3 ms·

isn't it likely that they won't do anything with the api, if it works currently why would it break? Seems like twitter would have redundancy built in. Barring s

isn't it likely that they won't do anything with the api, if it works currently why would it break? Seems like twitter would have redundancy built in. Barring someone hacking into systems and breaking them what could go wrong in the near future.

zrobotics 4y ago
Keeping an API stable is a surprisingly large amount of work. I've never worked with a codebase as large as Twitter's, but I have seen that even with testing in place it is easy for seemingly unrelated changes to break the API. If Twitter has reduced engineering staff, API functionality would be one of the first things to suffer in my estimation. This doesn't manifest as someone purposely breaking the API, but incidental changes breaking it. For example, a minor change in something like time display code that does the "posted X minutes ago" could easily end up silently corrupting API calls in odd ways. And if the engineering staff is reduced, fixing the API that broke a 3rd party vendors product will likely be a very low priority.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> if it works currently why would it break? Because they are planning much more rapid iteration with relatively little planning on core product features with a butchered staff and quite likely not prioritizing maintaining API stability for third-party tools while doing it and, its very overtly a “move fast and break things” mindset. Plus, the new high priority Blue-with-verification rollout has been quite visibly broken on the web and first party apps, with people getting inconsistent reeults about availability when trying to upgrade to it and having inconsistent results as to whether (and to whom, and in what contexts) the checks display after they do. Do you think keeping the API working for third-party integrations has a higher priority?
- lawgimenez 4y ago
  Yes I agree, I have been following Twitter’s API for years and the progress is just so slow. I even followed their Postman API.
papito 4y ago
Considering that Musk is on a roll making decisions that will outright murder the platform (making everyone pay for the Blue Check or your tweets are treated like garbage), who's to say the new boss will not come up with some knee-capping payment regime for API clients? No one knows. The guy is increasingly an unstable wildcard.

zrobotics 4y ago

Keeping an API stable is a surprisingly large amount of work. I've never worked with a codebase as large as Twitter's, but I have seen that even with testing in place it is easy for seemingly unrelated changes to break the API. If Twitter has reduced engineering staff, API functionality would be one of the first things to suffer in my estimation. This doesn't manifest as someone purposely breaking the API, but incidental changes breaking it. For example, a minor change in something like time display code that does the "posted X minutes ago" could easily end up silently corrupting API calls in odd ways. And if the engineering staff is reduced, fixing the API that broke a 3rd party vendors product will likely be a very low priority.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> if it works currently why would it break? Because they are planning much more rapid iteration with relatively little planning on core product features with a butchered staff and quite likely not prioritizing maintaining API stability for third-party tools while doing it and, its very overtly a “move fast and break things” mindset. Plus, the new high priority Blue-with-verification rollout has been quite visibly broken on the web and first party apps, with people getting inconsistent reeults about availability when trying to upgrade to it and having inconsistent results as to whether (and to whom, and in what contexts) the checks display after they do. Do you think keeping the API working for third-party integrations has a higher priority?

lawgimenez 4y ago
Yes I agree, I have been following Twitter’s API for years and the progress is just so slow. I even followed their Postman API.

papito 4y ago

Considering that Musk is on a roll making decisions that will outright murder the platform (making everyone pay for the Blue Check or your tweets are treated like garbage), who's to say the new boss will not come up with some knee-capping payment regime for API clients? No one knows. The guy is increasingly an unstable wildcard.