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The moment Musk acquired Twitter they should've known this would happen. The guy doesn't care about anyone except himself.

philliphaydon 4y ago
To be fair you could argue the same for 3rd parties. Twitter may have grown cos of 3rd party apps but it would die to 3rd party apps too if it can’t make money.
- Fnoord 4y ago
  Sure, you could argue that, but... Without API we go back to web scraping, Selenium, etc. Now guess which method is more expensive for any company (including Twitter)? Web scraping. Its the entire reason an API started to exist in the first place. Besides, if there is authentication involved, the user is logged in, and API calls can be profiled. So I would say to your statement: "Definitely not." Only on the short term. And those users you lose you might be able to write off as dead weight or leeches but if a couple of big fish will have impact on the power of the network effect. And once that is reduced, the domino effect might take place.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
spatulon 4y ago
Musk might care if this move drives all the influential power users away. I'm not influential – I almost never tweet and have almost no followers – but I've read Twitter almost every day for the last 15 years. If I can't use Tweetbot, I'm just going to stop using Twitter. The official client and the website are just not usable for me. Sure, they haven't been getting any ad revenue from me using a third-party client, so they won't miss me, but they never even attempted to provide those ads to the third-party clients.
- ctvo 4y ago
  > If I can't use Tweetbot, I'm just going to stop using Twitter. The official client and the website are just not usable for me. This is the situation for me. I haven't been on the platform since this disruption.
unity1001 4y ago
This happened before Musk. Twitter decided to 'pivot' to 'enterprise users' to sell 'influencer data' to them. They suddenly shut down their api and changed their api pages to some b2b sales pitch. You couldnt even open an account without giving them excrutiating detail about the size of your enterprise and how big you were (there were poll questions to pass before signing up). When they noticed that they killed their developer base, they started a mailing campaign saying something like 'We love developers' (cringe). But by that time it was done and gone. Again - this happened before Musk.

philliphaydon 4y ago

To be fair you could argue the same for 3rd parties. Twitter may have grown cos of 3rd party apps but it would die to 3rd party apps too if it can’t make money.

Fnoord 4y ago
Sure, you could argue that, but... Without API we go back to web scraping, Selenium, etc. Now guess which method is more expensive for any company (including Twitter)? Web scraping. Its the entire reason an API started to exist in the first place. Besides, if there is authentication involved, the user is logged in, and API calls can be profiled. So I would say to your statement: "Definitely not." Only on the short term. And those users you lose you might be able to write off as dead weight or leeches but if a couple of big fish will have impact on the power of the network effect. And once that is reduced, the domino effect might take place.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

spatulon 4y ago

Musk might care if this move drives all the influential power users away. I'm not influential – I almost never tweet and have almost no followers – but I've read Twitter almost every day for the last 15 years. If I can't use Tweetbot, I'm just going to stop using Twitter. The official client and the website are just not usable for me. Sure, they haven't been getting any ad revenue from me using a third-party client, so they won't miss me, but they never even attempted to provide those ads to the third-party clients.

ctvo 4y ago
> If I can't use Tweetbot, I'm just going to stop using Twitter. The official client and the website are just not usable for me. This is the situation for me. I haven't been on the platform since this disruption.

unity1001 4y ago

This happened before Musk. Twitter decided to 'pivot' to 'enterprise users' to sell 'influencer data' to them. They suddenly shut down their api and changed their api pages to some b2b sales pitch. You couldnt even open an account without giving them excrutiating detail about the size of your enterprise and how big you were (there were poll questions to pass before signing up). When they noticed that they killed their developer base, they started a mailing campaign saying something like 'We love developers' (cringe). But by that time it was done and gone. Again - this happened before Musk.