From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem.
A more sane way to do this would have been with a public tweet explaining why they were doing it (ad revenue), a 3 month lead time, and an API for helping apps get users to "upgrade" their account.
> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem.
Musk is trying to monetize every last aspect of current Twitter possible while cutting costs to stave off bankruptcy that his acquisition made imminent long enough to pivot Twitter into a completely different business model centering on being a payment intermediary, apparently to relitigate his firing twice from X.com before it became PayPal.
He doesn't care about the ecosystem, because its an ecosystem for a completely different busoness than the one he wants Twitter to be. He cares that use of Twitter outside of the 1st party frontends bypasses monetization, so he wants it monetized or gone.
This is true, but I suspect he greatly underestimates how useful the ecosystem is to actually making Twitter relevant enough for a critical mass of people to want to use the first party frontends.
Which is odd, because Elon is someone that definitely will remember AOL, MSN messenger and MySpace being things...
> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem.
This does not follow, in Twitter's case. If Twitter's API made them money, they wouldn't have shut it down, but it's the exact opposite, it costs them money while providing no monetary benefit. So in this case, from the business perspective, it is correct to start charging for it.
Now they could spend 3 months but with debt service payments of a billion dollars a year, I highly doubt that they have the patience to wait that long.
The number of users kept via the API is not as high as people might think, so I would actually agree that if that's the case, then Musk correctly shut off the API for people who weren't bringing in more benefits than the costs they were incurring.
Frankly the guy designed rockets that landed for the first time ever so I think he probably has the brain capacity to make this calculation.
He might not be great at decisions where people and politics are involved, but this isn’t one of those decisions. But some people here on HN really want to believe he’s an idiot, which he’s not.
Can we please stop saying that the CEO of a company did anything but lead a company (not to downplay the difficulty of leading a company). Musk certainly did not design rockets that land themselves. I highly doubt that he could even write down (let alone solve) the main important equations when asked. It's funny how some execs are attributed with doing everything (Jobs and Musk are the main ones), while nobody would say Adani dug up coal from the ground.
Watching even 1 video of an everyday astronaut interview with Musk makes it completely obvious you are completely wrong. And so do tonnes of testimonials on quora from spacex employees.
Musk is the chief engineer of spacex rockets. He's not just a CEO.
Do a little research before making comments like this.
Twitter API is what publishers use to bring content onto Twitter. That content is a reason why other users visit Twitter. With that content gone, Twitter is a lot less attractive to many.
Will be interesting to observe ... will publishers pay? Will users enjoy without those?
The gp comment is talking about the indirect benefits of having an API, which is a large number of free developers and researchers help you improve your product at a pretty low cost (compared to if you paid them directly
> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem
I'd love to have free API access to all kinds of companies.
Think how much easier and faster it would be booking your travel if all airlines and hotels let you straight in to the raw pricing and availability data from their reservation systems.
Think how much money you could save if retailers exposed all their product availability and pricing data, live.
They don't, because they all regard this stuff as "commercially sensitive".
Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive as you don't typically want the end consumers to see how much profit is being made from them and how much discount is given to wholesalers.
Twitter data is rarely anything to do with pricing, so that's why it's different.
> Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive [..]
I'm not after internal pricing/B2B pricing/discounting, in my thought experiment I "just" want free API access to information that's already on public websites (eg end-user/retail pricing for rooms/flights/widgets). I'm not aware of any airlines/hotels/retailers that allow even that. In bulk, it's commercially sensitive too.
I've heard that they do a lot of price manipulation with holidays, so I can see why they wouldn't want to provide enough data for customers to track prices over time. Also, you'd be bypassing their advertising.
But yeah, it would be great if we didn't have to use their websites to navigate the data.
So back to where we started: what's actually wrong with Twitter deciding to insist on eyeballs on twitter.com instead of scripts pointing at their free API?
I wouldn't say that it's necessarily 'wrong', but I do think it's a bad decision. The problem is that they've let people have access and build upon their free API and pulling the rug from under them is going to annoy them and generate bad will towards Twitter.
In some ways it reminds me of the Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast licensing shenanigans where the business is annoying people building an ecosystem around their products which arguably adds a lot of value.
> The problem is that they've let people have access and build upon their free API and pulling the rug from under them is going to annoy them [..]
Yup, although we all know that Twitter just the latest example in a loooong line of companies to have pulled this stunt since, well, what feels like forever.
> and generate bad will towards Twitter
I'm fairly ambivalent about this aspect, and I doubt Musk cares much, it's not as though the haters weren't already hating before this latest incident.
If charging for API usage amounts to developer alienation, then why is Apple the most successful business in the world?
Frankly, I don't think Musk much cares for the developers. From a business perspective, he might be right here - developers aren't the ones watching ads or paying for microtransactions, users are. The developers, at his scale, are a liability. Restricting their capabilities and profiting from their struggle is just part of the modern tech stack. I hate it as much as you do, but calling it "insane" is a hysterical double-standard that crops up just too often on HN.
If the App Store had been free for 15 years and then Apple said "if you don't pay us $100 a year in one week, we'll delete your app" then you can bet that Tim Cook would be seeking new opportunities _within hours_. There's a big difference between "this has always cost something" and "this is going from free to paid with _one week's notice_".
I don't see how third party developers are additive to Twitter in the same way they're additive to Apple at all. If that's true at all, why would Twitter provide services for free? Why would Apple charge at all? (Especially from the beginning).
It's a hard comparison because the value of the Apple ecosystem is so obvious and mutual. Twitter is junk on both sides; unless as a third party dev you just happened to find value in it, in which case you should pay for it.
I understand this is hurting peoples feelings, but it makes complete sense to me from all angles.
> I don't see how third party developers are additive to Twitter in the same way they're additive to Apple at all.
When did you start using Twitter? Twitter as we know it today is largely a product of the community and third party developers. Retweets, hashtags, quote tweets, the use of a blue bird symbol; all came from either the community at large or specific third party devs. The fun bots also drive a lot of twitter engagement; honestly they're the only real thing I miss on Mastodon (while some of the most important ones did come across, a lot didn't). Third party software also makes Twitter a support system, a status reporting system... The list goes on.
However, beyond all that, even if there was a good argument for killing the API free tier (there is not), no-one sensible would do it with _one week's notice_. This will alienate even commercial users who would be willing to pay. If you're using your CRM's twitter integration to track customer complaints, say, unless you're huge the free API is probably sufficient today. With one week's notice, even assuming you hear about it the first day (most will not) good look getting a purchase order for the API within a week if your company is even remotely bureaucratic (most are).
The patron saint of Dunning-Kruger presumably thinks it's a good idea, but can't imagine anyone else does.
> the advertisers have lost one extra person to sell to
Which is aligned with Musk's strategy thus far, but there's also a good argument to be made that that product should have never been needed if twitter was providing a decent first party client. They should have wanted to provide that to control the advertising. Letting the third parties take that up was a poor strategy -- business-wise that is, I get that people may have liked it and have used it for a long time and are probably sad to lose it.
> I don't see how third party developers are additive to Twitter
Then you're not in the community in which the third party elements(e.g. tweet aggregation, SSO login, fine grained access control) are vital part of. Which may be substantial, or not, and we as the sheep don't know.
You're right and I'm my sheepish hypothesis here is it's not substantial. I think twitter is largely a toy, if it were to completely vanish tomorrow, very little harm would actually be done to anyone. It's like a PMF question, does twitter have third party developers banging on their door with fists full of cash? No, they have a bunch of freeloaders that have built derivative toys.
Apple can nickel and dime developers because a good app on their ecosystem is profitable.
Nobody is making enough profit via the Twitter API to make it worth staying on. Twitter is a distant #3 social network that itself has never really made money.
This is being too generous. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are all far larger than Twitter. Reddit is also just barely larger than Twitter, though at that scale you have to consider who has more bots. Twitter claims slightly more MAUs than Snapchat, but since Snapchat isn't a viral network it probably has no bots to speak of, making it larger than Twitter in terms of real users.
But this comes after pulling the plug on the third-party apps without a word of warning or even acknowledging that they had done it. So those devs turned around and said, well, guess we'll go work on Mastodon apps now. Presumably there was a noticeable drop in engagement as those users cut back their time on twitter. So now twitter is like you can come back if you pay, but we can't tell you what that will cost.
You don't need to pay to use Xcode, or to run apps on your own devices. If you publish to the app store I think there is a $99/year fee or something to have your app signed, plus they take 30% of your revenue.
You don't absolutely need to have your code signed, I can give apps to my friends, they just get a warning about it not being signed and potentially unsafe when it's first installed.
So? You need a computer to run any code at all. I bought a used Mac for very cheap last year, the first Apple product I've owned in ~35 years of working in and around the computer industry. I don't feel ripped off.
A more sane way to do this would have been with a public tweet explaining why they were doing it (ad revenue), a 3 month lead time, and an API for helping apps get users to "upgrade" their account.