11 ms·

Tweetbot is back down again

197 points by JdeBP 4y ago

JdeBP 4y ago
Ironically, the best information about the status of TweetBot is on the FediVerse. Paul Haddad one of its developers has been posting at https://tapbots.social/@paul https://tapbots.social/@paul (directly followable as @paul@tapbots.social by FediVerse users). In an experiment on Sunday evening, M. Haddad switched out the Twitter API key used by TweetBot, which had already been disabled since Friday 2023-01-13, for an older one that it still possessed that had posting limits. People rushed to confirm that TweetBot was back, only to discover that they could only log in and read, not post. It was approximately 3 hours from then until that API key completely stopped working too, along with all of the other API keys that Tapbots had. The Twitter API itself is still present, but specific API keys used in several 3rd party apps have ceased functioning. No developer has received any word from Twitter at all about what is going on. However, unconfirmed rumour, reported on some WWW sites, had had it that internal communications within Twitter revealed that the disabling of the API keys for specific 3rd-party Twitter apps was intentional, and that Twitter staff had yet to work out how to announce this publicly. M. Haddad took the disabling of the other API keys once they were put into use as confirmation that this rumour was indeed accurate, that this was not an accident or just some bug that would be fixed, but a deliberately targetted move. This combines with other developments. 3rd party apps could show chronological Twitter timelines, and skip advertisements. The chronological timeline has this same weekend been removed from the Twitter WWW interface and 1st-party app, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the same day that the 3rd party apps stopped working Twitter offered advertisers halved advertising rates if they paid for a blitz of up to $250,000 worth of advertising to Twitter users that must run before 2023-02-28. * https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-offers-free-ads-brands-that-advertise-its-platform-wsj-2023-01-14/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-offers-free-ads-b... Effectively, Twitter is now marketing itself as distinct from the FediVerse, with no 3rd party apps (the FediVerse having several each for iOS and Android, including one in development by Tapbots), an advertising blitz with user attention being sold to advertisers and those who pay Twitter as the funding model (with many FediVerse instances opting for a user-funded or coöperatively-funded model, with organizations that wish an "official" presence funding their own instances for hosting official staff accounts, as Tapbots itself does, and advertisements being banned), and only algorithmic timelines (chronological timelines being the only option in most FediVerse WWW interfaces and apps). Several users who have disabled their accounts in response to the loss of TweetBot, deleting and archiving all posts, marking the accounts private, and unfollowing everyone, have also reported (in various FediVerse posts) upon checking back that their accounts have had followers re-added to them by Twitter itself. * https://mastodon.scot/@bodhipaksa/109694529674624449 https://mastodon.scot/@bodhipaksa/109694529674624449 Unfollowing everyone ensures both that the accounts do not accumulate notifications and concomitant junk e-mail, and that follower counts accurately reflect the real reduced Twitter effectiveness to those others that remain using it. Many (not just Charles Stross) have also stressed the importance of not deleting accounts, and occasional dummy keep-alive posts, in order to prevent impersonation of long-standing public identities. Anecdotal reports over the weekend have already stated much reduced views of Tweets made by those without paid-for accounts, because of the switch to non-chronological viewability only, favouring advertisers and the posts of those who have paid Twitter for accounts. Not paying Twitter is, by those reports, to be no longer read, as much if even at all.
- cptroot 4y ago
  Thanks for the heads up that chronological timeline is getting disabled. I've disabled auto-updates for the Android app in the hopes that I can keep it for just a little bit longer. We'll see whether that works in the face of Musk's determination to make Twitter profitable.
  - TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
    I don't think chronological timeline is going away though, it's still there on the Mobile Web version at least. There's two tabs: For You and Following. For You is the recommendation timeline and Following is chronological.
    - MattDemers 4y ago
      But unfortunately (unlike before) you can't default to "Following." You're defaulted to the "For You" tab on every hard-load, or app open (following a close) and you have to click or swipe over. At least before you could click that "Home" icon and switch to "Latest" and it would reasonably stick. I gave Twitter a lot more leeway than I should've through all this due to network effect and intertia, and I regret that a lot. When this "For You"/"Following" thing happened I actively went back to Echofon and Tweetbot, and was planning to make a subscription just to avoid what I was seeing on the first-party app/website. And now I can't even do that. Wouldn't be surprised if Tweetdeck is forced to move over to the "new" Tweetdeck (which is just a wrapper for the web experience) soon.
  - tag2103 4y ago
    The Chronological timeline is now more obvious on the WWW. I had that as my default before and with the new UI I default into the new "following" tab.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  > The chronological timeline has this same weekend been removed from the Twitter WWW interface and 1st-party app Well, I left a bit ago, but if I hadn't that would be the end for me. That's the only view I used on Twitter, and found the non-chronological timeline to have almost no value at all. Definitely haven't regretted my decision to leave, but that decision is such a strong reinforcement of that decision.
JdeBP 4y ago
M. Haddad has also discussed a current problem. Users have current subscriptions to TweetBot and face repeat subscription charges at their app store. Migrating those users with time left on their subscriptions (and who want it) to Ivory, the in-development app from Tapbots for the FediVerse, requires an update to TweetBot. However, app stores will not accept an updated app when that app is rendered non-functional by Twitter. * https://tapbots.social/@paul/109691075588560655 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109691075588560655 Twitter has left 3rd-party vendors with no sunset period, or ability to deal with their customers gracefully, directly impacting not only their apps but their revenue. It is as yet unknown how amenable to 3rd-party Twitter app vendors the app store owners for iOS and Android will be.
- retox 4y ago
  Did the developer have any special agreement or contract with Twitter that the API would always be available? If not it sounds like an unacceptable professional risk to base your livelihood on the whims of another entity.
  - george_perez 4y ago
    Not sure about special agreements or contracts, but Tweetbot along with other high-profile third-party apps (like Twitterrific) had way, way more API tokens available because of their size when Twitter started restricting the number of API tokens an app could have assigned for the lifetime of the app. API tokens for new apps were way more limited, around 10,000 I believe. Tweetbot and Twitterrific, while they never disclosed how many tokens they were given as legacy apps, were still to this day accepting new users, so the number seems to be way more than 10,000. And they had access to a less limited API (request-wise) to make their app work better without constant rate limiting nags.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - braingenious 4y ago
    Watching some sad failed poster-bro turned forced admin setting fire to the functionality of his dumb website “Hmm… it is actually the people that have created value for the site by driving engagement that are the true idiots”
nlitened 4y ago
Imagine TweetBot and Twitterrific just silently became dual Twitter/Mastodon clients, automatically following Mastodon accounts that are followed on Twitter, and when Twitter API is unavailable, customers don't notice a thing.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  More likely is a shift to have news updates through instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
- ilikehurdles 4y ago
  The customers would notice because with mastodon the apps would actually fetch content.
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  A Mastodon version of TweetBot is already in development, and nearly finished. It's called "Ivory". https://tapbots.com/ivory/ https://tapbots.com/ivory/
- saurik 4y ago
  They'd notice because the people they were following would change, as not everyone on Twitter is on Mastodon.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    Nah, it's just "the algorithm" deciding who to show you like any ad-social site. Sheer coincidence it decides to show you the sort of folks that might try Mastodon. ;-)
- foogazi 4y ago
  Would have been nice to see - silently gathering mastodon links of all your follows and building a twitter alt As it is these clients only fed off the main twitter api and when that was turned off it errors out
blackoil 4y ago
Did these app had any revenue sharing / paid APIs with twitter or were they using free public APIs?
- adventurer 4y ago
  I can confirm at least some of the free apis are still in working order. Twitter started to throw an error yesterday afternoon that my app. wasn’t in a project but I was able to resolve it.
- tag2103 4y ago
  If there were rev sharing / paid you'd be hearing about lawsuits already. Lack of lawsuits tells me the freebie got cut off.
- numpad0 4y ago
  Most of them were ad-less free apps that offered authenticated access to free APIs, so pure costs to Twitter, but Twitter hadn't been able to shut them down due to feature deficiencies in official apps.
lumb63 4y ago
It never occurred to me how strange it is that a company providing people an online socialization medium prioritized non-human entities’ abilities to use their platform.
- reiichiroh 4y ago
  Humans use third party clients
dr_kretyn 4y ago
[flagged]
- jupp0r 4y ago
  ChatGPT can tell you all about it
  - kerbs 4y ago
    lmcpgtfy
- skiddo 4y ago
  A niche 3rd-party twitter client with a vocal following. The app was effectively the only way I consumed twitter (at least on mobile) since ~2010. While not the most feature rich twitter client, I enjoyed the clean interface and most importantly - the ability to sort tweets chronologically.
- masklinn 4y ago
  Tweetbot is a third-party twitter client. You see it mentioned on HN “twice within a day” because it’s likely one of the more popular twitter client, and it’s one of the client which got hit by twitter deactivating api keys unilaterally and without warning or communication.
- scarface74 4y ago
  If only there were a method to search for that type of information…
AlexandrB 4y ago
I wonder if commenters who thought that Musk would usher in an era of freedom and an end to bad design choices at Twitter are eating crow about now. It seems like the previous executive team was walking a tightrope of satisfying several competing interests, whereas the current leadership has gone all-in on monetizing to the maximum extent possible.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 4y ago
  Not one thing that Musk had done prior to his purchase of Twitter ever suggested to me that he would do anything but exactly what he's doing @Twitter. Everything about him suggested "freedom for me (and my ilk), but not for thee" would be how things would proceed. Which flavor of kool-aid do I need to drink before I see Musk as the great savior instead the person I see now?
  - jacooper 4y ago
    > Which flavor of kool-aid do I need to drink before I see Musk as the great savior instead the person I see now? Presumably buying a Tesla and believing that its the best car in the world, also that Elon musk did everything alone and he's the reason Tesla exists(not true, elon didn't create Tesla).
  - lemon_bottle 4y ago
    >> Which flavor of kool-aid do I need to drink before I see Musk as the great savior instead the person I see now? The things he said about freedom of speech ("free speech absolutism", etc.) made a great impact on people. To be fair, there was also some merit in that narrative as censorship was indeed happening in Twitter 1.0. It's quite easy for a commoner or pleb to think that Elon Musk is single handedly taking on the "mighty establishment" on behalf of the common people. The "Modern day Robin Hood" is a kool-aide stereotype which isn't easy to shake off and Elon seems to have been successful so far in that narrative pitch.
bobleeswagger 4y ago
[flagged]
wodenokoto 4y ago
Is it my English that is off, or does "per developer" imply that the developer asked for the keys to be disabled (which isn't the case)
- ironmagma 4y ago
  It's ambiguous. Could be "per developer's account of the story" or "per developer's request" here although the latter is much more common.
  - JdeBP 4y ago
    There are only so many characters allowed in a Hacker News title. (-: But just following the hyperlink makes it abundantly clear.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- lynndotpy 4y ago
  I think "per developer" means "according to the developer" in this context.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  It's a rather funky phrasing, and I don't think it's an issue with your English. "per" is usually used to mean "in accordance with". So, "per your request" means "in accordance with with your request". It looks the submitter was trying to use "per developer" to mean "according to the developer". While "according to" and "in accordance with" are synonymous when meaning that two things are in agreement, I wouldn't use "in accordance with" or "per" to mean "as told by".
  - caf 4y ago
    The use of 'per' to mean 'as told by' is fairly common, though like many things in the language it may be highly regional?
zeroCalories 4y ago
This sucks, but I don't find it surprising when many of these third party clients are hostile to Twitter. No ads, taking UX out of Twitter's control, and promoting other backbends. It's not clear to me that it benefits Twitter to support these clients.
- pontilanda 4y ago
  Content. If your platform sucks, power users can hang around, using power tools. This isn't so much of a problem on Twitter as much as Reddit, though. Their native experience is okay (it's just the users that are insufferable)
  - zeroCalories 4y ago
    Sure, if the number of power users is low, not increasing, and these power users drive a lot of engagement. I suspect that at least one of the above is not true. Also you should rethink your life if you consider yourself a Twitter/Reddit power user.
    - pontilanda 4y ago
      > Also you should rethink your life if you consider yourself a Twitter/Reddit power user. I'm not, but people can make money on those platforms nowadays, so don't be so judgmental.
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  The Twitter API doesn’t give them the ads. They literally can’t display them. As for the UX thing — Twitter owes a huge amount of its own UX to third-party clients. Hell, Twitter’s own iOS client was originally a third-party client they acquired called Tweetie. The developer of Twitteriffic made a list of all the things they pioneered for Twitter: https://furbo.org/2011/03/11/twitterrific-firsts/ https://furbo.org/2011/03/11/twitterrific-firsts/
  - zeroCalories 4y ago
ehPReth 4y ago
I wonder what would happen (technically, legally, etc) if TweetBot et. al started using one of Twitter's api keys for its apps? AIUI they're all embedded in their respective apps... https://gist.github.com/shobotch/5160017 https://gist.github.com/shobotch/5160017
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  I suspect that the first thing would be a simple legal letter saying "Cease and desist". The second would be a lawsuit. And via side channels Twitter could probably prod the US government to go after the apps for breaking some hacking law, and would almost certainly just ping Apple to take them down too.
jdminhbg 4y ago
It’s kind of insane that the third-party client situation lasted the way it did for so long. Twitter subsidized someone else’s paid app, that didn’t show any of Twitter’s ads, for free, for years. I exclusively used Tweetbot, and checking out the first-party clients this weekend confirms to me that they’re still pretty bad. But I knew that eventually this day was coming. Twitter never made properly supporting third party clients a priority, by either finding a way to charge for access or finding a way to ensure ads were in the feeds. It couldn’t keep going the way it was, and obviously Elon has no interest in devoting any time/attention to it.
- fishywang 4y ago
  >Twitter subsidized someone else’s paid app, that didn’t show any of Twitter’s ads, for free, for years. That's one way to put it. The other side is those third-party apps brought Twitter users for years.
  - fabianfabian 4y ago
    How? Can you even sign up in third-party apps? Those third-party app users were already Twitter users before. Maybe you meant they wouldn't remain Twitter users because they can't tolerate the default app experience?
    - saurik 4y ago
      Is it impossibly surprising that someone might only bother to use the normal app for the purpose of signing up for the service so they can use another app they heard of? Think of recent versions of Internet Explorer: "what is my purpose?" "you install Chrome." (But, yeah: I'd say that it isn't even quite about maintaining the user but the extent to which they continue to engage; like, the user might still be a user, but are they someone who spends the entire day using the app? A number of these alternative clients were what were being used by teams of people to be able to manage the really complex/important accounts.)
    - whateveracct 4y ago
      [flagged]
diebeforei485 4y ago
From a business standpoint I haven't understood why third party clients that don't show ads were ever a good idea for Twitter. It would be reasonable if- (1) Third party clients showed all ads; and (2) The user was subscribed to Twitter Blue
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  Twitter never fed third-party apps ads. Part of why this decision is so questionable is because there were numerous ways Twitter could have monetized these apps more directly, yet never attempted to do so.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  Most Twitter users don't use a third party client, but anyone who's anyone uses a third party client, and most of Twitter's features (retweets, quote tweets, pull to refresh, the use of a bird, the use of the word tweet....) were invented by third party apps. If Twitter wants to be... like, a really bad instagram clone, leaning into the following celebrities thing all the way, then this... maybe works?
  - diebeforei485 4y ago
    > anyone who's anyone uses a third party client In other words, the people who are most lucrative to advertise to are not seeing any ads, and are not paying Twitter for the privilege of an ad-free experience.
rc_mob 4y ago
[flagged]
dang 4y ago
Recent and related: The Shit Show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 - Jan 2023 (264 comments)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
geuis 4y ago
This is my final straw. I've had active accounts since 2009. Never had a super active presence, but it's been an incredibly useful tool for communicating support and user outreach. I just announced that I will be deactivating my accounts. In particular, for https://jsonip.com https://jsonip.com I will be setting up a new status endpoint that's also reflected on https://getjsonip.com https://getjsonip.com. Direct contact will be through charles@getjsonip.com. I just can't abide this blatant behavior of firing thousands of people and arbitrarily disabling access keys for various client apps with absolutely no prior notification. Not sure if I should make a post on HN about the change for jsonip.com or not. I have a lot of users but don't know if there enough here to justify a post.
dang 4y ago
Url changed from https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004, which points to this.
- JdeBP 4y ago
  No, it's the other way around. The article from The Verge that you substituted points to and is based upon (after it was updated) the original source post by Paul Haddad that I gave, which didn't point to anything. Notice that the post referenced is the one in the large font, not the one at the top. (-:
  - pvg 4y ago
    It's sort of circular now with the posts pointing to each other. The verge one is probably the better summary and has more context, at this point.
    - JdeBP 4y ago
      They do not point to each other. M. Haddad's previous post point to The Verge. The post that I hyperlinked to came afterwards, and The Verge points to it. It does not point to anything.
      - pvg 4y ago
        Your original link https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 has 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... at the top which in turn links to your original link https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 near the top. They cross-link regardless of the circumstances/sequence of events that led them to cross-linking.
        JdeBP 4y ago
        No, that is https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695455993367527 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695455993367527, which is the preceding post. Unlike Hacker News, Mastodon makes the post linked-to by the URL have a different background and a larger font. And https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 is very clearly a post that contains no hyperlink at all. That's because it was posted before The Verge then went back and edited its article.
mesh 4y ago
I wonder if Twitter considered charging users of third party apps to be able to use them? i.e. in order to access Twitter via a third party app, you have to pay a monthly subscription to twitter. I know Twitter has discussed subscriptions, and this seems like a way to leverage the value of third party apps to directly drive revenue. Maybe even give the third party app developers a cut. Then you have a situation where your developer ecosystem has incentives to drive usage and revenue for you.
- rvz 4y ago
  > I wonder if Twitter considered charging users of third party apps to be able to use them? i.e. in order to access Twitter via a third party app, you have to pay a monthly subscription to twitter. Or even better, third-party developers pay for an API key set on a subscription plan to use the Twitter API in their apps, which makes sense and is a win-win-win for Twitter, third-party developers and users.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    That'd at least be accessible to Twitter users who don't live in part of the Anglosphere (or Japan).
5amdotis 4y ago
TweetBot was the only Twitter experience that did not suck. Looking forward to Ivory :)
infogulch 4y ago
This would be a good incentive for paying $8 for Twitter Blue: you are allowed to use third party apps. It's the first mildly convincing reason to pay for Twitter that I've seen yet. Even better: access to use third party apps is a second tier that costs $10, and give $1 to the app maker. All the incentives are nicely lined up: the user won't choose to pay more if it's not worth it so the alternative app is guaranteed to offer some added value, the app maker gets paid for their efforts and is inclined to closely follow Twitter's increased rate of feature development so at least they don't fall behind and ideally innovate, Twitter gets value in not just a bit of extra money but also platform interaction experimentation which they can mine for good ideas to integrate back into the official client, they're inclined to make the API good, etc. I don't know how most people would take to this idea, but I like solutions where the incentives are all aligned. Am I missing something?
- tptacek 4y ago
  Isn't this one of the oldest discussions on Hacker News? Generally, I thought the reason you can't pay to use an arbitrary third party client on a locked-down service is that the most lucrative clients will disproportionately take advantage of that offer, which makes it hard to evolve the platform, and harder in the immediacy to monetize. I've only learned in the last few days how many ads Twitter has. I've never seen any of them, because I've never used the Twitter website, just Tweetbot. Also: after abruptly pulling the plug without explanation, I'm also pretty unlikely to shell out a dollar for it in the future. Certainly: Tapbots has no reason to invest in the platform anymore. The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    >The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter. I'm having a hard time seeing ActivityPub reach any kind of mass adaptation.
    - whateveracct 4y ago
      It doesn't have to. You don't need millions to be a good forum. You need the right 100s.
robga 4y ago
I’m surprised that acquisition isn’t part any strategy to constrain 3rd party apps. Acquiring the top few apps would soften the PR blow and retain users. It’d bring back on board some crack dev/product people who’ve already managed to create better apps than Twitter Corp was able to forge from it’s earlier acquired official app. The cost would have been nominal in the grand scheme (the devs would have had little choice but to acquiesce). It may yet happen. To me, that it hasn’t, we’ll this indicates the block is temporary, showing who’s boss before introducing a new rule like paid users only, or ad exposure. Either way, it’s an Emperor level decision. Would love to have seen the internal heat when the decision was mandated.
- padjo 4y ago
  Have twitter even confirmed that it was a decision yet and not just an availability incident?
  - _djo_ 4y ago
    Come on...
- nunez 4y ago
  Is it possible that they got acquisition offers in the past and rejected them?
wildpeaks 4y ago
If ads were really the issue, all he had to do is add the ads in the API. Instead, he caused free advertising for Tapbot's upcoming Mastodon client and pissed off power users who produce the free content the site relies on to sell ads. Thirdparty apps wouldn't exist if the official app was good enough.
- cbeach 4y ago
  Ad brokers and their clients are very sensitive about how their ads are displayed, and which content they appear next to. To allow arbitrary third party apps to decide this would not be a sensible business decision by Twitter.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    Twitter still controls the API: if there's content they don't want to appear next to ads, then can choose not to serve it.
    - cbeach 4y ago
      Third party apps decide how content is displayed, regardless of what comes out of the Twitter API. That's the problem for Twitter, from a business point of view.
      - wpietri 4y ago
        Is that much of a problem? Twitter's ad units aren't arbitrary. They sell things that look very much like tweets. It seems like it would be pretty easy for Twitter to insist that things get rendered the way they want or else. They could even provide library code for popular platforms to do that, as they have that already written.
        cbeach 4y ago
        I've seen ads on Twitter that render in a more sophisticated way than tweets. For example, they include buttons. Third party apps could implement this kind of thing, for sure. However, on an ongoing basis, Twitter would need to ensure that all third party apps had the latest ad presentation logic, and that they worked correctly, and none of the third party apps used sneaky tricks to hide the ads. After all, there's no benefit to the developers of the third-party app in hosting ads that benefit Twitter. It would quite costly and fiddly for Twitter to administrate this, and IMO, the benefits of a third-party app ecosystem don't really stack up from Twitter's PoV.
SilverBirch 4y ago
It almost seems like Elon Musk has forgotten about path dependency, which maybe makes sense since he other companies basically don't require you to think about path dependency, you build a new factory or design a new car or rocket. I think most people agree there's a problem for Twitter as a business that these third party apps exist. These apps sap Twitter's ad revenue, they become an intermediary between Twitter and it's highest value users. What happens, for instance, if one of these apps suddenly start mixing Facebook/Instagram/Mastodon into users feeds? Ouch! Also, it impacts how your new feature roll outs happen. So, you need to own the app that all your customers use. But you need an actual plan to get people to move from the third party app to the first party. You know, figure out why the third party apps are used, build some equivalent features and lure users back. Instead Elon Musk's plan is just "let's break that". Well ok, but you haven't actually managed to get people to come back to your first party app, you've just broken their experience of twitter. Well done, you've broken twitter for your most valuable users. Do you think, having broken the service with no notice at all, and with no viable app that they want to use, that they're going to use your first party app? No! They're just going to fucking leave! What do you think all those developers who were writing great twitter clients are going to do now? You could have hired them, you could have had them writing great twitter clients for you. No instead, you've forced them all to go off and write clients for your competitors social networks. This move has single handedly created the largest developer community for Mastodon. So yes, we're finally at the point where Twitter is best used through the first party app. We've achieved that by losing the majority of the high value users that you were worried about on the 3rd party app in the first place.
hnburnsy 4y ago
My Fritter client still works, wonder why. https://fritter.cc/ https://fritter.cc/

197 points by JdeBP 4y ago

Ironically, the best information about the status of TweetBot is on the FediVerse. Paul Haddad one of its developers has been posting at https://tapbots.social/@paul https://tapbots.social/@paul (directly followable as @paul@tapbots.social by FediVerse users). In an experiment on Sunday evening, M. Haddad switched out the Twitter API key used by TweetBot, which had already been disabled since Friday 2023-01-13, for an older one that it still possessed that had posting limits. People rushed to confirm that TweetBot was back, only to discover that they could only log in and read, not post. It was approximately 3 hours from then until that API key completely stopped working too, along with all of the other API keys that Tapbots had. The Twitter API itself is still present, but specific API keys used in several 3rd party apps have ceased functioning. No developer has received any word from Twitter at all about what is going on. However, unconfirmed rumour, reported on some WWW sites, had had it that internal communications within Twitter revealed that the disabling of the API keys for specific 3rd-party Twitter apps was intentional, and that Twitter staff had yet to work out how to announce this publicly. M. Haddad took the disabling of the other API keys once they were put into use as confirmation that this rumour was indeed accurate, that this was not an accident or just some bug that would be fixed, but a deliberately targetted move. This combines with other developments. 3rd party apps could show chronological Twitter timelines, and skip advertisements. The chronological timeline has this same weekend been removed from the Twitter WWW interface and 1st-party app, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the same day that the 3rd party apps stopped working Twitter offered advertisers halved advertising rates if they paid for a blitz of up to $250,000 worth of advertising to Twitter users that must run before 2023-02-28. * https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-offers-free-ads-brands-that-advertise-its-platform-wsj-2023-01-14/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-offers-free-ads-b... Effectively, Twitter is now marketing itself as distinct from the FediVerse, with no 3rd party apps (the FediVerse having several each for iOS and Android, including one in development by Tapbots), an advertising blitz with user attention being sold to advertisers and those who pay Twitter as the funding model (with many FediVerse instances opting for a user-funded or coöperatively-funded model, with organizations that wish an "official" presence funding their own instances for hosting official staff accounts, as Tapbots itself does, and advertisements being banned), and only algorithmic timelines (chronological timelines being the only option in most FediVerse WWW interfaces and apps). Several users who have disabled their accounts in response to the loss of TweetBot, deleting and archiving all posts, marking the accounts private, and unfollowing everyone, have also reported (in various FediVerse posts) upon checking back that their accounts have had followers re-added to them by Twitter itself. * https://mastodon.scot/@bodhipaksa/109694529674624449 https://mastodon.scot/@bodhipaksa/109694529674624449 Unfollowing everyone ensures both that the accounts do not accumulate notifications and concomitant junk e-mail, and that follower counts accurately reflect the real reduced Twitter effectiveness to those others that remain using it. Many (not just Charles Stross) have also stressed the importance of not deleting accounts, and occasional dummy keep-alive posts, in order to prevent impersonation of long-standing public identities. Anecdotal reports over the weekend have already stated much reduced views of Tweets made by those without paid-for accounts, because of the switch to non-chronological viewability only, favouring advertisers and the posts of those who have paid Twitter for accounts. Not paying Twitter is, by those reports, to be no longer read, as much if even at all.

cptroot 4y ago
Thanks for the heads up that chronological timeline is getting disabled. I've disabled auto-updates for the Android app in the hopes that I can keep it for just a little bit longer. We'll see whether that works in the face of Musk's determination to make Twitter profitable.
- TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
  I don't think chronological timeline is going away though, it's still there on the Mobile Web version at least. There's two tabs: For You and Following. For You is the recommendation timeline and Following is chronological.
  - MattDemers 4y ago
    But unfortunately (unlike before) you can't default to "Following." You're defaulted to the "For You" tab on every hard-load, or app open (following a close) and you have to click or swipe over. At least before you could click that "Home" icon and switch to "Latest" and it would reasonably stick. I gave Twitter a lot more leeway than I should've through all this due to network effect and intertia, and I regret that a lot. When this "For You"/"Following" thing happened I actively went back to Echofon and Tweetbot, and was planning to make a subscription just to avoid what I was seeing on the first-party app/website. And now I can't even do that. Wouldn't be surprised if Tweetdeck is forced to move over to the "new" Tweetdeck (which is just a wrapper for the web experience) soon.
- tag2103 4y ago
  The Chronological timeline is now more obvious on the WWW. I had that as my default before and with the new UI I default into the new "following" tab.
ncallaway 4y ago
> The chronological timeline has this same weekend been removed from the Twitter WWW interface and 1st-party app Well, I left a bit ago, but if I hadn't that would be the end for me. That's the only view I used on Twitter, and found the non-chronological timeline to have almost no value at all. Definitely haven't regretted my decision to leave, but that decision is such a strong reinforcement of that decision.

JdeBP 4y ago

M. Haddad has also discussed a current problem. Users have current subscriptions to TweetBot and face repeat subscription charges at their app store. Migrating those users with time left on their subscriptions (and who want it) to Ivory, the in-development app from Tapbots for the FediVerse, requires an update to TweetBot. However, app stores will not accept an updated app when that app is rendered non-functional by Twitter. * https://tapbots.social/@paul/109691075588560655 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109691075588560655 Twitter has left 3rd-party vendors with no sunset period, or ability to deal with their customers gracefully, directly impacting not only their apps but their revenue. It is as yet unknown how amenable to 3rd-party Twitter app vendors the app store owners for iOS and Android will be.

retox 4y ago
Did the developer have any special agreement or contract with Twitter that the API would always be available? If not it sounds like an unacceptable professional risk to base your livelihood on the whims of another entity.
- george_perez 4y ago
  Not sure about special agreements or contracts, but Tweetbot along with other high-profile third-party apps (like Twitterrific) had way, way more API tokens available because of their size when Twitter started restricting the number of API tokens an app could have assigned for the lifetime of the app. API tokens for new apps were way more limited, around 10,000 I believe. Tweetbot and Twitterrific, while they never disclosed how many tokens they were given as legacy apps, were still to this day accepting new users, so the number seems to be way more than 10,000. And they had access to a less limited API (request-wise) to make their app work better without constant rate limiting nags.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- braingenious 4y ago
  Watching some sad failed poster-bro turned forced admin setting fire to the functionality of his dumb website “Hmm… it is actually the people that have created value for the site by driving engagement that are the true idiots”

nlitened 4y ago

Imagine TweetBot and Twitterrific just silently became dual Twitter/Mastodon clients, automatically following Mastodon accounts that are followed on Twitter, and when Twitter API is unavailable, customers don't notice a thing.

bushbaba 4y ago
More likely is a shift to have news updates through instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
ilikehurdles 4y ago
The customers would notice because with mastodon the apps would actually fetch content.
LeoPanthera 4y ago
A Mastodon version of TweetBot is already in development, and nearly finished. It's called "Ivory". https://tapbots.com/ivory/ https://tapbots.com/ivory/
saurik 4y ago
They'd notice because the people they were following would change, as not everyone on Twitter is on Mastodon.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Nah, it's just "the algorithm" deciding who to show you like any ad-social site. Sheer coincidence it decides to show you the sort of folks that might try Mastodon. ;-)
foogazi 4y ago
Would have been nice to see - silently gathering mastodon links of all your follows and building a twitter alt As it is these clients only fed off the main twitter api and when that was turned off it errors out

blackoil 4y ago

Did these app had any revenue sharing / paid APIs with twitter or were they using free public APIs?

adventurer 4y ago
I can confirm at least some of the free apis are still in working order. Twitter started to throw an error yesterday afternoon that my app. wasn’t in a project but I was able to resolve it.
tag2103 4y ago
If there were rev sharing / paid you'd be hearing about lawsuits already. Lack of lawsuits tells me the freebie got cut off.
numpad0 4y ago
Most of them were ad-less free apps that offered authenticated access to free APIs, so pure costs to Twitter, but Twitter hadn't been able to shut them down due to feature deficiencies in official apps.

lumb63 4y ago

It never occurred to me how strange it is that a company providing people an online socialization medium prioritized non-human entities’ abilities to use their platform.

reiichiroh 4y ago
Humans use third party clients

dr_kretyn 4y ago

[flagged]

jupp0r 4y ago
ChatGPT can tell you all about it
- kerbs 4y ago
  lmcpgtfy
skiddo 4y ago
A niche 3rd-party twitter client with a vocal following. The app was effectively the only way I consumed twitter (at least on mobile) since ~2010. While not the most feature rich twitter client, I enjoyed the clean interface and most importantly - the ability to sort tweets chronologically.
masklinn 4y ago
Tweetbot is a third-party twitter client. You see it mentioned on HN “twice within a day” because it’s likely one of the more popular twitter client, and it’s one of the client which got hit by twitter deactivating api keys unilaterally and without warning or communication.
scarface74 4y ago
If only there were a method to search for that type of information…

AlexandrB 4y ago

I wonder if commenters who thought that Musk would usher in an era of freedom and an end to bad design choices at Twitter are eating crow about now. It seems like the previous executive team was walking a tightrope of satisfying several competing interests, whereas the current leadership has gone all-in on monetizing to the maximum extent possible.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dylan604 4y ago
Not one thing that Musk had done prior to his purchase of Twitter ever suggested to me that he would do anything but exactly what he's doing @Twitter. Everything about him suggested "freedom for me (and my ilk), but not for thee" would be how things would proceed. Which flavor of kool-aid do I need to drink before I see Musk as the great savior instead the person I see now?
- jacooper 4y ago
  > Which flavor of kool-aid do I need to drink before I see Musk as the great savior instead the person I see now? Presumably buying a Tesla and believing that its the best car in the world, also that Elon musk did everything alone and he's the reason Tesla exists(not true, elon didn't create Tesla).
- lemon_bottle 4y ago
  >> Which flavor of kool-aid do I need to drink before I see Musk as the great savior instead the person I see now? The things he said about freedom of speech ("free speech absolutism", etc.) made a great impact on people. To be fair, there was also some merit in that narrative as censorship was indeed happening in Twitter 1.0. It's quite easy for a commoner or pleb to think that Elon Musk is single handedly taking on the "mighty establishment" on behalf of the common people. The "Modern day Robin Hood" is a kool-aide stereotype which isn't easy to shake off and Elon seems to have been successful so far in that narrative pitch.

bobleeswagger 4y ago

[flagged]

wodenokoto 4y ago

Is it my English that is off, or does "per developer" imply that the developer asked for the keys to be disabled (which isn't the case)

ironmagma 4y ago
It's ambiguous. Could be "per developer's account of the story" or "per developer's request" here although the latter is much more common.
- JdeBP 4y ago
  There are only so many characters allowed in a Hacker News title. (-: But just following the hyperlink makes it abundantly clear.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
lynndotpy 4y ago
I think "per developer" means "according to the developer" in this context.
MereInterest 4y ago
It's a rather funky phrasing, and I don't think it's an issue with your English. "per" is usually used to mean "in accordance with". So, "per your request" means "in accordance with with your request". It looks the submitter was trying to use "per developer" to mean "according to the developer". While "according to" and "in accordance with" are synonymous when meaning that two things are in agreement, I wouldn't use "in accordance with" or "per" to mean "as told by".
- caf 4y ago
  The use of 'per' to mean 'as told by' is fairly common, though like many things in the language it may be highly regional?

zeroCalories 4y ago

This sucks, but I don't find it surprising when many of these third party clients are hostile to Twitter. No ads, taking UX out of Twitter's control, and promoting other backbends. It's not clear to me that it benefits Twitter to support these clients.

pontilanda 4y ago
Content. If your platform sucks, power users can hang around, using power tools. This isn't so much of a problem on Twitter as much as Reddit, though. Their native experience is okay (it's just the users that are insufferable)
- zeroCalories 4y ago
  Sure, if the number of power users is low, not increasing, and these power users drive a lot of engagement. I suspect that at least one of the above is not true. Also you should rethink your life if you consider yourself a Twitter/Reddit power user.
  - pontilanda 4y ago
    > Also you should rethink your life if you consider yourself a Twitter/Reddit power user. I'm not, but people can make money on those platforms nowadays, so don't be so judgmental.
jakelazaroff 4y ago
The Twitter API doesn’t give them the ads. They literally can’t display them. As for the UX thing — Twitter owes a huge amount of its own UX to third-party clients. Hell, Twitter’s own iOS client was originally a third-party client they acquired called Tweetie. The developer of Twitteriffic made a list of all the things they pioneered for Twitter: https://furbo.org/2011/03/11/twitterrific-firsts/ https://furbo.org/2011/03/11/twitterrific-firsts/
- zeroCalories 4y ago

ehPReth 4y ago

I wonder what would happen (technically, legally, etc) if TweetBot et. al started using one of Twitter's api keys for its apps? AIUI they're all embedded in their respective apps... https://gist.github.com/shobotch/5160017 https://gist.github.com/shobotch/5160017

SilverBirch 4y ago
I suspect that the first thing would be a simple legal letter saying "Cease and desist". The second would be a lawsuit. And via side channels Twitter could probably prod the US government to go after the apps for breaking some hacking law, and would almost certainly just ping Apple to take them down too.

jdminhbg 4y ago

It’s kind of insane that the third-party client situation lasted the way it did for so long. Twitter subsidized someone else’s paid app, that didn’t show any of Twitter’s ads, for free, for years. I exclusively used Tweetbot, and checking out the first-party clients this weekend confirms to me that they’re still pretty bad. But I knew that eventually this day was coming. Twitter never made properly supporting third party clients a priority, by either finding a way to charge for access or finding a way to ensure ads were in the feeds. It couldn’t keep going the way it was, and obviously Elon has no interest in devoting any time/attention to it.

fishywang 4y ago
>Twitter subsidized someone else’s paid app, that didn’t show any of Twitter’s ads, for free, for years. That's one way to put it. The other side is those third-party apps brought Twitter users for years.
- fabianfabian 4y ago
  How? Can you even sign up in third-party apps? Those third-party app users were already Twitter users before. Maybe you meant they wouldn't remain Twitter users because they can't tolerate the default app experience?
  - saurik 4y ago
    Is it impossibly surprising that someone might only bother to use the normal app for the purpose of signing up for the service so they can use another app they heard of? Think of recent versions of Internet Explorer: "what is my purpose?" "you install Chrome." (But, yeah: I'd say that it isn't even quite about maintaining the user but the extent to which they continue to engage; like, the user might still be a user, but are they someone who spends the entire day using the app? A number of these alternative clients were what were being used by teams of people to be able to manage the really complex/important accounts.)
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    [flagged]

diebeforei485 4y ago

From a business standpoint I haven't understood why third party clients that don't show ads were ever a good idea for Twitter. It would be reasonable if- (1) Third party clients showed all ads; and (2) The user was subscribed to Twitter Blue

ascagnel_ 4y ago
Twitter never fed third-party apps ads. Part of why this decision is so questionable is because there were numerous ways Twitter could have monetized these apps more directly, yet never attempted to do so.
rsynnott 4y ago
Most Twitter users don't use a third party client, but anyone who's anyone uses a third party client, and most of Twitter's features (retweets, quote tweets, pull to refresh, the use of a bird, the use of the word tweet....) were invented by third party apps. If Twitter wants to be... like, a really bad instagram clone, leaning into the following celebrities thing all the way, then this... maybe works?
- diebeforei485 4y ago
  > anyone who's anyone uses a third party client In other words, the people who are most lucrative to advertise to are not seeing any ads, and are not paying Twitter for the privilege of an ad-free experience.

rc_mob 4y ago

[flagged]

dang 4y ago

Recent and related: The Shit Show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 - Jan 2023 (264 comments)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

geuis 4y ago

This is my final straw. I've had active accounts since 2009. Never had a super active presence, but it's been an incredibly useful tool for communicating support and user outreach. I just announced that I will be deactivating my accounts. In particular, for https://jsonip.com https://jsonip.com I will be setting up a new status endpoint that's also reflected on https://getjsonip.com https://getjsonip.com. Direct contact will be through charles@getjsonip.com. I just can't abide this blatant behavior of firing thousands of people and arbitrarily disabling access keys for various client apps with absolutely no prior notification. Not sure if I should make a post on HN about the change for jsonip.com or not. I have a lot of users but don't know if there enough here to justify a post.

dang 4y ago

Url changed from https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004, which points to this.

JdeBP 4y ago
No, it's the other way around. The article from The Verge that you substituted points to and is based upon (after it was updated) the original source post by Paul Haddad that I gave, which didn't point to anything. Notice that the post referenced is the one in the large font, not the one at the top. (-:
- pvg 4y ago
  It's sort of circular now with the posts pointing to each other. The verge one is probably the better summary and has more context, at this point.
  - JdeBP 4y ago
    They do not point to each other. M. Haddad's previous post point to The Verge. The post that I hyperlinked to came afterwards, and The Verge points to it. It does not point to anything.
    - pvg 4y ago
      Your original link https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 has 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... at the top which in turn links to your original link https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 near the top. They cross-link regardless of the circumstances/sequence of events that led them to cross-linking.
      - JdeBP 4y ago
        No, that is https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695455993367527 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695455993367527, which is the preceding post. Unlike Hacker News, Mastodon makes the post linked-to by the URL have a different background and a larger font. And https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 https://tapbots.social/@paul/109695822047176004 is very clearly a post that contains no hyperlink at all. That's because it was posted before The Verge then went back and edited its article.

mesh 4y ago

I wonder if Twitter considered charging users of third party apps to be able to use them? i.e. in order to access Twitter via a third party app, you have to pay a monthly subscription to twitter. I know Twitter has discussed subscriptions, and this seems like a way to leverage the value of third party apps to directly drive revenue. Maybe even give the third party app developers a cut. Then you have a situation where your developer ecosystem has incentives to drive usage and revenue for you.

rvz 4y ago
> I wonder if Twitter considered charging users of third party apps to be able to use them? i.e. in order to access Twitter via a third party app, you have to pay a monthly subscription to twitter. Or even better, third-party developers pay for an API key set on a subscription plan to use the Twitter API in their apps, which makes sense and is a win-win-win for Twitter, third-party developers and users.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  That'd at least be accessible to Twitter users who don't live in part of the Anglosphere (or Japan).

5amdotis 4y ago

TweetBot was the only Twitter experience that did not suck. Looking forward to Ivory :)

infogulch 4y ago

This would be a good incentive for paying $8 for Twitter Blue: you are allowed to use third party apps. It's the first mildly convincing reason to pay for Twitter that I've seen yet. Even better: access to use third party apps is a second tier that costs $10, and give $1 to the app maker. All the incentives are nicely lined up: the user won't choose to pay more if it's not worth it so the alternative app is guaranteed to offer some added value, the app maker gets paid for their efforts and is inclined to closely follow Twitter's increased rate of feature development so at least they don't fall behind and ideally innovate, Twitter gets value in not just a bit of extra money but also platform interaction experimentation which they can mine for good ideas to integrate back into the official client, they're inclined to make the API good, etc. I don't know how most people would take to this idea, but I like solutions where the incentives are all aligned. Am I missing something?

tptacek 4y ago
Isn't this one of the oldest discussions on Hacker News? Generally, I thought the reason you can't pay to use an arbitrary third party client on a locked-down service is that the most lucrative clients will disproportionately take advantage of that offer, which makes it hard to evolve the platform, and harder in the immediacy to monetize. I've only learned in the last few days how many ads Twitter has. I've never seen any of them, because I've never used the Twitter website, just Tweetbot. Also: after abruptly pulling the plug without explanation, I'm also pretty unlikely to shell out a dollar for it in the future. Certainly: Tapbots has no reason to invest in the platform anymore. The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  >The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter. I'm having a hard time seeing ActivityPub reach any kind of mass adaptation.
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    It doesn't have to. You don't need millions to be a good forum. You need the right 100s.

robga 4y ago

I’m surprised that acquisition isn’t part any strategy to constrain 3rd party apps. Acquiring the top few apps would soften the PR blow and retain users. It’d bring back on board some crack dev/product people who’ve already managed to create better apps than Twitter Corp was able to forge from it’s earlier acquired official app. The cost would have been nominal in the grand scheme (the devs would have had little choice but to acquiesce). It may yet happen. To me, that it hasn’t, we’ll this indicates the block is temporary, showing who’s boss before introducing a new rule like paid users only, or ad exposure. Either way, it’s an Emperor level decision. Would love to have seen the internal heat when the decision was mandated.

padjo 4y ago
Have twitter even confirmed that it was a decision yet and not just an availability incident?
- _djo_ 4y ago
  Come on...
nunez 4y ago
Is it possible that they got acquisition offers in the past and rejected them?

wildpeaks 4y ago

If ads were really the issue, all he had to do is add the ads in the API. Instead, he caused free advertising for Tapbot's upcoming Mastodon client and pissed off power users who produce the free content the site relies on to sell ads. Thirdparty apps wouldn't exist if the official app was good enough.

cbeach 4y ago
Ad brokers and their clients are very sensitive about how their ads are displayed, and which content they appear next to. To allow arbitrary third party apps to decide this would not be a sensible business decision by Twitter.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  Twitter still controls the API: if there's content they don't want to appear next to ads, then can choose not to serve it.
  - cbeach 4y ago
    Third party apps decide how content is displayed, regardless of what comes out of the Twitter API. That's the problem for Twitter, from a business point of view.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Is that much of a problem? Twitter's ad units aren't arbitrary. They sell things that look very much like tweets. It seems like it would be pretty easy for Twitter to insist that things get rendered the way they want or else. They could even provide library code for popular platforms to do that, as they have that already written.
      - cbeach 4y ago
        I've seen ads on Twitter that render in a more sophisticated way than tweets. For example, they include buttons. Third party apps could implement this kind of thing, for sure. However, on an ongoing basis, Twitter would need to ensure that all third party apps had the latest ad presentation logic, and that they worked correctly, and none of the third party apps used sneaky tricks to hide the ads. After all, there's no benefit to the developers of the third-party app in hosting ads that benefit Twitter. It would quite costly and fiddly for Twitter to administrate this, and IMO, the benefits of a third-party app ecosystem don't really stack up from Twitter's PoV.

SilverBirch 4y ago

It almost seems like Elon Musk has forgotten about path dependency, which maybe makes sense since he other companies basically don't require you to think about path dependency, you build a new factory or design a new car or rocket. I think most people agree there's a problem for Twitter as a business that these third party apps exist. These apps sap Twitter's ad revenue, they become an intermediary between Twitter and it's highest value users. What happens, for instance, if one of these apps suddenly start mixing Facebook/Instagram/Mastodon into users feeds? Ouch! Also, it impacts how your new feature roll outs happen. So, you need to own the app that all your customers use. But you need an actual plan to get people to move from the third party app to the first party. You know, figure out why the third party apps are used, build some equivalent features and lure users back. Instead Elon Musk's plan is just "let's break that". Well ok, but you haven't actually managed to get people to come back to your first party app, you've just broken their experience of twitter. Well done, you've broken twitter for your most valuable users. Do you think, having broken the service with no notice at all, and with no viable app that they want to use, that they're going to use your first party app? No! They're just going to fucking leave! What do you think all those developers who were writing great twitter clients are going to do now? You could have hired them, you could have had them writing great twitter clients for you. No instead, you've forced them all to go off and write clients for your competitors social networks. This move has single handedly created the largest developer community for Mastodon. So yes, we're finally at the point where Twitter is best used through the first party app. We've achieved that by losing the majority of the high value users that you were worried about on the 3rd party app in the first place.

hnburnsy 4y ago

My Fritter client still works, wonder why. https://fritter.cc/ https://fritter.cc/