There was a point in time, around 5 years ago more or less, when third party twitter clients were driving a fair amount of innovation in desktop UI, particularl

There was a point in time, around 5 years ago more or less, when third party twitter clients were driving a fair amount of innovation in desktop UI, particularly on OSX. As a mentor I'd even ask if my mentee would want to learn to code by pulling some stuff out of Twitter and putting it in their own design on their own webpage. There was a lot of hope and promise back then, and Twitter was giving a voice to people in harsh regimes as their other modes of contact were being shut down (like with Arab Spring). They looked like they were on the up and up. I don't think moves like this solve Twitter's existential abuse problem, which I believe has far more to do with their 140 characters and unsolicited heckling than it does anything else. It turns your whole reality into gossip and this gossip overpowers any semblance of rational or reasoned discourse. It's intensely toxic and shutting off an API and some client apps changes nothing about that.