Okay, so this one is nearly making me buy into those conspiracy theories that Musk is deliberately breaking Twitter because 4d chess (only nearly; this is incompetence rather than anything else).
There's an argument to be had whether it makes sense for Twitter to have a free API tier. I personally think that it's obvious it should:
- A lot of Twitter content/engagement is created by bots, and people quote-tweeting said bots. Fun bots are actually probably the biggest thing I miss after having moved to Mastodon (fortunately, the all-important Samuel Pepys bot has come across).
- Use of paid-only APIs virtually always stagnates. If there's a free tier, hobbyists and students can do interesting things with them, and this drives innovation. Most of Twitter's important features (retweets, quote tweets, hashtags, etc etc) ultimately originated in third party clients, not from Twitter itself.
- A free API makes it less frictionful for companies to try twitter out for things. If you want to maybe try showing your website status automatically or auto-track customer tweets at you in your support system or whatever, it's easier if you just hook up the app vs if you have to fill out a purchase order for the API access first.
However, whatever about whether a free API is a good idea, it is clearly a _terrible_ idea to kill it on a week's notice. Even for users who _want_ to pay, with only a week's notice many will never hear about it, if their organisation is remotely bureaucratic it's probably not long enough to get the purchase order approved, etc. There's just no possible reasoning to do it this quickly.
Personally, I like the theory that he's planning to discharge all of the debts he's run up in one fell swoop with a bankruptcy filing.
It will be sad, but not unexpected if the courts let him get away with it. I wish I could buy a house with a mortgage in the house's name, make the house declare bankruptcy, and then keep ownership of it.
Replace "house" with "Twitter", and that's the gambit. Although, the amount of debt that he'll be discharging would be about enough to buy a house for every chronically homeless person in the US.
He won't retain ownership of it. The banks are already talking about how they'll run Twitter, since they expected him to default on the $300m interest payment the other day.
> I like the theory that he's planning to discharge all of the debts he's run up in one fell swoop with a bankruptcy filing.
And that theory is incorrect. If Twitter goes into bankruptcy, the shareholders are wiped out. Ownership goes to the banks. He could be trying to drive the cost of the debt down (supposedly already down 40% on the open market), so he can buy it. But, the banks aren't stupid. He will absolutely have to pay a premium to buy it back.
There is another card Elon could play - which is not pay the loan and force the banks to declare bankruptcy. Do the banks really want to own Twitter? Can they kick out Elon, get competent management and somehow make themselves whole on the loaned money? That's certainly a scenario, but one that can't look appealing to the banks.
If the banks seize Twitter, do they really have to own and operate it? They only need to be able to flip it for at least the value of the $13B liability it collateralized, plus whatever associated legal and tax costs. Twitter is probably not worth $44B anymore but supposing they can seize it before its users and assets and brand have all gone to zero, I imagine that there is someone somewhere who is willing to gamble $13B for the opportunity to own Twitter, pick up the pieces and try to restore their credibility and value prop, and try to take it public with at least a $20B valuation so they can cash out at a nice profit.
If I recall the Matt Levine newsletter correctly the banks have already discounted the debt so I would think they'd be happy to sell it for less than the original $ value, either to Musk or Musk associates.
As I mentioned, it's already down 40% last I saw. And they will take less, but they aren't going to give it away. One, it sets a bad precedence, and two it's bad business.
ML also mentioned he hoped Twitter would stiff the banks on the first interest payment like they have been doing all their other creditors. It would have been an entertaining game of chicken. The other unknown is if Elon really wants to dump more money into this, though he may feel pot committed. But what if he realizes there is no winning option?
I agreed up until the last point. Unfortunately markets don’t work like that, if we say had $1 bn to buy houses for homeless, the cost per house would very quickly go up as supply decreased.
Then there’s the challenge of transporting homeless individuals to other areas where supply is higher.
Furthermore, many homeless people aren’t homeless because the want to be. Many are afflicted with mental and health problems, that quite frankly, a house wouldn’t solve.
I fully agree that there’s an issue, and we need to do something about it, but these oversimplified ways of looking at economics is detrimental to the real discussions we should be having.
> Most of Twitter's important features (retweets […]) ultimately originated in third party clients,
Not sure about the others, but RTs did not originate with 3rd party clients, but simply organically with users. Back then we did RT @author OriginalText, third party client support for automating this came after it was established and displaying them differently much later.
Whilst I don't disagree with you, I can't think of a single time I've been happy consuming from or interacting with a bot, someones toy project, or another API driven system on Twitter.
You experience obviously varies, but I suspect most people are there to follow people.
> Use of paid-only APIs virtually always stagnates.
You should add the keyword: expensive APIs.
Nobody cares about pay $10 a month to experiment and use the API, especially if it makes things easier to get and not have to explain to some Twitter service why you need access.
It's when they make it expensive that nobody will use it.
I have a discord bot that pulls a twitter feed into Discord & embeds it (server of 10k members). Pretty sure we can't do that anymore, starting next week.
There's an argument to be had whether it makes sense for Twitter to have a free API tier. I personally think that it's obvious it should:
- A lot of Twitter content/engagement is created by bots, and people quote-tweeting said bots. Fun bots are actually probably the biggest thing I miss after having moved to Mastodon (fortunately, the all-important Samuel Pepys bot has come across).
- Use of paid-only APIs virtually always stagnates. If there's a free tier, hobbyists and students can do interesting things with them, and this drives innovation. Most of Twitter's important features (retweets, quote tweets, hashtags, etc etc) ultimately originated in third party clients, not from Twitter itself.
- A free API makes it less frictionful for companies to try twitter out for things. If you want to maybe try showing your website status automatically or auto-track customer tweets at you in your support system or whatever, it's easier if you just hook up the app vs if you have to fill out a purchase order for the API access first.
However, whatever about whether a free API is a good idea, it is clearly a _terrible_ idea to kill it on a week's notice. Even for users who _want_ to pay, with only a week's notice many will never hear about it, if their organisation is remotely bureaucratic it's probably not long enough to get the purchase order approved, etc. There's just no possible reasoning to do it this quickly.