20 ms·

The Shit Show

723 points by chazeon 4y ago

ygggvbbjiuygvf 4y ago
It’s not even clear that they “pulled the plug”, could just be a temporary outage. Wish Musk would announce his thoughts on the future of the API, though.
- paxys 4y ago
  Regardless of how it started, a "temporary outage" that has lasted for several days and has received zero acknowledgement from the company can now be considered intentional. They don't get the benefit of doubt without sending even a bare minimum "sorry, we are working on fixing it" tweet.
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  Can a “temporary outage” be limited only to the most popular apps? Can a “temporary outage” affect Twitterrific for iOS but not Twitterrific for Mac [0]? [0] https://blog.iconfactory.com/2023/01/state-of-the-twitterverse/ https://blog.iconfactory.com/2023/01/state-of-the-twitterver...
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
    Yes, of course (if e.g. some shards but not others broke/received an updated incorrect config). In fact, it applying to some but not other versions of the same app makes it look more likely to be a bug than intentional.
throwmeup123 4y ago
[flagged]
- ygggvbbjiuygvf 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - throwmeup123 4y ago
    [flagged]
Ciantic 4y ago
End of an era. I like that he sees that ActivityPub should be so much more than Mastodon. "a truly universal timeline" of various things on the internet. For that to happen we can't limit ourselves to just Mastodon, but start building alternative takes. Yes, some aren't viewable on other clients, but that's fine, then they just show a link, but at least you can reply/reblog/like items.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I just hope we walk before we try to run. It feels like Mastodon has been given a colossal opportunity and it feels like it’s being completely squandered. I trust that Space Jerk will give Mastodon a very long opportunity window but the sooner the better. Maybe revolution is a good idea and I’m completely wrong. But I still find Mastodon so frustrating and unreliable that I am just not on social media at all now.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Apparently as a baby I learned to run before walking so I want to defend doing it that way. Running is a bit easier than walking, walking is a process of carefully balancing at each step. Running is just falling, but you catch yourself before you hit the ground. As long as you aren’t too concerned with steering, you can easily at least run until you find an obstacle. And then you’ve learned about a new type of obstacle! Even the fastest baby should have trouble getting into trouble as long as the parents are attentive — they are tiny and parents have long arms to catch them. Babies barely have the capability to generate enough kinetic energy to harm themselves I’m pretty sure. Or I dunno, at least I survived. Apply this to your analogy as you’d like.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      me typing out a definition for running that dictates that it’s not just stumbling recklessly forward in style, all for an analogy “You’re probably wondering how I got here…”
      - 4y ago
samwillis 4y ago
This is a moving post, I wish Craig and everyone else effected by these events the best, onwards and upwards! If these people who pioneered the use of Twitter and fundamentally steered how it developed through their community contributions turn their experience to Mastodon and the Fediverse, big things will come. From the ashes of one thing can be built the future.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  It should be liberating, no more working under ever worsening constraints, someone just ripped off the band-aid and made the hard choice for them. Didn't want to let go? Not sure of how much effort and support to continue putting in? Problem solved! The answer is zero. Zilch. Nada. Enjoy the free time!
  - paxys 4y ago
    Loss of the product itself, however hard, can be dealt with. It's the loss of the community that really stings.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
smitty1e 4y ago
We have standards, sir. The show was upgraded to a "Crap Cabaret".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gnarbarian 4y ago
He has every right to be mad but this post comes off as petulant and juvenile.
- rdlw 4y ago
  Well yeah, his life's work was destroyed at someone's whim with the flick of a switch. How many people would be gracious? Why should anyone be?
  - Espressosaurus 4y ago
    This is what happens when you rely on a service you have no control over. It'll happen now, it'll happen later, but at some point, somebody is going to decide they make more money turning the thing you rely on off.
    - d4nnyo 4y ago
      Right!
    - laborcontract 4y ago
      Oh boy what do we tell everyone using AWS?
      - rapnie 4y ago
        Rather those offering value-added services on top of AWS. Well, maybe they read HN and they should account for the risks anyway.
      - Espressosaurus 4y ago
        The risk is always that they decide the service you're relying on is too niche/is being replaced by something else and you need to adapt. Which is a thing that happens. The big stuff like EC2 isn't likely to go away before Amazon itself goes away, but there are piles of other smaller services that may or may not. It's not Google in terms of getting rid of capabilities, but they sunset APIs and capabilities all the time. For good reason! It's probably not a good idea to be running Python 2.7 today, and there's no reason why they should want to support it. So you're being snide but yes, this is a concern, and the deprecation schedule is solely under Amazon's control. If at some point the cloud goes bust because on-prem is the new hotness (what's old is new again) in 10 or 20 years, you bet your damn bippy AWS will pull the plug when it makes sense for Amazon to do so. And that's a product you pay for. If you're not paying for the product (I don't know if Twitter was offering free access to its APIs) then you're relying on the good will and support of the person/company providing the product/API and at any moment they can change their mind. As we've seen here. If you rely on someone else's platform, you are at their mercy. If you don't believe me, wait another few days for yet another app developer to complain about getting locked out of an app store, or some payments platform locking them out of their account to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
birdyrooster 4y ago
It's like when you exclaim "jesus christ" and are unwittingly paying tribute to some assholes. I won't say his name anymore either.
sysadm1n 4y ago
I never relied on Twitter's API, since building stuff with it is akin to building your castle on other people's land. You're always going to be a tenant, and the API gatekeepers play landlord and can rugpull you without notice. But I'm looking into Nostr[0] as an alternative, aswell as ActivityPub which seems to be working well these days. Dorsey's Bluesky Social[1] looks promising too, but it's a very late move since Twitter should have been a protocol from the outset. [0] https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/ [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)
- x86x87 4y ago
  This is not the first time twittet screwed developers. If you're olf enough to remember they did this shit in their early day when they had the real possibility of being social media's message bus. Corporate greed took over and capitalism won / they pulled the plug on developer apis. Up until that point they flourished. Now with new wind in their sails generated by 45 and more recently by the technoking they have forgot the lesson and doing the same mistake. Twitter is nothing without its ecosystem. They are killing the same env they need to survive.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    > they have forgot the lesson They haven't _forgotten_ it, Saint Car is _ignoring_ it. People in Twitter would absolutely be aware that the last attempt (which for all its problems was still infinitely more ordered and less user-hostile than this one, of course), didn't go so well.
    - x86x87 4y ago
      Saint Car? That induced a permanent chuckle.
- kcplate 4y ago
  > I never relied on Twitter's API, since building stuff with it is akin to building your castle on other people's land This is a wise attitude. I can’t imagine any company whose existence is wholly reliant on another single organization not entering into an agreement with the said single organization to protect itself. I feel sorry for them, but damn…you need to protect your product.
tptacek 4y ago
I think (and have been saying this a bunch lately) that he's right about ActivityPub and Mastodon, and that "a universal timeline" is actually a really good way to put words to it. I was a Mastodon hater for years, but having used it for the past month or so with an actual community of people (really: the whole community I interacted with on Twitter before), I have to admit it: the ActivityPub people were right about this. It's easy to see the potential, and how it pulls in the writing we were all doing before there was Twitter while keeping most of what Twitter was good for too. I'm expecting this to be the second-dumbest thing I ever predicted badly (I dismissed MP3s, too!)
- EricE 4y ago
  RSS? We had it until everyone ceded control to Google because it was convenient. <Shrug>
- warinukraine 4y ago
  May I ask what was your original argument against Mastodon?
  - tptacek 4y ago
    I looked at in terms of the "Fediverse", a coherent decentralized social network, with lots of instances cooperating to make one intentional thing. I'm still not bullish about that. But once you use it, you see that it's basically hyper-interactive RSS. (Maybe you see the two at the same thing; I don't.)
    - warinukraine 4y ago
      > I looked at in terms of the "Fediverse", a coherent decentralized social network, with lots of instances cooperating to make one intentional thing. So what was your original argument against this?
      - tptacek 4y ago
        That it will never cohere. (That's about as much as I want to say about this right now; this gets boring pretty quickly.)
dom96 4y ago
Great post. I hope we see a multitude of new clients for Mastodon. In the meantime, if you're someone like me that is dipping their feet into Mastodon but isn't ready to leave Twitter fully yet, then you might be interested in a browser extension I developed[0] which puts Mastodon posts in your Twitter timeline. [0] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/lgiffpmohlpjlkclpmelkkfmjnlpafne?hl=en-GB&authuser=0 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/l...
antiquark 4y ago
Twitter has been crippling their API long before "Space Hilter" took over. https://tidbits.com/2018/08/20/twitter-cripples-third-party-clientsagain/ https://tidbits.com/2018/08/20/twitter-cripples-third-party-...
- paxys 4y ago
  Yes that is mentioned in the opening paragraphs of the article.
- retrocryptid 4y ago
  Space Hitler? That's the kind of hyperbole that seriously undercuts your credibility. Mr. Musk is "Space Mussolini" at best.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Given how many of us used third party apps I wouldn't say it was crippled. And there are only two examples given: streaming and push notifications. The first as Twitter pointed out was because it was only ever a beta feature and even today their own apps don't support this feature.
mkoc 4y ago
Not sure how it is for others, but for me tapbot Tweetbot is working again since today; is the API back up?
- cmcfadden 4y ago
  Paul mentioned that they had a way to push new API info to the clients, so I think they basically just re-registered the app as a YOLO thing to see how long until Twitter pulls the plug again.
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  I was able to get an access token, and my timeline loads in Tweetbot, but I can't see mentions or activity, and I can't tweet from it.
- clouddrover 4y ago
  Tweetbot partially works because they're using new API keys: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/15/23556359/tweetbot-twitter-online-third-party-apps-outage https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/15/23556359/tweetbot-twitter... It's a temporary workaround at best. The new API access is rate limited and Tweetbot will likely be banned again.
  - karlshea 4y ago
    The new keys are already not working for me.
    - clouddrover 4y ago
      It certainly proves that the whole situation is intentional. Here's what Paul Haddad (Tweetbot developer) says about the new keys failing: https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004
w0mbat 4y ago
The “Space Karen” slur is lame. Elon is the manager in this situation, and if you’re complaining to the manager, you’re the Karen.
- uwuemu 4y ago
  [dead]
- int_19h 4y ago
  Elon took "complaining to the manager" to a whole new level by buying the whole company outright and then firing all the managers he was ranting about.
geerlingguy 4y ago
I'm still waiting to hear any kind of official word, but it looks pretty bleak. Without Tweetbot, Twitter is almost impossible to use. Checking in on https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/, the alternate UI, it's almost usable, but still missing like 8 of the most important features that made Twitter useful to me. I have been posting sometimes on Mastodon but still primarily on Twitter, waiting to see how things turned out. But if Tweetbot at least isn't restored, I will switch roles and will likely try out Mastodon for a while, posting just a little on Twitter. The problem is, most of the "Fediverse" right now is a big echo chamber (kind of like Voat was when Reddit had its weird issues a few years back, or more charitably like a community like HN is... it's not always bad as long as people are aware of it). So it's not the same kind of community as Twitter had.
- thejohnconway 4y ago
  Twitter was never one community though, of course. The amount of interaction I had outside my bubble was really minimal. I could see other people shouting at each other if I wanted to, but of course I could do that without having an account.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I've been using Mastodon for the past couple of months for most of the people I follow, but prior to that I had been using Twitterific for Twitter because it was so much better for how I used it. Up until a couple of days ago I was still using Twitterific to keep up with those who hadn't yet made the jump (mostly non-tech-adjacent people/communities), but with the iOS version now being dead my usage has seen a nosedive. For now I still check every so often with the Mac version since it's still functional, and if that dies then I'm going to try to figure out alternatives for aforementioned communities (probably Discord, but we'll see) and drop Twitter altogether. I have no interest in the stock client/site whatsoever.
- nerdchum 4y ago
  I remember Voat! It started off with great intentions, just to be a more free speech version of reddit and at the end was just posts about Michelle Obama being a man and Qanon. It was an interesting case study in how free speech can decline to a lowest common denominator type situation.
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
[flagged]
- joshgachnang 4y ago
  Losing your business like this has to be infuriating, but that's always the risk building your business on top of someone else's business. However, the writing style completely undercuts the message with the name calling. I wonder if Craig will still pull the plug now that the API seems to be back up.
  - rideontime 4y ago
    where have you heard that the API is back up for those who've been banned? only thing I've seen is that some have worked around their bans by getting new API keys
    - joshgachnang 4y ago
      Yeah that looks like that's what it is. I can't post from the apps either.
IngvarLynn 4y ago
[flagged]
- bfgoodrich 4y ago
  [dead]
graycat 4y ago
[flagged]
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  Maybe, just maybe, HN isn't for you?
  - graycat 4y ago
    Of course, my point is the propensity of undefined terminology in writing about computing and in particular at Hacker News. It's a very valid point. You don't attack the point but ME. Not good.
    - sph 4y ago
      This is a computing forum, ain't nobody got the time to explain what API means. You should not go on medical forums asking in any post what SVT tachycardia means either. It's just rude, and trollish, since you have been here for 10 years and you're wasting everybody's time with fake questions.
      - graycat 4y ago
        I didn't ask was "API" meant. Instead, I asked what was the specific API they were referring to. There are thousands of APIs and the authors assumed what API they had in mind was clear. Clear enough??? For your > It's just rude, and trollish, since you have been here for 10 years and you're wasting everybody's time with fake questions. Wrong. All wrong. 100% wrong. I did no such thing. What I did is 100% fully appropriate, reasonable, justified, and constructive. Just read again, setting your hostility aside, what I actually WROTE. E.g., I wrote "API" to question the meaning of the quote I gave "the API". Okay, as is fully clear from what else I wrote, I was asking WHAT !@#$%^&() API? Not your misreading -- I was NOT asking what an API is but what API the author had in mind. You blew it. You get an F for simple reading comprehension. More generally, sorry to break the news, but computing and Hacker News have a strong desire to be as obscure as possible. It appears that most of what competence* the audience has is simple explanations of obscure jargon about trivial concepts and then omit the explanations and leave the jargon. My view is that poor technical writing, including undefined obscure jargon is by far the worst bottleneck to progress in computing and, thus, in the economy and civilization. In a few words, JUNK THE OBSCURE JARGON. Clear enough? This is a controversial suggestion? Usually when I see obscure jargon, I don't bother to guess or look up what it means and, instead, conclude that the content is from such a bad writer that I should not attempt to read the content. Writers, take note: A large fraction of the content on computing and at Hacker News I just won't attempt to read. I know quite well what advanced material is in computing and math. I'll put it to you this way: I know enough about academic computer science research to understand that a large fraction of accomplished, expert, famous, tenured, chaired professors of computer science at some of the best research research universities don't waste their time, effort, or energy on undefined, generally trivial content presented as obscure jargon either. Undefined terminology -- bad stuff. Don't do that. Understand now? I know; I know; these ideas are a bit too subtle for the diligent Hacker News audience well informed on obscure aspects of Twitter. Uh, I have next to nothing to do with Twitter. Apparently some of the Hacker News audience expects to become better informed about computing by paying attention to trivia about Twitter -- not good.
Lammy 4y ago
[flagged]
- xupybd 4y ago
  A Karen is a personality type. They are not imputing the gender on Elon but the personality. By applying the insult to men they are de-gendering the insult. Not that I like the term Space Karen.
  - Lammy 4y ago
    It became an insult because people hate women who stand up for themselves. It can't be de-gendered.
    - adventurer 4y ago
      That’s not what a Karen is or why people use it.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
mattwilsonn888 4y ago
If federation was a worthwhile goal (in one's mind) after "the bozo took over Twitter" then it is quite obvious nothing fundamentally has changed such that federation would have been a noble goal as a foil to previous Twitter management. Seriously - if more personal sovereignty is the goal then complaining about Twitter only after new management is admitting that the primary quality you don't like is the new management. In reality the argument for federation is as I've already said - more personal sovereignty, less centralized, corruptible, overlord control. Twitter is certainly doing much better now than before, and that doesn't mean federated communities online still are not, in principle, superior. If someone wants to use crypto to do justify sentiment like this, they'd be mocked here, but this is much better? It goes to show that people denouncing different approaches often aren't doing it because those approaches lack coherent justification, but because those approaches are related to aspects of technology some people don't like and don't care to examine. There are plenty of reasons to lampoon the majority of approaches 'crypto' takes to 'solve' problems - that doesn't mean one shouldn't lampoon carefully and thoughtfully. Likewise, there is reason to justify federated platforms, but a dislike of Elon Musk's politics will not be the true driver.
- klabb3 4y ago
  > complaining about Twitter only after new management is admitting that the primary quality you don't like is the new management. This rings very true. The move to Mastodon isn’t likely to translate into “…but why do we need speech owners at all”. Unaccountable and unjustified concentrated power is simply not a concern to most. Once the dust settles, business as usual will kick in. It’ll either be a feudal lordship of mastodon instances, or a brand new dickhead in a leather jacket.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > complaining about Twitter only after new management is admitting that the primary quality you don't like is the new management. So the thing about Twitter (and actually I think this is something Musk badly misunderstood) is that Twitter users, particularly long-time Twitter users, have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. It's always been a bit of a broken unpleasant mess; there's a reason that Twitter users affectionately call it the hellsite. Previously, federated services were a nice idea, but there was never really the push needed; significant numbers of people weren't sufficiently annoyed with Twitter to leave. Now, well. (I pretty much expected this to happen once Saint Car bowed to the will of the Delaware Chancery Court, but I've got to admit I thought it would take a lot longer, via a thousand cuts. This API thing feels like such an unforced error.) Also, this has served as a timely reminder that, even if the private service you like (or love-hate) is fine now, it could at any moment be taken over and ruined by a weird idiot. Even if your interests align with the platform's interests, you can no longer assume the platform will act in its best interests.
godelski 4y ago
I've been thinking about social media a lot lately and how it has changed my life. I'm only in my early 30's, but I think many others my age grew up online and when the internet felt smaller, but in a different way. I made life long friends through these means. But something I've noticed is that as everyone has come online, I have made fewer friends. What I personally miss is the small niche communities. These don't seem to exist anymore. I made several friends on sites like What.cd and found many artists I would have never come into contact otherwise (even speaking with many). Even friends on sites like Imgur when it was smaller, but never once it grew. The global social media is cool and has aspects that are nice to it (e.g. being able to talk to power), but its same power is its greatest downfall (you can't speak to your audience when your audience is everyone, filled with different priors (how we interpret words), and different willingness to act in good faith). I see everyone talking about Twitter and how it needs to be replaced. But I want to know how we remake these smaller communities. That's what I miss about the internet. There are clearly size thresholds for these. Finding them is often hard and word of mouth. But what I want to know is how we make these flourish and bring personhood back to the internet. We should have both types of communities. But I don't think methods like Mastadon or Reddit really facilitate this. I think many even have seen this change as HN has grown. There are several people that I recognize their names but as the community has grown we have too seen a change in content, culture, and how we speak to one another. For good or bad. But I do think it is nice to have small communities as well that do develop their own cultures. Maybe I'm just old now though.
- nathias 4y ago
  they still exist on the fringes, there are forums from early web, new forums, new types of tech (defi and crypto has a lot of that)
  - kristianc 4y ago
    > new types of tech (defi and crypto has a lot of that) I’m sure crypto and Defi has some good people, but a huge proportion of them seem to be grifters and scammers who I’d want nothing to do with. That wasn’t really the case on the early web.
okokwhatever 4y ago
[flagged]
- crummy 4y ago
  this guy spent 16 years writing and maintaining a Twitter client
Lio 4y ago
I’ve had the Mastodon client downloaded for a while now but haven’t really got round to switching over to it. I think this is the push I really need. Space Karen has done me a favour. I sure as shit won’t be going back to Twitter’s dumpster fire of a native client. Edited timelines, promoted tweets and user preferences that randomly reset themselves to the most annoying settings. Nope.
thih9 4y ago
The brand is losing so much credibility among developers, I guess we'll see even fewer products with Twitter API as a core feature. I know this has been a trend for the last couple of years but this kind of lack of communication seems like a milestone.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  I think the real beginning of the end will be when tertiary services axe their twitter integrations. Top of mind for me would be Google News.
- bentobean 4y ago
  It's not losing any credibility with this developer (to the extent that it ever had "credibility" to begin with). Just sayin'.
ArmandGrillet 4y ago
Well-written and touching post. To switch off this API used by so many long-time users on the same day "For You" appears as the default option on Twitter triggers me. The "For You" timeline is only for Elon: it will drive engagement, extremism, and all the things social networks have been accused of driving for years now in order to make more $. Some folks here have been comparing the crypto/Web3 and ActivityPub craze recently but I see a massive difference. A billionaire has spent the last 3 months shitting on what I thought was my social backyard. Crypto and NFTs did not impact how I use my bank accounts, Elon ruined in a quarter a very special place I had crafted over a decade. Mastodon is not great right now, the UX needs to vastly improve, but all for-profit social networks have always disappointed in the long run. Looking back, few technologies have kept the same degree of greatness over the past 15 years: emails, torrents, RSS feeds... only tools no corporation fully controls. I hope ActivityPub can join that list fairly soon.
- warinukraine 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - leokennis 4y ago
    I imagine you believe the money you keep with the company known as your bank is yours as well right? Just because it’s a company doesn’t mean they get to behave like assholes and then put the blame on their users for being gullible or ignorant.
    - warinukraine 4y ago
      It's mine because the law says so.
    - kaashif 4y ago
      I disagree somewhat with what that guy said but your "counterpoint" is ridiculous. Bank deposits are yours! If the bank collapses and can't give them to you, there's FDIC insurance so the government will get you that money. This is nothing at all like Twitter and only weakens your argument.
neilv 4y ago
To the people who were already warning of things like this, in the '80s and '90s, all the cries lately of "I let some rich guy own my social network; how could I have known that would be abused" might seem a bit /r/LeopardsAteMyFace.
harrego 4y ago
See also Paul Haddad's situation[1] (creator of TweetBot): > I really want an official public statement. We have a large number of sub. renewals for year 3 of Tweetbot coming up in a couple of weeks. If we're permanently cut off I need to know so we can remove the app from sale and prevent those. Which obviously I'd rather not do. [1] https://tapbots.social/@paul/109690528614720936 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109690528614720936
- NelsonMinar 4y ago
  Paul is a respectful developer, polite to his customers. Musk is a vainglorious boss, making erratic decisions. People like Paul. Be like Paul.
waynecochran 4y ago
Was the Twitter API taken down intentionally or is this a bug? If intentional was it announced ahead of time? If its a bug, has this happened before -- looks like in happened in July 2022 (https://api.twitterstat.us/history?page=3 https://api.twitterstat.us/history?page=3)?
- rideontime 4y ago
  for 9 hours, and it was acknowledged. hardly comparable.
m3kw9 4y ago
Can’t think of mastodon as a competitor to twitter. I gave it a shot and it feels like discord for twitter.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pmarreck 4y ago
[flagged]
- pxtail 4y ago
  Yep, it makes no sense - fueling, empowering someone's private property,even voluntarily helping to sidestep/skip platform shortcomings to make it dominant player instead of promoting open standards and solutions and then surprise, "Pikachu face" I'm perceiving Asahi Linux initiative in similar way and it's astonishing to see people putting countless man-hours for free into improving device produced by one of richest companies in the world which is known for having full controll on sofware and hardware intentionally and steadily making it as locked as possible, hostile to OS What could go wrong here..
iLoveOncall 4y ago
[flagged]
- lapcat 4y ago
  > your website being shutdown It's not a website, it's the app he's been working on for the past 16 years.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    Ah my bad, if it's an app instead of a website, I understand how it is appropriate to use the passing of your mom as a metaphor in a blog post named "The Shit Show".
    - lapcat 4y ago
      This feels like concern trolling. Did your mom just die a few weeks ago? The author experienced two personally traumatic events in a short period of time. Maybe your sense of "tastefulness" isn't relevant here.
      - system2 4y ago
        One is business, the other one is family life. His business decisions were not right and he is learning it the hard way. Why would anyone involve their mother's death in an Elon Musk post?
        lapcat 4y ago
        > His business decisions were not right and he is learning it the hard way. This is absurd. His business decision worked for 16 years, which is longer than many jobs or even companies last. The point is that the new owner of Twitter has no respect for the people who contributed to the platform over the years. Twitter won't even announce that they've shut down the 3rd party API. How cowardly is that?
brap 4y ago
[flagged]
- wstuartcl 4y ago
  While I agree that getting locked out is a clear risk of any business built against another company's platform I do think it is perfectly reasonable for someone whom has done so for 15+ years (and is part of an ecosystem that helped establish that third party) to be publicly upset for the mode and method for how this change happened at twitter. Its not just his frustrations being vented in this post but the impact to his users (which is well out of his control). Twitter's actions of breaking the API for the largest 25 integrators with millions of users (by all indications) on purpose with 0 deprecation warning, 0 communication, 0 response the the break is garbage. Knowing that Musk is the agent of change and the one setting these actions in place he can take the heat. at the end of the day I am done with twitter as it is, so its no skuff on my skin either way -- as far as I am concerned there is a clear path forward for the types of actions Musk has taken at twitter. It is just a matter of time.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > You took a bet relying on a third party business, and that bet didn't pay off. Actually it paid off for more than 15 years, which makes the whole complaining even more unjustified.
madrox 4y ago
This situation is heart breaking for us who have a lot of attachment to this API. I built a research thesis around data mining the firehose, and that work got me my first data mining job. I made hundreds of valuable connections. However, the API really died years ago when requirements of ad-based revenue meant neutering many endpoints. It's been on life support since. Recent events really were about pulling the plug. But Mastodon excites me the way I used to be excited about social. There's possibility again to turn it into the things we gave up on a decade ago. I look forward to a new wave of innovation here. And yes, I refuse to say the name of the company or the owner at this point. I agree with the author. It isn't deserved.
thread_id 4y ago
Sorry to break it to you Elon but you really did spend $44 billion on the next MySpace. There's nothing you can do about it now. All we ask is that you please stop trashing your Tesla brand. Oh!!! and by the way recommend to the BOD to make Tom Zhu CEO of Tesla. You can stay at Twitter.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  MySpace didn't have the President of United States and the leader of Taliban on the same platform though. No matter what side of the debate you're on, Twitter does have solid network effects.
- sixothree 4y ago
  Twitter had so much potential under new leadership. There are so many ways he could have made the platform a richer experience. YouTube could have been a competitor. But he squandered it in a truly epic fashion.
system2 4y ago
I have an idea. Do not build your businesses on top of other social media platform APIs.
- lapcat 4y ago
  In fact, you should live like a hermit in wilderness and never depend on other people for anything, making your computers out of wood.
bioinformatics 4y ago
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csomar 4y ago
We’ll see how this plays out, but I think Twitter has grew despite sabotaging developers. I’ve left Twitter in 2011-2012 because of their API changes, and that made me salty so I decided to not use their platform. So they lost me as a user, but that certainly didn’t matter much. In my opinion, you can only push it so far. You rely on some of the “power” users to run a platform. In HN, think of it of people that post, comment and visit the most. The rest of the users are mostly “followers”. These “power” people make and set the trends. This is the last nail in the coffin. These people will find new territories and hopefully they’ll learn this time that they need to own the platform, and not just their contributions. If successful, this will make it hard for any future centralized platform to see the light again. If success, this will probably take Facebook and other social media networks too. This will make it even harder (or easier?) for governments to control narrative or even understand what’s going on. I’m optimistic today for the future. Thank you Elon Musk!
aaronbrethorst 4y ago
I removed the official Twitter app from my phone a few weeks back. I was leery about the amount of extra data that could be slurped up from my device and sent back to...well, wherever. And so I reinstalled an old version of Tweetbot that I had paid for, and was really quite happy with the experience. It was a bit cumbersome, didn't give me nearly as many stats, and lacked push notifications. But, it was helping to wean me off my constant doom-scrolling. And now that Tweetbot no longer works, I am even less inclined to reinstall Twitter on my iPhone, and I'm opening the Mastodon app more often.
the__alchemist 4y ago
Noob question: what demographics is or was Twitter popular with? I remember is as something like the FB news feed, and used mainly by grownups, vice university students. Since then, I haven't met anyone who suggested to follow it, or encountered it outside the context of news articles (especially lately). Or the occasional link here to a long-form post split up into tweets. Is this like Whattsapp that's popular in some countries but not others? I'm in East coast USA.
helloworld11 4y ago
Cry me a river. Build something based on a third party platform and expect possible consequences like this as its vagaries and ownership details change. Most of the post reeks of self absorption and naval gazing. Yep, some billionaire that for the moment isn't quite popular among the glitterati of social justice and elite media bought a major social network only to change it in ways you don't like. It happens, adjust. It might be fashionable to pour shit on Musk but nothing new or horrible happened here as far as the world of tech is concerned. Twitter was treading shit with all kinds of bad policies long before space man came along to apply his own brand of convoluted management..
- amitrip 4y ago
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docmars 4y ago
Yikes, and here I thought Twitter is the best it's been in years now that people can share meaningful information again. I guess greed and pet projects trump accountability these days.
unconed 4y ago
Hate on "space karen" all you want... but we all know that if he hadn't bought it, the company would still be a bloated carcass incapable of delivering features, its c-level would be dancing to the tune of every 3 letter agency, and its moderation teams would be openly enforcing left wing dogma while granting media friends a total exemption. There never would have been an exodus to other protocols had the awful people responsible for all of the above not gotten what they deserved. They would still be relishing exactly the position and behavior they now openly hate musk for: petty tyranny. All in all, a positive development. Twitter didn't fall as predicted, tons of incriminating evidence is coming out, and people who are used to always getting their way are now hearing what an unconditional "no" feels like from the other side, for the first time in their lives it seems.
- amitrip 4y ago
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ericzawo 4y ago
Who honestly is characterizing the hostile takeover as going well?
fennecfoxy 4y ago
Does it federate your identity to others servers automatically yet? Or is it still the case that if you piss off the server owner/they decide to call it quits without allowing migration, that all your data is gone?\ It's a glaring flaw really.
Slava_Propanei 4y ago
[dead]

723 points by chazeon 4y ago

It’s not even clear that they “pulled the plug”, could just be a temporary outage. Wish Musk would announce his thoughts on the future of the API, though.

paxys 4y ago
Regardless of how it started, a "temporary outage" that has lasted for several days and has received zero acknowledgement from the company can now be considered intentional. They don't get the benefit of doubt without sending even a bare minimum "sorry, we are working on fixing it" tweet.
Kwpolska 4y ago
Can a “temporary outage” be limited only to the most popular apps? Can a “temporary outage” affect Twitterrific for iOS but not Twitterrific for Mac [0]? [0] https://blog.iconfactory.com/2023/01/state-of-the-twitterverse/ https://blog.iconfactory.com/2023/01/state-of-the-twitterver...
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  Yes, of course (if e.g. some shards but not others broke/received an updated incorrect config). In fact, it applying to some but not other versions of the same app makes it look more likely to be a bug than intentional.

throwmeup123 4y ago

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ygggvbbjiuygvf 4y ago
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- throwmeup123 4y ago
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Ciantic 4y ago

End of an era. I like that he sees that ActivityPub should be so much more than Mastodon. "a truly universal timeline" of various things on the internet. For that to happen we can't limit ourselves to just Mastodon, but start building alternative takes. Yes, some aren't viewable on other clients, but that's fine, then they just show a link, but at least you can reply/reblog/like items.

Waterluvian 4y ago
I just hope we walk before we try to run. It feels like Mastodon has been given a colossal opportunity and it feels like it’s being completely squandered. I trust that Space Jerk will give Mastodon a very long opportunity window but the sooner the better. Maybe revolution is a good idea and I’m completely wrong. But I still find Mastodon so frustrating and unreliable that I am just not on social media at all now.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Apparently as a baby I learned to run before walking so I want to defend doing it that way. Running is a bit easier than walking, walking is a process of carefully balancing at each step. Running is just falling, but you catch yourself before you hit the ground. As long as you aren’t too concerned with steering, you can easily at least run until you find an obstacle. And then you’ve learned about a new type of obstacle! Even the fastest baby should have trouble getting into trouble as long as the parents are attentive — they are tiny and parents have long arms to catch them. Babies barely have the capability to generate enough kinetic energy to harm themselves I’m pretty sure. Or I dunno, at least I survived. Apply this to your analogy as you’d like.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    me typing out a definition for running that dictates that it’s not just stumbling recklessly forward in style, all for an analogy “You’re probably wondering how I got here…”
    - 4y ago

samwillis 4y ago

This is a moving post, I wish Craig and everyone else effected by these events the best, onwards and upwards! If these people who pioneered the use of Twitter and fundamentally steered how it developed through their community contributions turn their experience to Mastodon and the Fediverse, big things will come. From the ashes of one thing can be built the future.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
It should be liberating, no more working under ever worsening constraints, someone just ripped off the band-aid and made the hard choice for them. Didn't want to let go? Not sure of how much effort and support to continue putting in? Problem solved! The answer is zero. Zilch. Nada. Enjoy the free time!
- paxys 4y ago
  Loss of the product itself, however hard, can be dealt with. It's the loss of the community that really stings.

deleted 4y ago

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smitty1e 4y ago

We have standards, sir. The show was upgraded to a "Crap Cabaret".

deleted 4y ago

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gnarbarian 4y ago

He has every right to be mad but this post comes off as petulant and juvenile.

rdlw 4y ago
Well yeah, his life's work was destroyed at someone's whim with the flick of a switch. How many people would be gracious? Why should anyone be?
- Espressosaurus 4y ago
  This is what happens when you rely on a service you have no control over. It'll happen now, it'll happen later, but at some point, somebody is going to decide they make more money turning the thing you rely on off.
  - d4nnyo 4y ago
    Right!
  - laborcontract 4y ago
    Oh boy what do we tell everyone using AWS?
    - rapnie 4y ago
      Rather those offering value-added services on top of AWS. Well, maybe they read HN and they should account for the risks anyway.
    - Espressosaurus 4y ago
      The risk is always that they decide the service you're relying on is too niche/is being replaced by something else and you need to adapt. Which is a thing that happens. The big stuff like EC2 isn't likely to go away before Amazon itself goes away, but there are piles of other smaller services that may or may not. It's not Google in terms of getting rid of capabilities, but they sunset APIs and capabilities all the time. For good reason! It's probably not a good idea to be running Python 2.7 today, and there's no reason why they should want to support it. So you're being snide but yes, this is a concern, and the deprecation schedule is solely under Amazon's control. If at some point the cloud goes bust because on-prem is the new hotness (what's old is new again) in 10 or 20 years, you bet your damn bippy AWS will pull the plug when it makes sense for Amazon to do so. And that's a product you pay for. If you're not paying for the product (I don't know if Twitter was offering free access to its APIs) then you're relying on the good will and support of the person/company providing the product/API and at any moment they can change their mind. As we've seen here. If you rely on someone else's platform, you are at their mercy. If you don't believe me, wait another few days for yet another app developer to complain about getting locked out of an app store, or some payments platform locking them out of their account to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

birdyrooster 4y ago

It's like when you exclaim "jesus christ" and are unwittingly paying tribute to some assholes. I won't say his name anymore either.

sysadm1n 4y ago

I never relied on Twitter's API, since building stuff with it is akin to building your castle on other people's land. You're always going to be a tenant, and the API gatekeepers play landlord and can rugpull you without notice. But I'm looking into Nostr[0] as an alternative, aswell as ActivityPub which seems to be working well these days. Dorsey's Bluesky Social[1] looks promising too, but it's a very late move since Twitter should have been a protocol from the outset. [0] https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/ [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)

x86x87 4y ago
This is not the first time twittet screwed developers. If you're olf enough to remember they did this shit in their early day when they had the real possibility of being social media's message bus. Corporate greed took over and capitalism won / they pulled the plug on developer apis. Up until that point they flourished. Now with new wind in their sails generated by 45 and more recently by the technoking they have forgot the lesson and doing the same mistake. Twitter is nothing without its ecosystem. They are killing the same env they need to survive.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > they have forgot the lesson They haven't _forgotten_ it, Saint Car is _ignoring_ it. People in Twitter would absolutely be aware that the last attempt (which for all its problems was still infinitely more ordered and less user-hostile than this one, of course), didn't go so well.
  - x86x87 4y ago
    Saint Car? That induced a permanent chuckle.
kcplate 4y ago
> I never relied on Twitter's API, since building stuff with it is akin to building your castle on other people's land This is a wise attitude. I can’t imagine any company whose existence is wholly reliant on another single organization not entering into an agreement with the said single organization to protect itself. I feel sorry for them, but damn…you need to protect your product.

tptacek 4y ago

I think (and have been saying this a bunch lately) that he's right about ActivityPub and Mastodon, and that "a universal timeline" is actually a really good way to put words to it. I was a Mastodon hater for years, but having used it for the past month or so with an actual community of people (really: the whole community I interacted with on Twitter before), I have to admit it: the ActivityPub people were right about this. It's easy to see the potential, and how it pulls in the writing we were all doing before there was Twitter while keeping most of what Twitter was good for too. I'm expecting this to be the second-dumbest thing I ever predicted badly (I dismissed MP3s, too!)

EricE 4y ago
RSS? We had it until everyone ceded control to Google because it was convenient. <Shrug>
warinukraine 4y ago
May I ask what was your original argument against Mastodon?
- tptacek 4y ago
  I looked at in terms of the "Fediverse", a coherent decentralized social network, with lots of instances cooperating to make one intentional thing. I'm still not bullish about that. But once you use it, you see that it's basically hyper-interactive RSS. (Maybe you see the two at the same thing; I don't.)
  - warinukraine 4y ago
    > I looked at in terms of the "Fediverse", a coherent decentralized social network, with lots of instances cooperating to make one intentional thing. So what was your original argument against this?
    - tptacek 4y ago
      That it will never cohere. (That's about as much as I want to say about this right now; this gets boring pretty quickly.)

dom96 4y ago

Great post. I hope we see a multitude of new clients for Mastodon. In the meantime, if you're someone like me that is dipping their feet into Mastodon but isn't ready to leave Twitter fully yet, then you might be interested in a browser extension I developed[0] which puts Mastodon posts in your Twitter timeline. [0] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/lgiffpmohlpjlkclpmelkkfmjnlpafne?hl=en-GB&authuser=0 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/l...

antiquark 4y ago

Twitter has been crippling their API long before "Space Hilter" took over. https://tidbits.com/2018/08/20/twitter-cripples-third-party-clientsagain/ https://tidbits.com/2018/08/20/twitter-cripples-third-party-...

paxys 4y ago
Yes that is mentioned in the opening paragraphs of the article.
retrocryptid 4y ago
Space Hitler? That's the kind of hyperbole that seriously undercuts your credibility. Mr. Musk is "Space Mussolini" at best.
threeseed 4y ago
Given how many of us used third party apps I wouldn't say it was crippled. And there are only two examples given: streaming and push notifications. The first as Twitter pointed out was because it was only ever a beta feature and even today their own apps don't support this feature.

mkoc 4y ago

Not sure how it is for others, but for me tapbot Tweetbot is working again since today; is the API back up?

cmcfadden 4y ago
Paul mentioned that they had a way to push new API info to the clients, so I think they basically just re-registered the app as a YOLO thing to see how long until Twitter pulls the plug again.
geerlingguy 4y ago
I was able to get an access token, and my timeline loads in Tweetbot, but I can't see mentions or activity, and I can't tweet from it.
clouddrover 4y ago
Tweetbot partially works because they're using new API keys: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/15/23556359/tweetbot-twitter-online-third-party-apps-outage https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/15/23556359/tweetbot-twitter... It's a temporary workaround at best. The new API access is rate limited and Tweetbot will likely be banned again.
- karlshea 4y ago
  The new keys are already not working for me.
  - clouddrover 4y ago
    It certainly proves that the whole situation is intentional. Here's what Paul Haddad (Tweetbot developer) says about the new keys failing: https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004

w0mbat 4y ago

The “Space Karen” slur is lame. Elon is the manager in this situation, and if you’re complaining to the manager, you’re the Karen.

uwuemu 4y ago
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int_19h 4y ago
Elon took "complaining to the manager" to a whole new level by buying the whole company outright and then firing all the managers he was ranting about.

geerlingguy 4y ago

I'm still waiting to hear any kind of official word, but it looks pretty bleak. Without Tweetbot, Twitter is almost impossible to use. Checking in on https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/, the alternate UI, it's almost usable, but still missing like 8 of the most important features that made Twitter useful to me. I have been posting sometimes on Mastodon but still primarily on Twitter, waiting to see how things turned out. But if Tweetbot at least isn't restored, I will switch roles and will likely try out Mastodon for a while, posting just a little on Twitter. The problem is, most of the "Fediverse" right now is a big echo chamber (kind of like Voat was when Reddit had its weird issues a few years back, or more charitably like a community like HN is... it's not always bad as long as people are aware of it). So it's not the same kind of community as Twitter had.

thejohnconway 4y ago
Twitter was never one community though, of course. The amount of interaction I had outside my bubble was really minimal. I could see other people shouting at each other if I wanted to, but of course I could do that without having an account.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
I've been using Mastodon for the past couple of months for most of the people I follow, but prior to that I had been using Twitterific for Twitter because it was so much better for how I used it. Up until a couple of days ago I was still using Twitterific to keep up with those who hadn't yet made the jump (mostly non-tech-adjacent people/communities), but with the iOS version now being dead my usage has seen a nosedive. For now I still check every so often with the Mac version since it's still functional, and if that dies then I'm going to try to figure out alternatives for aforementioned communities (probably Discord, but we'll see) and drop Twitter altogether. I have no interest in the stock client/site whatsoever.
nerdchum 4y ago
I remember Voat! It started off with great intentions, just to be a more free speech version of reddit and at the end was just posts about Michelle Obama being a man and Qanon. It was an interesting case study in how free speech can decline to a lowest common denominator type situation.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago

[flagged]

joshgachnang 4y ago
Losing your business like this has to be infuriating, but that's always the risk building your business on top of someone else's business. However, the writing style completely undercuts the message with the name calling. I wonder if Craig will still pull the plug now that the API seems to be back up.
- rideontime 4y ago
  where have you heard that the API is back up for those who've been banned? only thing I've seen is that some have worked around their bans by getting new API keys
  - joshgachnang 4y ago
    Yeah that looks like that's what it is. I can't post from the apps either.

IngvarLynn 4y ago

[flagged]

bfgoodrich 4y ago
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graycat 4y ago

[flagged]

Ensorceled 4y ago
Maybe, just maybe, HN isn't for you?
- graycat 4y ago
  Of course, my point is the propensity of undefined terminology in writing about computing and in particular at Hacker News. It's a very valid point. You don't attack the point but ME. Not good.
  - sph 4y ago
    This is a computing forum, ain't nobody got the time to explain what API means. You should not go on medical forums asking in any post what SVT tachycardia means either. It's just rude, and trollish, since you have been here for 10 years and you're wasting everybody's time with fake questions.
    - graycat 4y ago
      I didn't ask was "API" meant. Instead, I asked what was the specific API they were referring to. There are thousands of APIs and the authors assumed what API they had in mind was clear. Clear enough??? For your > It's just rude, and trollish, since you have been here for 10 years and you're wasting everybody's time with fake questions. Wrong. All wrong. 100% wrong. I did no such thing. What I did is 100% fully appropriate, reasonable, justified, and constructive. Just read again, setting your hostility aside, what I actually WROTE. E.g., I wrote "API" to question the meaning of the quote I gave "the API". Okay, as is fully clear from what else I wrote, I was asking WHAT !@#$%^&() API? Not your misreading -- I was NOT asking what an API is but what API the author had in mind. You blew it. You get an F for simple reading comprehension. More generally, sorry to break the news, but computing and Hacker News have a strong desire to be as obscure as possible. It appears that most of what competence* the audience has is simple explanations of obscure jargon about trivial concepts and then omit the explanations and leave the jargon. My view is that poor technical writing, including undefined obscure jargon is by far the worst bottleneck to progress in computing and, thus, in the economy and civilization. In a few words, JUNK THE OBSCURE JARGON. Clear enough? This is a controversial suggestion? Usually when I see obscure jargon, I don't bother to guess or look up what it means and, instead, conclude that the content is from such a bad writer that I should not attempt to read the content. Writers, take note: A large fraction of the content on computing and at Hacker News I just won't attempt to read. I know quite well what advanced material is in computing and math. I'll put it to you this way: I know enough about academic computer science research to understand that a large fraction of accomplished, expert, famous, tenured, chaired professors of computer science at some of the best research research universities don't waste their time, effort, or energy on undefined, generally trivial content presented as obscure jargon either. Undefined terminology -- bad stuff. Don't do that. Understand now? I know; I know; these ideas are a bit too subtle for the diligent Hacker News audience well informed on obscure aspects of Twitter. Uh, I have next to nothing to do with Twitter. Apparently some of the Hacker News audience expects to become better informed about computing by paying attention to trivia about Twitter -- not good.

Lammy 4y ago

[flagged]

xupybd 4y ago
A Karen is a personality type. They are not imputing the gender on Elon but the personality. By applying the insult to men they are de-gendering the insult. Not that I like the term Space Karen.
- Lammy 4y ago
  It became an insult because people hate women who stand up for themselves. It can't be de-gendered.
  - adventurer 4y ago
    That’s not what a Karen is or why people use it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

mattwilsonn888 4y ago

If federation was a worthwhile goal (in one's mind) after "the bozo took over Twitter" then it is quite obvious nothing fundamentally has changed such that federation would have been a noble goal as a foil to previous Twitter management. Seriously - if more personal sovereignty is the goal then complaining about Twitter only after new management is admitting that the primary quality you don't like is the new management. In reality the argument for federation is as I've already said - more personal sovereignty, less centralized, corruptible, overlord control. Twitter is certainly doing much better now than before, and that doesn't mean federated communities online still are not, in principle, superior. If someone wants to use crypto to do justify sentiment like this, they'd be mocked here, but this is much better? It goes to show that people denouncing different approaches often aren't doing it because those approaches lack coherent justification, but because those approaches are related to aspects of technology some people don't like and don't care to examine. There are plenty of reasons to lampoon the majority of approaches 'crypto' takes to 'solve' problems - that doesn't mean one shouldn't lampoon carefully and thoughtfully. Likewise, there is reason to justify federated platforms, but a dislike of Elon Musk's politics will not be the true driver.

klabb3 4y ago
> complaining about Twitter only after new management is admitting that the primary quality you don't like is the new management. This rings very true. The move to Mastodon isn’t likely to translate into “…but why do we need speech owners at all”. Unaccountable and unjustified concentrated power is simply not a concern to most. Once the dust settles, business as usual will kick in. It’ll either be a feudal lordship of mastodon instances, or a brand new dickhead in a leather jacket.
rsynnott 4y ago
> complaining about Twitter only after new management is admitting that the primary quality you don't like is the new management. So the thing about Twitter (and actually I think this is something Musk badly misunderstood) is that Twitter users, particularly long-time Twitter users, have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. It's always been a bit of a broken unpleasant mess; there's a reason that Twitter users affectionately call it the hellsite. Previously, federated services were a nice idea, but there was never really the push needed; significant numbers of people weren't sufficiently annoyed with Twitter to leave. Now, well. (I pretty much expected this to happen once Saint Car bowed to the will of the Delaware Chancery Court, but I've got to admit I thought it would take a lot longer, via a thousand cuts. This API thing feels like such an unforced error.) Also, this has served as a timely reminder that, even if the private service you like (or love-hate) is fine now, it could at any moment be taken over and ruined by a weird idiot. Even if your interests align with the platform's interests, you can no longer assume the platform will act in its best interests.

godelski 4y ago

I've been thinking about social media a lot lately and how it has changed my life. I'm only in my early 30's, but I think many others my age grew up online and when the internet felt smaller, but in a different way. I made life long friends through these means. But something I've noticed is that as everyone has come online, I have made fewer friends. What I personally miss is the small niche communities. These don't seem to exist anymore. I made several friends on sites like What.cd and found many artists I would have never come into contact otherwise (even speaking with many). Even friends on sites like Imgur when it was smaller, but never once it grew. The global social media is cool and has aspects that are nice to it (e.g. being able to talk to power), but its same power is its greatest downfall (you can't speak to your audience when your audience is everyone, filled with different priors (how we interpret words), and different willingness to act in good faith). I see everyone talking about Twitter and how it needs to be replaced. But I want to know how we remake these smaller communities. That's what I miss about the internet. There are clearly size thresholds for these. Finding them is often hard and word of mouth. But what I want to know is how we make these flourish and bring personhood back to the internet. We should have both types of communities. But I don't think methods like Mastadon or Reddit really facilitate this. I think many even have seen this change as HN has grown. There are several people that I recognize their names but as the community has grown we have too seen a change in content, culture, and how we speak to one another. For good or bad. But I do think it is nice to have small communities as well that do develop their own cultures. Maybe I'm just old now though.

nathias 4y ago
they still exist on the fringes, there are forums from early web, new forums, new types of tech (defi and crypto has a lot of that)
- kristianc 4y ago
  > new types of tech (defi and crypto has a lot of that) I’m sure crypto and Defi has some good people, but a huge proportion of them seem to be grifters and scammers who I’d want nothing to do with. That wasn’t really the case on the early web.

okokwhatever 4y ago

[flagged]

crummy 4y ago
this guy spent 16 years writing and maintaining a Twitter client

Lio 4y ago

I’ve had the Mastodon client downloaded for a while now but haven’t really got round to switching over to it. I think this is the push I really need. Space Karen has done me a favour. I sure as shit won’t be going back to Twitter’s dumpster fire of a native client. Edited timelines, promoted tweets and user preferences that randomly reset themselves to the most annoying settings. Nope.

thih9 4y ago

The brand is losing so much credibility among developers, I guess we'll see even fewer products with Twitter API as a core feature. I know this has been a trend for the last couple of years but this kind of lack of communication seems like a milestone.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
I think the real beginning of the end will be when tertiary services axe their twitter integrations. Top of mind for me would be Google News.
bentobean 4y ago
It's not losing any credibility with this developer (to the extent that it ever had "credibility" to begin with). Just sayin'.

ArmandGrillet 4y ago

Well-written and touching post. To switch off this API used by so many long-time users on the same day "For You" appears as the default option on Twitter triggers me. The "For You" timeline is only for Elon: it will drive engagement, extremism, and all the things social networks have been accused of driving for years now in order to make more $. Some folks here have been comparing the crypto/Web3 and ActivityPub craze recently but I see a massive difference. A billionaire has spent the last 3 months shitting on what I thought was my social backyard. Crypto and NFTs did not impact how I use my bank accounts, Elon ruined in a quarter a very special place I had crafted over a decade. Mastodon is not great right now, the UX needs to vastly improve, but all for-profit social networks have always disappointed in the long run. Looking back, few technologies have kept the same degree of greatness over the past 15 years: emails, torrents, RSS feeds... only tools no corporation fully controls. I hope ActivityPub can join that list fairly soon.

warinukraine 4y ago
[flagged]
- leokennis 4y ago
  I imagine you believe the money you keep with the company known as your bank is yours as well right? Just because it’s a company doesn’t mean they get to behave like assholes and then put the blame on their users for being gullible or ignorant.
  - warinukraine 4y ago
    It's mine because the law says so.
  - kaashif 4y ago
    I disagree somewhat with what that guy said but your "counterpoint" is ridiculous. Bank deposits are yours! If the bank collapses and can't give them to you, there's FDIC insurance so the government will get you that money. This is nothing at all like Twitter and only weakens your argument.

neilv 4y ago

To the people who were already warning of things like this, in the '80s and '90s, all the cries lately of "I let some rich guy own my social network; how could I have known that would be abused" might seem a bit /r/LeopardsAteMyFace.

harrego 4y ago

See also Paul Haddad's situation[1] (creator of TweetBot): > I really want an official public statement. We have a large number of sub. renewals for year 3 of Tweetbot coming up in a couple of weeks. If we're permanently cut off I need to know so we can remove the app from sale and prevent those. Which obviously I'd rather not do. [1] https://tapbots.social/@paul/109690528614720936 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109690528614720936

NelsonMinar 4y ago
Paul is a respectful developer, polite to his customers. Musk is a vainglorious boss, making erratic decisions. People like Paul. Be like Paul.

waynecochran 4y ago

Was the Twitter API taken down intentionally or is this a bug? If intentional was it announced ahead of time? If its a bug, has this happened before -- looks like in happened in July 2022 (https://api.twitterstat.us/history?page=3 https://api.twitterstat.us/history?page=3)?

rideontime 4y ago
for 9 hours, and it was acknowledged. hardly comparable.

m3kw9 4y ago

Can’t think of mastodon as a competitor to twitter. I gave it a shot and it feels like discord for twitter.

deleted 4y ago

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pmarreck 4y ago

[flagged]

pxtail 4y ago
Yep, it makes no sense - fueling, empowering someone's private property,even voluntarily helping to sidestep/skip platform shortcomings to make it dominant player instead of promoting open standards and solutions and then surprise, "Pikachu face" I'm perceiving Asahi Linux initiative in similar way and it's astonishing to see people putting countless man-hours for free into improving device produced by one of richest companies in the world which is known for having full controll on sofware and hardware intentionally and steadily making it as locked as possible, hostile to OS What could go wrong here..

iLoveOncall 4y ago

[flagged]

lapcat 4y ago
> your website being shutdown It's not a website, it's the app he's been working on for the past 16 years.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  Ah my bad, if it's an app instead of a website, I understand how it is appropriate to use the passing of your mom as a metaphor in a blog post named "The Shit Show".
  - lapcat 4y ago
    This feels like concern trolling. Did your mom just die a few weeks ago? The author experienced two personally traumatic events in a short period of time. Maybe your sense of "tastefulness" isn't relevant here.
    - system2 4y ago
      One is business, the other one is family life. His business decisions were not right and he is learning it the hard way. Why would anyone involve their mother's death in an Elon Musk post?
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > His business decisions were not right and he is learning it the hard way. This is absurd. His business decision worked for 16 years, which is longer than many jobs or even companies last. The point is that the new owner of Twitter has no respect for the people who contributed to the platform over the years. Twitter won't even announce that they've shut down the 3rd party API. How cowardly is that?

brap 4y ago

[flagged]

wstuartcl 4y ago
While I agree that getting locked out is a clear risk of any business built against another company's platform I do think it is perfectly reasonable for someone whom has done so for 15+ years (and is part of an ecosystem that helped establish that third party) to be publicly upset for the mode and method for how this change happened at twitter. Its not just his frustrations being vented in this post but the impact to his users (which is well out of his control). Twitter's actions of breaking the API for the largest 25 integrators with millions of users (by all indications) on purpose with 0 deprecation warning, 0 communication, 0 response the the break is garbage. Knowing that Musk is the agent of change and the one setting these actions in place he can take the heat. at the end of the day I am done with twitter as it is, so its no skuff on my skin either way -- as far as I am concerned there is a clear path forward for the types of actions Musk has taken at twitter. It is just a matter of time.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
> You took a bet relying on a third party business, and that bet didn't pay off. Actually it paid off for more than 15 years, which makes the whole complaining even more unjustified.

madrox 4y ago

This situation is heart breaking for us who have a lot of attachment to this API. I built a research thesis around data mining the firehose, and that work got me my first data mining job. I made hundreds of valuable connections. However, the API really died years ago when requirements of ad-based revenue meant neutering many endpoints. It's been on life support since. Recent events really were about pulling the plug. But Mastodon excites me the way I used to be excited about social. There's possibility again to turn it into the things we gave up on a decade ago. I look forward to a new wave of innovation here. And yes, I refuse to say the name of the company or the owner at this point. I agree with the author. It isn't deserved.

thread_id 4y ago

Sorry to break it to you Elon but you really did spend $44 billion on the next MySpace. There's nothing you can do about it now. All we ask is that you please stop trashing your Tesla brand. Oh!!! and by the way recommend to the BOD to make Tom Zhu CEO of Tesla. You can stay at Twitter.

systemvoltage 4y ago
MySpace didn't have the President of United States and the leader of Taliban on the same platform though. No matter what side of the debate you're on, Twitter does have solid network effects.
sixothree 4y ago
Twitter had so much potential under new leadership. There are so many ways he could have made the platform a richer experience. YouTube could have been a competitor. But he squandered it in a truly epic fashion.

system2 4y ago

I have an idea. Do not build your businesses on top of other social media platform APIs.

lapcat 4y ago
In fact, you should live like a hermit in wilderness and never depend on other people for anything, making your computers out of wood.

bioinformatics 4y ago

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deleted 4y ago

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deleted 4y ago

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csomar 4y ago

We’ll see how this plays out, but I think Twitter has grew despite sabotaging developers. I’ve left Twitter in 2011-2012 because of their API changes, and that made me salty so I decided to not use their platform. So they lost me as a user, but that certainly didn’t matter much. In my opinion, you can only push it so far. You rely on some of the “power” users to run a platform. In HN, think of it of people that post, comment and visit the most. The rest of the users are mostly “followers”. These “power” people make and set the trends. This is the last nail in the coffin. These people will find new territories and hopefully they’ll learn this time that they need to own the platform, and not just their contributions. If successful, this will make it hard for any future centralized platform to see the light again. If success, this will probably take Facebook and other social media networks too. This will make it even harder (or easier?) for governments to control narrative or even understand what’s going on. I’m optimistic today for the future. Thank you Elon Musk!

aaronbrethorst 4y ago

I removed the official Twitter app from my phone a few weeks back. I was leery about the amount of extra data that could be slurped up from my device and sent back to...well, wherever. And so I reinstalled an old version of Tweetbot that I had paid for, and was really quite happy with the experience. It was a bit cumbersome, didn't give me nearly as many stats, and lacked push notifications. But, it was helping to wean me off my constant doom-scrolling. And now that Tweetbot no longer works, I am even less inclined to reinstall Twitter on my iPhone, and I'm opening the Mastodon app more often.

the__alchemist 4y ago

Noob question: what demographics is or was Twitter popular with? I remember is as something like the FB news feed, and used mainly by grownups, vice university students. Since then, I haven't met anyone who suggested to follow it, or encountered it outside the context of news articles (especially lately). Or the occasional link here to a long-form post split up into tweets. Is this like Whattsapp that's popular in some countries but not others? I'm in East coast USA.

helloworld11 4y ago

Cry me a river. Build something based on a third party platform and expect possible consequences like this as its vagaries and ownership details change. Most of the post reeks of self absorption and naval gazing. Yep, some billionaire that for the moment isn't quite popular among the glitterati of social justice and elite media bought a major social network only to change it in ways you don't like. It happens, adjust. It might be fashionable to pour shit on Musk but nothing new or horrible happened here as far as the world of tech is concerned. Twitter was treading shit with all kinds of bad policies long before space man came along to apply his own brand of convoluted management..

amitrip 4y ago
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docmars 4y ago

Yikes, and here I thought Twitter is the best it's been in years now that people can share meaningful information again. I guess greed and pet projects trump accountability these days.

unconed 4y ago

Hate on "space karen" all you want... but we all know that if he hadn't bought it, the company would still be a bloated carcass incapable of delivering features, its c-level would be dancing to the tune of every 3 letter agency, and its moderation teams would be openly enforcing left wing dogma while granting media friends a total exemption. There never would have been an exodus to other protocols had the awful people responsible for all of the above not gotten what they deserved. They would still be relishing exactly the position and behavior they now openly hate musk for: petty tyranny. All in all, a positive development. Twitter didn't fall as predicted, tons of incriminating evidence is coming out, and people who are used to always getting their way are now hearing what an unconditional "no" feels like from the other side, for the first time in their lives it seems.

amitrip 4y ago
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ericzawo 4y ago

Who honestly is characterizing the hostile takeover as going well?

fennecfoxy 4y ago

Does it federate your identity to others servers automatically yet? Or is it still the case that if you piss off the server owner/they decide to call it quits without allowing migration, that all your data is gone?\ It's a glaring flaw really.

Slava_Propanei 4y ago

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