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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 promot

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
  None of those matter. There are plenty of good reasons why Twitter might not be comfortable giving ads as an API, and that means they're giving away their resources for free by providing these APIs. Also, Twitter is a more mature platform now. They probably don't feel like they need the innovation from these apps anymore. But that misses the point, small changes like the view count on tweets are added to improve engagement / profit, so Twitter wants full control of what is seen. Again, it probably does not help Twitter to support these people, even if they are a small part of the user base. Same mindset as banning competitor links in your bio.
  - jakelazaroff 4y ago
    You said “many of these third-party clients are hostile to Twitter”, and gave these as examples. If none of them matter, why did you mention them in the first place?

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
None of those matter. There are plenty of good reasons why Twitter might not be comfortable giving ads as an API, and that means they're giving away their resources for free by providing these APIs. Also, Twitter is a more mature platform now. They probably don't feel like they need the innovation from these apps anymore. But that misses the point, small changes like the view count on tweets are added to improve engagement / profit, so Twitter wants full control of what is seen. Again, it probably does not help Twitter to support these people, even if they are a small part of the user base. Same mindset as banning competitor links in your bio.
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  You said “many of these third-party clients are hostile to Twitter”, and gave these as examples. If none of them matter, why did you mention them in the first place?