18 ms·

Twitterrific has been discontinued

505 points by erickhill 4y ago

yokoprime 4y ago
Wonder if they will use some of the IP they've built up to move into the Mastodon Client space. While there is already a nice crop of Mastodon clients, it seems like there is no dominant 3rd party client yet.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  That is exactly what Tapbots has done with Ivory - Taking Tweetbot and using that as the basis for a Mastodon client. I've been using it for the past few weeks and it's fantastic https://tapbots.com/ivory https://tapbots.com/ivory
  - josh64 4y ago
    Honest question - I've been using Ivory for the past week but it doesn't seem to do anything that Metatext or the Mastodon app didn't already do. What's so fantastic about Ivory? I feel like I'm missing something because everyone speaks so highly of Ivory. Thanks!
    - madeofpalk 4y ago
      I haven’t used those apps, but I figure it doesn’t do anything those apps don’t do. I just prefer Ivory’s UI. For me, it’s a nicer app to use.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      In my case, I've got years worth of Tweetbot muscle memory. Using different clients is... a little rough right now.
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      > Metatext I do like Metatext but development is paused (repo is archived) - and notifications appear to have stopped working. I'll probably end up back on Toot! at some point. (Tried building my own version from the repo but it breaks for some reason and I'm not an iOS dev who can figure out why.)
      - josh64 4y ago
        I'll have a go at building it and if I'm successful I'll let you know. I honestly thought a proper fork would have started by now but that is not the case.
    - amatecha 4y ago
      I think posting an "Unlisted" toot was one of them, though I could be wrong. I don't have the official app nor Ivory to check this.
samwillis 4y ago
There was a quite moving exchange between Twitterrific and a customer earlier: > Customer: This makes me so sad. Your iPhone app allowed me as a blind person to use Twitter so much better than the app that they themselves produce. Sorry for the hostility you are receiving from them, but know that you are appreciated for the hard work you’ve done. > Twitterrific: Maybe the best thing anyone's ever told us. Thank you for this, truly. It is everything. Please take care. https://mobile.twitter.com/RustyHilliard77/status/1616174474029862912 https://mobile.twitter.com/RustyHilliard77/status/1616174474...
- barbazoo 4y ago
  That's heartbreaking
- pavlov 4y ago
  The problem facing Twitter 2.0 is that Musk is personally driving product development and he has essentially no empathy for users. Can you blame him? He hasn’t needed it until now. His companies either specialize in binary-outcome engineering challenges (rocket flies/explodes) or products where Musk himself is the user, like a kid designing his own toys (and calling them “S/3/X/Y”). Turns out that a lot of people want to drive the car that he wants to drive himself, so he probably thinks this impeccable taste applies to any kind of product. But Twitter, unlike a car, is used by hundreds of millions of people in thousands of completely different ways. He has no idea of what the experience is like for someone with only a handful of followers, or blind, or trans, or Algerian, or retired, a teenage girl, a suicidal anorexic, etc. etc. — and he doesn’t seem at all interested in trying to understand.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    Yes, I can blame him. It was reasonably obvious to other people - those who have and have not ran a rocket company - that running Twitter is different to running Tesla. If you’re blindsided by your own ego, it’s your fault and you’re to blame.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    > he has essentially no empathy for users Mindreading much?
_justinfunk 4y ago
Are there any open-source options where I can have a non-algorithmic timeline with my own API key?
- skrause 4y ago
  Mastodon.
- unpopularopp 4y ago
  Well you can get the linear non-algorithmic timeline in the official mobile app, works perfectly for the time being
  - MBCook 4y ago
    On the web too. Plus you can use extensions to block ads, promoted junk, suggestions on who to follow, etc. But none of it holds a candle to TweetBot or Twitterific.
    - mjmsmith 4y ago
      If you're on iOS/macOS, the developer of Tweaks for Twitter [1] has been keeping up with recent downgrades to the web UI. The version released today will hide the For You tab and always show the Following tab (plus blocking ads / promoted tweets etc etc). no connection / satisfied user [1] https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/ https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/
      - MBCook 4y ago
        That’s exactly what I’ve started using. The website is almost sort-of usable with it.
  - lukaszkorecki 4y ago
    It's almost acceptable, except that there's no timeline sync between clients - personally for me it's a pretty big dealbreaker
- 4y ago
schnebbau 4y ago
> we would ask you to please consider not requesting a refund from Apple If I pay for something and don't get the promised value why should I be the one who eats it? This is going to hurt the dev but that's business and I'm sure their bank balance is doing just fine. Appealing to the users like this feels unfair.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  So you'd try to get a refund on your beach vacation if it rained?
  - mads 4y ago
    Well, if he was promised 100% sunshine, he might.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - sgarrity 4y ago
    This feels a bit more like the power & water was cut off to the beach house, but I like taking metaphors one step to far.
    - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
      The basic point is that no-one pays for a Twitter client expecting it to keep working if (say) Twitter closes down or pivots into a rideshare company or decides to close down third-party access to the platform. On any reasonable viewpoint that's a risk accepted by the purchaser, not the app seller.
      - esskay 4y ago
        If you bought a 12 month subscription to Netflix and they closed down next week are you honestly saying you wouldn't be asking for a refund? It doesn't matter that its an app for Twitter, you've paid for someone to provide something they can no longer deliver.
saurik 4y ago
I maintain the position I have had ever since Twitter sold people on the ridiculous idea of "API keys": the correct path has always been adversarial interoperability (as we did back forever ago when people built alternative apps for instant messaging services); if Twitterrific had been designed to use the same API and authority as the official app--maybe as a fallback, if nothing else--Twitter would not have been easily able to kill it... they could try, but it would be a cat and mouse game at best, and the only real recourse they would have would have been to try to detect API abnormalities (which Twitterific could quickly fix, and frankly the skeleton crew at Twitter today likely couldn't do well anyway) to directly punish the end users for continuing to insist on logging in with alternative clients (as Snapchat is forced to do); and, while it is easy to just shut off Twitterific's API key and tell the users "too bad", I think having to take the war to Twitterific's userbase (as the app would be able to keep working forever, with only momentary brownouts) would be a tougher pill for Twitter to swallow, given that it had way too much marketshare at this point.
- placatedmayhem 4y ago
  I don't know the specifics about Twitter's API saga over the years but... why isn't this the case? Why does Twitter need to be involved on the client side with consumption of the API?
  - vkou 4y ago
    > Why does Twitter need to be involved on the client side with consumption of the API? They don't need to be involved, they want to be involved, and they have the legal backing to do so.
    - saurik 4y ago
      Can you provide any citation for them having "legal backing"? I literally participate in hearings at the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress over people providing adversarial interoperability and I have never seen any functional legal argument against such.
baxtr 4y ago
This is absolutely humiliating for these 3rd party people. Twitter shows no respect whatsoever for these devs. You wanna shut them down to show more ads? Fine. But at least communicate and let them know upfront. What a sh*t show.
- bachmeier 4y ago
  > Twitter shows no respect whatsoever for these devs. Or for the users of those apps.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    Or the workers
  - tazjin 4y ago
    There's probably a distorted view there where the percentage of overall users using third-party clients is absolutely minuscule, but if you look at the percentage of content _creators_ it's much larger. At least I remember reading it was like that around the time that I stopped using Twitter a few years ago.
    - TillE 4y ago
      Pretty much everyone who does this stuff for a job (social media managers, etc) is using third-party clients.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
      For a couple people in my social network this was the final straw. They're gone now and will never come back.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Or for the users of those apps Is this the sound of nails hammering into Twitter Blue's coffin? An obvious premium feature would have been API tokens.
madeofpalk 4y ago
It's hard to overstate how much of an impact third party twitter clients have had on Twitter and the broader mobile landscape - like the post mentions, the word 'Tweet' and blue bird twitter icon came from third party clients! The Tweetie app invented pull-to-refresh, used by every (both) mobile operating systems.
- masklinn 4y ago
  Yeah original twitter allowed an explosion of creativity (both in style and interaction) around clients, due to its simple data and interaction model.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Tweetie even got bought and turned into the official client.
  - radicalbyte 4y ago
    TweetDeck too as the official power-user web-client. At the time I thought of building a client but the dependence on Twitter seemed like a huge risk. More fool me though given that those companies were taken over for a decent amount.
    - endgame 4y ago
      You were right though, just not on the time-scale that you assumed at the time.
- toss1 4y ago
  Yup! Also hard to overstate the impact the new ownership has had, such that their assessment is now: >>"...an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer." This, from people that partnered with Twitter for a decade++ The new owner had a lot of us, me included, fooled into thinking he was intelligent and trustworthy. Now, it is obvious he's neither. Wealth reveals character, and it is sad to see that that character is so rotten.
ceejayoz 4y ago
> We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer. They just documented it. Another after-the-fact policy like @elonjet got. https://www.engadget.com/twitter-new-developer-terms-ban-third-party-clients-211247096.html https://www.engadget.com/twitter-new-developer-terms-ban-thi... "The 'restrictions' section of Twitter’s developer agreement was updated Thursday with a clause banning 'use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.' The addition is the only substantive change to the 5,000-word agreement." Anyone with a shred of empathy would've given devs advance notice of "we're destroying your business".
- minimaxir 4y ago
  "long-standing API rules" indeed.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Let's hope Twitter puts the time machine up for auction (https://www.npr.org/2023/01/18/1149731084/twitter-office-supplies-auction-online https://www.npr.org/2023/01/18/1149731084/twitter-office-sup...) someday.
  - TillE 4y ago
    It's notable how that statement was just an absolute, unequivocal lie. Most companies don't do that! https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1615405842735714304 https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1615405842735714304
    - minimaxir 4y ago
      There is a conspiracy theory that Elon himself wrote that tweet, which IMO tracks.
      - rideontime 4y ago
perardi 4y ago
Twitterrific, and a lot of these early iOS clients, really helped defined the Twitter service, and even more so, our interface idioms for mobile apps. Right from the bird’s mouth, which by the way, they created, not Twitter… “Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world!” And “pull-to-refresh”? Tweetie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh
- selykg 4y ago
  Tweetie was a great app. That was the last time I was really actually "interested" in Twitter. It was all sort of downhill for me. But I remember pull to refresh being an absolutely mind bending feature at the time. It just felt natural.
  - MattRix 4y ago
    For some additional info, Twitter acquired Tweetie and turned it into the official Twitter iOS app.
- dusing 4y ago
  I agree, but it is 2023 now, it’s not super important how Twitter was founded.
  - amatecha 4y ago
    Uhhh... I mean, the events that came before are what led to where we are today, so it's pretty worthwhile to understand the history of software, tech, and humanity for that matter. This colossal breadth of tech we're using every day has been a development of centuries, and Twitter and its development is a piece of that. Dismissing that history is a disservice to our community and to our future. Yeah, where a feature came from is not of news-headline importance, but it's relevant to us and our understanding of how software and services evolve over time, with involvement from their community of users and fellow industry members.
pvg 4y ago
[flagged]
- rideontime 4y ago
  a couple of days ago? it says "one hour ago"... wait, this is a link to the page we're on.
  - pvg 4y ago
    I mispasted the link heh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485
erenkaplan 4y ago
It is very sad that mavericks kill good projects for their own benefit.
- klyrs 4y ago
  The sad thing is that third-party apps are actually good for twitter. Musk continues to cut his nose to spite his face.
  - dusing 4y ago
    In what way are they good? How they provide revenue for twitter.
    - Sunspark 4y ago
      People are the product. If they are using the third-party apps they are producing content on the platform for others to engage with, which drives traffic to the site and allows for delivery of ads to others.
    - ascagnel_ 4y ago
      - Twitter could have turned the apps into a revenue opportunity (gate API access behind the paid Blue service for users, charge developers per user for API access) - Twitter apps had the reputation at one point of being “UI playgrounds” — a good place for designers to experiment with different ideas around presentation of the feed; while Twitter didn’t directly benefit from it, these apps provided a massive amount of design iteration that enabled Twitter to steal the best ideas
      - sundaeofshock 4y ago
        Putting the API behind Twitter blue might not have worked. The paid badge has become a mark of derision amongst a portion of the user base.
        ascagnel_ 4y ago
OrvalWintermute 4y ago
> We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer I understand that many people are angry about recent Twitter changes. This rightly so, because many 3rd party apps are obviously a huge time investment and people have bought apps. This seems unjust. However, with all the recent disclosures about Twitter shadowbanning, deboosting, deamplifying, banning, and viewpoint censoring, I cannot help but feel that Twitter has always been capricious. It is only now that we are recognizing it : the unfortunate reality that a private company controls a defacto public square.
- dusing 4y ago
  You’d have to agree that the current owners are “controlling the defacto public square” a magnitude less than the previous ones. I don’t think asking a tiny % of twitter users to use their products interfaces instead of third parties is very controlling, but shadow banning, and censoring topics is incredibly.
  - OrvalWintermute 4y ago
    > You’d have to agree that the current owners are “controlling the defacto public square” a magnitude less than the previous ones. I think they are both controlling, but yes, the current regime appears much more viewpoint neutral. > I don’t think asking a tiny % of twitter users to use their products interfaces instead of third parties is very controlling, but shadow banning, and censoring topics is incredibly. Disagree here, because tools are built upon this. So, it might be more accurate to say Twitter 3rd party Devs & Twitter Ecosystem Devs, not users. I think the viewpoint controlling and censoring is more so; HN does some of the same things I am afraid to see (yes, to a much smaller audience, but same tactics).
coldcode 4y ago
To be honest, I expect Elon and Twitter will be discontinued at some point, without any good feelings and thanks on the part of any of their customers, unlike the app developers Twitter just killed. What is needed is to do Twitter again, in some way that is more open and supportive of client apps, but still has the immediacy and global search that Twitter has. Mastodon has its uses, but it isn't a real replacement. Twitter was always a terrible business, but an incredibly useful idea. The idea needs to exist.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Any centralized, VC-backed service like Twitter is going to want to control the client UX. Seems like what you should be asking for is Mastodon, but with performance improvements and improved search.
  - coldcode 4y ago
    Without centralized access to content, a distributed full search would seem unbearable slow at Twitter scale.
    - hugs_vs_toph 4y ago
      Remember the ancient times before chatgpt?
- jaredcwhite 4y ago
  "Mastodon has its uses, but it isn't a real replacement." Or the global community of people with some technical proficiency keeps developing Mastodon (or forks, or OSS replacements) so that it is a real replacement. My stance on future Twitter-like proprietary social networks is clear and unequivocal: Never again.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > My stance on future Twitter-like proprietary social networks is clear and unequivocal: Never again. It’s ran for over a decade, not a bad run. I’d very much be surprised if Mastodon instances last that long. Decentralisation brings its own major issues, it’s not a silver bullet. Thinking that Mastodon-like services will take over is a pipe dream. Proprietary services aren’t inherently bad as long as their business model aligns with your interests. The problem is that the current business model of social media is “growth & engagement”, not actual money from end-users. This means the relationship between the provider and the user is always adversarial and there’s an incentive to pull tricks like this so you steer users back into the malicious, official client to collect more data and/or harass them with dark patterns. It is absolutely possible to build and operate a sustainable social media platform by charging a monthly token sum for the service. The only reason it’s not done nowadays is because there is no room for new players to enter - without interoperability either enforced by law (EU digital markets law?) or adversarial interoperability being made legal (the law is currently abused to prevent that), a new general-purpose social platform is a non-starter regardless of the underlying business model.
culi 4y ago
> Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world! Wow they really helped make Twitter what it is today
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
binkHN 4y ago
What are the chances Reddit goes down this path and kills the many amazing third-party clients? I absolutely love the one I use and detest the official Reddit app.
- minimaxir 4y ago
  Given the amount of users that use and evangelize Apollo for iOS (including myself), that might hurt Reddit more than the loss of third-party apps for Twitter.
  - buildbot 4y ago
    Yeah the day Apollo is disabled is the day I stop using reddit basically… It’s so good using anything else is annoying. Before Apollo, only Baconreader came close.
  - lawgimenez 4y ago
    Significant users are up in arms in the Apollo sub with the repeated ads shown on Pro users.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Not much. No one cares about Reddit that much, it doesn't have the ridiculous level of venture capital attached that forces leadership to short-term benefits only, and most importantly: Reddit caves when the mods of major subs do collective action. Twitter and FB have in house moderation, whereas Reddit is completely at the mercy of the volunteer mods.
  - Sunspark 4y ago
    I don't think this is true. Reddit is a corporation. If they decide they want to replace the mods in any sub with new mods they can do just that. There is no property ownership in the reddit domain. They just avoid doing so, but they can, just like how they shut down subs they don't want to see around. They do have control of the platform. The reddit mods are unpaid de-facto employees as they perform work on behalf of the corporation. I also suspect that some of them are actual employees of reddit. Reddit does have access to capital, one of their owners is Tencent.
mistersquid 4y ago
This is a stretch, but I wonder if Twitter is open to liability for summarily shutting down its third-party API access. Is there any potential upside to suing?
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  I'm quite certain the developer agreement has a "can be revoked at any time, for any reason" clause. edit: > Twitter may immediately terminate or suspend this Agreement, any rights granted herein, and/or your license to the Licensed Materials, at its sole discretion at any time, for any reason by providing notice to you. Only possible wiggle room is they didn't do the "providing notice" bit.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  If this were the case, Apple would be sued monthly for all the Sherlocking.
- astrange 4y ago
  You can get some Congresspeople to summon them for a hearing if you like.
klelatti 4y ago
It’s obviously bad business (for Twitter given the cost / benefit) and show’s Elon’s lack of empathy but also demonstrates the perils of having a user like him run the show. He literally couldn’t care about anything that doesn’t affect his own experience of the product. Features, clients, parts of the world, even users - if Elon isn’t interested then it will probably go or be ignored.
- dusing 4y ago
  Do you have a source on your assumption of costs and benefits
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Do you have a source on your assumption of costs and benefits We know Twitter is careening towards bankruptcy under his management. There are other factors at play. But the buck stops with him, and the buck is getting fucked.
    - TheHappyOddish 4y ago
      Do we? What is this based on?
dang 4y ago
Recent and related: Official Twitter Statement on Revoking API Access to 3rd Party Devs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 - Jan 2023 (11 comments) Twitter kicking off a developer API campaign on January 16, 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410624 - Jan 2023 (107 comments) Tweetbot is back down again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34396664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34396664 - Jan 2023 (210 comments) The Shit Show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 - Jan 2023 (312 comments) Twitter API Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387834 - Jan 2023 (98 comments) Twitter's API is down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34363743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34363743 - Jan 2023 (408 comments)
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > Official Twitter Statement on Revoking API Access to 3rd Party Devs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 - Jan 2023 (11 comments) To be clear, this statement was a lie. They added the "long-standing policy" today, retroactively. https://www.engadget.com/twitter-new-developer-terms-ban-third-party-clients-211247096.html https://www.engadget.com/twitter-new-developer-terms-ban-thi... (Musk also promised a vote on major policy changes. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832)
  - alfiedotwtf 4y ago
    Musk also promised to step down based on a majority poll. What ever happened to this happening?
    - ccn0p 4y ago
      it might be and you just don't know yet. these things take time.
      - 4y ago
riwsky 4y ago
is sad to see it go
nickcw 4y ago
Why has Twitter shut down the API? Is it because third party clients don't show adverts and it is feeling the pinch? Or for some other reason?
- astrange 4y ago
  Elon didn't know there were third party clients and immediately shut them off when he found out. They also seem determined to show people the algorithmic timeline, so a client that actually listens to you would fight that.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  They never mentioned publicly, they never communicated it. But you can likely guess that this is about ads.
- dusing 4y ago
  I’d guess Ads and it’s confusing the enhancements and rapid product development they are shipping. Makes sense.
- amatecha 4y ago
  We don't know, neither Twitter nor Musk have said a word about it (that I've noticed, anyway).
- Me1000 4y ago
  I don't think they actually shut down the API, they just revoked the API keys for popular third party apps. If you're using the API to build something other than a replacement for the official app, then I believe they still allow you to use it. If they did shut down the whole API I was ready to make an argument about how public APIs can be costly to maintain because they're not used by first party software. But again, that's not the case, so I think we're left with the ads explanation.
frankjr 4y ago
If the issue is that 3rd party clients don't show ads, why not just require them to do so? Surely that's a better alternative than shutting them down completely.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  Some 3rd party apps did mention before they would comply with such a rule if an ads API existed. But they don't exist and now with almost no dev left at twitter, it was unlikely to happen anyway.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  "Allow 3rd party apps" should be a benefit of twitter blue, problem solved.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  I asked myself this for a long time and I worked on a first party client for Twitter. Still don't have a good answer for this.
abrookewood 4y ago
If I didn't know better, I'd be wondering if Musk was shorting Twitter's stock. Has anyone ever managed to do so much damage to a company in such a short amount of time?
- EricE 4y ago
  Why would he short a stock that he already owns all the shares of? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
  - matwood 4y ago
    He doesn’t own all the shares. There is a slightly credible theory that he’s tanking the value so the debt value will fall and he can potentially buy it up on the cheap. The problem for Elon is that bankers aren’t idiots. If he tries to buy his own debt, they will absolute charge a premium or just push for bankruptcy wiping out the shareholders anyway.
  - abrookewood 4y ago
    Hence the "if I didn't know better" ... anyway, as someone else pointed out it's private now. It just has the appearance of self-sabotage.
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  Twitter is a private company; it’s basically impossible for him to do so. And if a company officer is shorting the company’s stock, that sounds an awful lot like a breach of fiduciary duty.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  People have long speculated that Musk found some way to profit off of running Twitter into the ground, since from day 0, that appeared to be his obvious strategy. No one has yet found a way that he'll profit from Twitter's decline. So he's obviously doing what he thinks is best, it is seemingly going strongly in the opposite direction, but only time will tell how it ends up. One thing's almost certain, he's not going to make money running Twitter into the ground.
tiffanyh 4y ago
Here's the hard truth ... Lesson learned: don't build your business on top of someone else's business, especially if you're not paying (under contract) to access that other service.
- rvz 4y ago
  Absolutely. The creators of third-party clients have not learned anything about the risks of building on top of someone else's business and APIs and exactly when that service is a completely free API. As predicted here: [0] when a third-party Discord client had to shut down [1] because Discord Inc. controlled the platform, the same has happened to Twitter. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685294 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25684953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25684953
- matwood 4y ago
  Well said. Too often people say don’t build on others, but you always have to build on top of existing things. What you don’t want is to be building on something that you don’t have a contractual relationship with. Even better is if it’s clear how you both win financially or otherwise.
- firecall 4y ago
  I dont buy into that line of thinking. You make hay whilst the sunshines. If you can make money from an App, then do so. Of course you have to diversify; dont put all your eggs in one basket. But if there is an opportunity to make money, then go make it. You can build your name on a high profile popular product, even if the product is short lived. Businesses and product lines dont generally last forever! :-)
- ProfessorLayton 4y ago
  gestures broadly at the mobile app store duopoly
  - acdha 4y ago
    This is true but I think there's a key difference which is worth considering if you're in this situation: app stores are in the business of selling apps. This means there's a risk of being Sherlock-ed but in general they're not going to decide that they suddenly want to stop existing. They want you to sell lots of copies since they get a cut of every sale: if you're successful, they make a ton of money for a modest level of expense. Something like a Twitter client is not only not part of their core business of selling ads but diametrically opposed to it so you have a much higher risk of unexpectedly being out of business because their success is not directly linked to yours. Arguments about innovation, bringing in super users, etc. are good but they're more tenuous and exactly the kind of thing some executive will dismiss when compared to the money they can make right now with more ad sales.
partiallypro 4y ago
This isn't the first time Twitter has done this, 3rd party apps used to be massive maybe 10 years ago until they made an API policy change abruptly. IMO the ecosystem never fully recovered from this. One service I enjoyed was "FavStar" which would allow you to find the best/funniest tweets or reward people for tweeting something good.
zouhair 4y ago
Well just found out most of the people I follow on Twitter are on Mastodon, I'm out.
- celeritascelery 4y ago
  I have the opposite problem. Almost no one I follow on twitter is on mastodon. But I really hate the first party client and all the toxic “trending items” for engagement.
amatecha 4y ago
Sad times. The third-party clients have always been _the_ way to access Twitter. One of my early favorites was Twinkle, made by Tapulous. It was pretty awesome, and even included searching for tweets from nearby users! This was pretty revolutionary and seriously fun in 2008. It helped us organized some Vancouver "tweetups" in 2008 and 2009. (Of course most recently I had settled on TweetBot, which was an amazing iOS Twitter client) Some stuff about Twinkle, since I didn't see anyone else talking about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20080718210738/http://tapulous.com/twinkle/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080718210738/http://tapulous.c... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RSB2MT01BQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RSB2MT01BQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd4u-E5qmxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd4u-E5qmxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_hxXOYIqrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_hxXOYIqrQ
mdmglr 4y ago
There was an opportunity here to open Twitter and position it’s API to become a message broker and discovery service. Have a heathy ecosystem of third party clients. Perhaps require users to have “Blue” subscription to use third party clients with some revenue share agreements.
- binkHN 4y ago
  This is an interesting approach, and there's always a possibility to reopen those APIs.
- teeray 4y ago
  The problem is that those people willing to pay for such a service are exactly those who advertisers are most interested in. If you have the disposable income to use an ad-hiding third party client for the cost of an extra subscription, they will outbid you in an effort to capture that income (and more) in their business instead.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    So instead those users will just leave or use the web UI with a browser-based blocker.
factfindingisfn 4y ago
"Finally, if you were subscriber to Twitterrific for iOS, we would ask you to please consider not requesting a refund from Apple. The loss of ongoing, recurring revenue from Twitterrific is already going to hurt our business significantly, and any refunds will come directly out of our pockets – not Twitter’s and not Apple’s. To put it simply, thousands of refunds would be devastating to a small company like ours." So a company builds a system that sits on another system to do a thing, charges for a thing, shuts down that thing, and then asks their customers to not ask for a refund for the thing on the thing that is broken...seems a bit....icky
- tshaddox 4y ago
  I strongly disagree. Their product’s “reliance” on an external system wasn’t just some incidental reckless dependency. It’s a Twitter client, so it’s i here fly “reliant” on Twitter. It’s not unlike someone selling a book about how to use Twitter’s API, then politely asking people to not ask for refunds for the book years later when Twitter shuts down its API.
doctor_eval 4y ago
I’m sure it’s been said before but if Twitter wants to get away from advertising, this action seems like such a wasted opportunity. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem all that difficult to have phased in an access fee for the API that’s charged to the app developers. There are lots of ways you could do this. From Twitter’s perspective, they’d get all the advantages of the third party ecosystem while externalising the risk of moving to a paid model. Twitter could have kept the “advertising supported” business to itself, at least for a while, while watching the competing apps settle on a price point. I mean the data this would have given Twitter about monetisation would have been fantastic. And at some point they could have released their own paid version too. Oh well. I suppose Elon knows what he is doing.
__warlord__ 4y ago
Imagine if Elon builds his "x app" where everything about you is stored, your money, contacts, social networks and all of the sudden he wakes up on a random Tuesday and decide that he wants to ban everyone who hurted his feelings the day before. I know him blocking access to third party apps might not be related but it sets a precendent (which already everyone knows) that doing business with him is not safe.
alwayslikethis 4y ago
https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication-of-users.html https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication...
nunez 4y ago
i'm glad nitter still works! this sucks overall though.
wildpeaks 4y ago
So long and thanks for all the fish, it was one of the extremely few applications that were on my home screen, probably even the application installed the longest.
micheljansen 4y ago
This really feels like the end of an era. Goodbye old friend!

505 points by erickhill 4y ago

Wonder if they will use some of the IP they've built up to move into the Mastodon Client space. While there is already a nice crop of Mastodon clients, it seems like there is no dominant 3rd party client yet.

madeofpalk 4y ago
That is exactly what Tapbots has done with Ivory - Taking Tweetbot and using that as the basis for a Mastodon client. I've been using it for the past few weeks and it's fantastic https://tapbots.com/ivory https://tapbots.com/ivory
- josh64 4y ago
  Honest question - I've been using Ivory for the past week but it doesn't seem to do anything that Metatext or the Mastodon app didn't already do. What's so fantastic about Ivory? I feel like I'm missing something because everyone speaks so highly of Ivory. Thanks!
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    I haven’t used those apps, but I figure it doesn’t do anything those apps don’t do. I just prefer Ivory’s UI. For me, it’s a nicer app to use.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    In my case, I've got years worth of Tweetbot muscle memory. Using different clients is... a little rough right now.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > Metatext I do like Metatext but development is paused (repo is archived) - and notifications appear to have stopped working. I'll probably end up back on Toot! at some point. (Tried building my own version from the repo but it breaks for some reason and I'm not an iOS dev who can figure out why.)
    - josh64 4y ago
      I'll have a go at building it and if I'm successful I'll let you know. I honestly thought a proper fork would have started by now but that is not the case.
  - amatecha 4y ago
    I think posting an "Unlisted" toot was one of them, though I could be wrong. I don't have the official app nor Ivory to check this.

samwillis 4y ago

There was a quite moving exchange between Twitterrific and a customer earlier: > Customer: This makes me so sad. Your iPhone app allowed me as a blind person to use Twitter so much better than the app that they themselves produce. Sorry for the hostility you are receiving from them, but know that you are appreciated for the hard work you’ve done. > Twitterrific: Maybe the best thing anyone's ever told us. Thank you for this, truly. It is everything. Please take care. https://mobile.twitter.com/RustyHilliard77/status/1616174474029862912 https://mobile.twitter.com/RustyHilliard77/status/1616174474...

barbazoo 4y ago
That's heartbreaking
pavlov 4y ago
The problem facing Twitter 2.0 is that Musk is personally driving product development and he has essentially no empathy for users. Can you blame him? He hasn’t needed it until now. His companies either specialize in binary-outcome engineering challenges (rocket flies/explodes) or products where Musk himself is the user, like a kid designing his own toys (and calling them “S/3/X/Y”). Turns out that a lot of people want to drive the car that he wants to drive himself, so he probably thinks this impeccable taste applies to any kind of product. But Twitter, unlike a car, is used by hundreds of millions of people in thousands of completely different ways. He has no idea of what the experience is like for someone with only a handful of followers, or blind, or trans, or Algerian, or retired, a teenage girl, a suicidal anorexic, etc. etc. — and he doesn’t seem at all interested in trying to understand.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  Yes, I can blame him. It was reasonably obvious to other people - those who have and have not ran a rocket company - that running Twitter is different to running Tesla. If you’re blindsided by your own ego, it’s your fault and you’re to blame.
- tomcam 4y ago
  > he has essentially no empathy for users Mindreading much?

_justinfunk 4y ago

Are there any open-source options where I can have a non-algorithmic timeline with my own API key?

skrause 4y ago
Mastodon.
unpopularopp 4y ago
Well you can get the linear non-algorithmic timeline in the official mobile app, works perfectly for the time being
- MBCook 4y ago
  On the web too. Plus you can use extensions to block ads, promoted junk, suggestions on who to follow, etc. But none of it holds a candle to TweetBot or Twitterific.
  - mjmsmith 4y ago
    If you're on iOS/macOS, the developer of Tweaks for Twitter [1] has been keeping up with recent downgrades to the web UI. The version released today will hide the For You tab and always show the Following tab (plus blocking ads / promoted tweets etc etc). no connection / satisfied user [1] https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/ https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/
    - MBCook 4y ago
      That’s exactly what I’ve started using. The website is almost sort-of usable with it.
- lukaszkorecki 4y ago
  It's almost acceptable, except that there's no timeline sync between clients - personally for me it's a pretty big dealbreaker
4y ago

schnebbau 4y ago

> we would ask you to please consider not requesting a refund from Apple If I pay for something and don't get the promised value why should I be the one who eats it? This is going to hurt the dev but that's business and I'm sure their bank balance is doing just fine. Appealing to the users like this feels unfair.

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
So you'd try to get a refund on your beach vacation if it rained?
- mads 4y ago
  Well, if he was promised 100% sunshine, he might.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- sgarrity 4y ago
  This feels a bit more like the power & water was cut off to the beach house, but I like taking metaphors one step to far.
  - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
    The basic point is that no-one pays for a Twitter client expecting it to keep working if (say) Twitter closes down or pivots into a rideshare company or decides to close down third-party access to the platform. On any reasonable viewpoint that's a risk accepted by the purchaser, not the app seller.
    - esskay 4y ago
      If you bought a 12 month subscription to Netflix and they closed down next week are you honestly saying you wouldn't be asking for a refund? It doesn't matter that its an app for Twitter, you've paid for someone to provide something they can no longer deliver.

saurik 4y ago

I maintain the position I have had ever since Twitter sold people on the ridiculous idea of "API keys": the correct path has always been adversarial interoperability (as we did back forever ago when people built alternative apps for instant messaging services); if Twitterrific had been designed to use the same API and authority as the official app--maybe as a fallback, if nothing else--Twitter would not have been easily able to kill it... they could try, but it would be a cat and mouse game at best, and the only real recourse they would have would have been to try to detect API abnormalities (which Twitterific could quickly fix, and frankly the skeleton crew at Twitter today likely couldn't do well anyway) to directly punish the end users for continuing to insist on logging in with alternative clients (as Snapchat is forced to do); and, while it is easy to just shut off Twitterific's API key and tell the users "too bad", I think having to take the war to Twitterific's userbase (as the app would be able to keep working forever, with only momentary brownouts) would be a tougher pill for Twitter to swallow, given that it had way too much marketshare at this point.

placatedmayhem 4y ago
I don't know the specifics about Twitter's API saga over the years but... why isn't this the case? Why does Twitter need to be involved on the client side with consumption of the API?
- vkou 4y ago
  > Why does Twitter need to be involved on the client side with consumption of the API? They don't need to be involved, they want to be involved, and they have the legal backing to do so.
  - saurik 4y ago
    Can you provide any citation for them having "legal backing"? I literally participate in hearings at the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress over people providing adversarial interoperability and I have never seen any functional legal argument against such.

baxtr 4y ago

This is absolutely humiliating for these 3rd party people. Twitter shows no respect whatsoever for these devs. You wanna shut them down to show more ads? Fine. But at least communicate and let them know upfront. What a sh*t show.

bachmeier 4y ago
> Twitter shows no respect whatsoever for these devs. Or for the users of those apps.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Or the workers
- tazjin 4y ago
  There's probably a distorted view there where the percentage of overall users using third-party clients is absolutely minuscule, but if you look at the percentage of content _creators_ it's much larger. At least I remember reading it was like that around the time that I stopped using Twitter a few years ago.
  - TillE 4y ago
    Pretty much everyone who does this stuff for a job (social media managers, etc) is using third-party clients.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
    For a couple people in my social network this was the final straw. They're gone now and will never come back.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Or for the users of those apps Is this the sound of nails hammering into Twitter Blue's coffin? An obvious premium feature would have been API tokens.

madeofpalk 4y ago

It's hard to overstate how much of an impact third party twitter clients have had on Twitter and the broader mobile landscape - like the post mentions, the word 'Tweet' and blue bird twitter icon came from third party clients! The Tweetie app invented pull-to-refresh, used by every (both) mobile operating systems.

masklinn 4y ago
Yeah original twitter allowed an explosion of creativity (both in style and interaction) around clients, due to its simple data and interaction model.
ceejayoz 4y ago
Tweetie even got bought and turned into the official client.
- radicalbyte 4y ago
  TweetDeck too as the official power-user web-client. At the time I thought of building a client but the dependence on Twitter seemed like a huge risk. More fool me though given that those companies were taken over for a decent amount.
  - endgame 4y ago
    You were right though, just not on the time-scale that you assumed at the time.
toss1 4y ago
Yup! Also hard to overstate the impact the new ownership has had, such that their assessment is now: >>"...an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer." This, from people that partnered with Twitter for a decade++ The new owner had a lot of us, me included, fooled into thinking he was intelligent and trustworthy. Now, it is obvious he's neither. Wealth reveals character, and it is sad to see that that character is so rotten.

ceejayoz 4y ago

> We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer. They just documented it. Another after-the-fact policy like @elonjet got. https://www.engadget.com/twitter-new-developer-terms-ban-third-party-clients-211247096.html https://www.engadget.com/twitter-new-developer-terms-ban-thi... "The 'restrictions' section of Twitter’s developer agreement was updated Thursday with a clause banning 'use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.' The addition is the only substantive change to the 5,000-word agreement." Anyone with a shred of empathy would've given devs advance notice of "we're destroying your business".

minimaxir 4y ago
"long-standing API rules" indeed.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Let's hope Twitter puts the time machine up for auction (https://www.npr.org/2023/01/18/1149731084/twitter-office-supplies-auction-online https://www.npr.org/2023/01/18/1149731084/twitter-office-sup...) someday.
- TillE 4y ago
  It's notable how that statement was just an absolute, unequivocal lie. Most companies don't do that! https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1615405842735714304 https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1615405842735714304
  - minimaxir 4y ago
    There is a conspiracy theory that Elon himself wrote that tweet, which IMO tracks.
    - rideontime 4y ago

perardi 4y ago

Twitterrific, and a lot of these early iOS clients, really helped defined the Twitter service, and even more so, our interface idioms for mobile apps. Right from the bird’s mouth, which by the way, they created, not Twitter… “Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world!” And “pull-to-refresh”? Tweetie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh

selykg 4y ago
Tweetie was a great app. That was the last time I was really actually "interested" in Twitter. It was all sort of downhill for me. But I remember pull to refresh being an absolutely mind bending feature at the time. It just felt natural.
- MattRix 4y ago
  For some additional info, Twitter acquired Tweetie and turned it into the official Twitter iOS app.
dusing 4y ago
I agree, but it is 2023 now, it’s not super important how Twitter was founded.
- amatecha 4y ago
  Uhhh... I mean, the events that came before are what led to where we are today, so it's pretty worthwhile to understand the history of software, tech, and humanity for that matter. This colossal breadth of tech we're using every day has been a development of centuries, and Twitter and its development is a piece of that. Dismissing that history is a disservice to our community and to our future. Yeah, where a feature came from is not of news-headline importance, but it's relevant to us and our understanding of how software and services evolve over time, with involvement from their community of users and fellow industry members.

pvg 4y ago

[flagged]

rideontime 4y ago
a couple of days ago? it says "one hour ago"... wait, this is a link to the page we're on.
- pvg 4y ago
  I mispasted the link heh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485

erenkaplan 4y ago

It is very sad that mavericks kill good projects for their own benefit.

klyrs 4y ago
The sad thing is that third-party apps are actually good for twitter. Musk continues to cut his nose to spite his face.
- dusing 4y ago
  In what way are they good? How they provide revenue for twitter.
  - Sunspark 4y ago
    People are the product. If they are using the third-party apps they are producing content on the platform for others to engage with, which drives traffic to the site and allows for delivery of ads to others.
  - ascagnel_ 4y ago
    - Twitter could have turned the apps into a revenue opportunity (gate API access behind the paid Blue service for users, charge developers per user for API access) - Twitter apps had the reputation at one point of being “UI playgrounds” — a good place for designers to experiment with different ideas around presentation of the feed; while Twitter didn’t directly benefit from it, these apps provided a massive amount of design iteration that enabled Twitter to steal the best ideas
    - sundaeofshock 4y ago
      Putting the API behind Twitter blue might not have worked. The paid badge has become a mark of derision amongst a portion of the user base.
      - ascagnel_ 4y ago

OrvalWintermute 4y ago

> We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer I understand that many people are angry about recent Twitter changes. This rightly so, because many 3rd party apps are obviously a huge time investment and people have bought apps. This seems unjust. However, with all the recent disclosures about Twitter shadowbanning, deboosting, deamplifying, banning, and viewpoint censoring, I cannot help but feel that Twitter has always been capricious. It is only now that we are recognizing it : the unfortunate reality that a private company controls a defacto public square.

dusing 4y ago
You’d have to agree that the current owners are “controlling the defacto public square” a magnitude less than the previous ones. I don’t think asking a tiny % of twitter users to use their products interfaces instead of third parties is very controlling, but shadow banning, and censoring topics is incredibly.
- OrvalWintermute 4y ago
  > You’d have to agree that the current owners are “controlling the defacto public square” a magnitude less than the previous ones. I think they are both controlling, but yes, the current regime appears much more viewpoint neutral. > I don’t think asking a tiny % of twitter users to use their products interfaces instead of third parties is very controlling, but shadow banning, and censoring topics is incredibly. Disagree here, because tools are built upon this. So, it might be more accurate to say Twitter 3rd party Devs & Twitter Ecosystem Devs, not users. I think the viewpoint controlling and censoring is more so; HN does some of the same things I am afraid to see (yes, to a much smaller audience, but same tactics).

coldcode 4y ago

To be honest, I expect Elon and Twitter will be discontinued at some point, without any good feelings and thanks on the part of any of their customers, unlike the app developers Twitter just killed. What is needed is to do Twitter again, in some way that is more open and supportive of client apps, but still has the immediacy and global search that Twitter has. Mastodon has its uses, but it isn't a real replacement. Twitter was always a terrible business, but an incredibly useful idea. The idea needs to exist.

KerrAvon 4y ago
Any centralized, VC-backed service like Twitter is going to want to control the client UX. Seems like what you should be asking for is Mastodon, but with performance improvements and improved search.
- coldcode 4y ago
  Without centralized access to content, a distributed full search would seem unbearable slow at Twitter scale.
  - hugs_vs_toph 4y ago
    Remember the ancient times before chatgpt?
jaredcwhite 4y ago
"Mastodon has its uses, but it isn't a real replacement." Or the global community of people with some technical proficiency keeps developing Mastodon (or forks, or OSS replacements) so that it is a real replacement. My stance on future Twitter-like proprietary social networks is clear and unequivocal: Never again.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > My stance on future Twitter-like proprietary social networks is clear and unequivocal: Never again. It’s ran for over a decade, not a bad run. I’d very much be surprised if Mastodon instances last that long. Decentralisation brings its own major issues, it’s not a silver bullet. Thinking that Mastodon-like services will take over is a pipe dream. Proprietary services aren’t inherently bad as long as their business model aligns with your interests. The problem is that the current business model of social media is “growth & engagement”, not actual money from end-users. This means the relationship between the provider and the user is always adversarial and there’s an incentive to pull tricks like this so you steer users back into the malicious, official client to collect more data and/or harass them with dark patterns. It is absolutely possible to build and operate a sustainable social media platform by charging a monthly token sum for the service. The only reason it’s not done nowadays is because there is no room for new players to enter - without interoperability either enforced by law (EU digital markets law?) or adversarial interoperability being made legal (the law is currently abused to prevent that), a new general-purpose social platform is a non-starter regardless of the underlying business model.

culi 4y ago

> Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world! Wow they really helped make Twitter what it is today

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

binkHN 4y ago

What are the chances Reddit goes down this path and kills the many amazing third-party clients? I absolutely love the one I use and detest the official Reddit app.

minimaxir 4y ago
Given the amount of users that use and evangelize Apollo for iOS (including myself), that might hurt Reddit more than the loss of third-party apps for Twitter.
- buildbot 4y ago
  Yeah the day Apollo is disabled is the day I stop using reddit basically… It’s so good using anything else is annoying. Before Apollo, only Baconreader came close.
- lawgimenez 4y ago
  Significant users are up in arms in the Apollo sub with the repeated ads shown on Pro users.
mschuster91 4y ago
Not much. No one cares about Reddit that much, it doesn't have the ridiculous level of venture capital attached that forces leadership to short-term benefits only, and most importantly: Reddit caves when the mods of major subs do collective action. Twitter and FB have in house moderation, whereas Reddit is completely at the mercy of the volunteer mods.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  I don't think this is true. Reddit is a corporation. If they decide they want to replace the mods in any sub with new mods they can do just that. There is no property ownership in the reddit domain. They just avoid doing so, but they can, just like how they shut down subs they don't want to see around. They do have control of the platform. The reddit mods are unpaid de-facto employees as they perform work on behalf of the corporation. I also suspect that some of them are actual employees of reddit. Reddit does have access to capital, one of their owners is Tencent.

mistersquid 4y ago

This is a stretch, but I wonder if Twitter is open to liability for summarily shutting down its third-party API access. Is there any potential upside to suing?

ceejayoz 4y ago
I'm quite certain the developer agreement has a "can be revoked at any time, for any reason" clause. edit: > Twitter may immediately terminate or suspend this Agreement, any rights granted herein, and/or your license to the Licensed Materials, at its sole discretion at any time, for any reason by providing notice to you. Only possible wiggle room is they didn't do the "providing notice" bit.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
If this were the case, Apple would be sued monthly for all the Sherlocking.
astrange 4y ago
You can get some Congresspeople to summon them for a hearing if you like.

klelatti 4y ago

It’s obviously bad business (for Twitter given the cost / benefit) and show’s Elon’s lack of empathy but also demonstrates the perils of having a user like him run the show. He literally couldn’t care about anything that doesn’t affect his own experience of the product. Features, clients, parts of the world, even users - if Elon isn’t interested then it will probably go or be ignored.

dusing 4y ago
Do you have a source on your assumption of costs and benefits
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Do you have a source on your assumption of costs and benefits We know Twitter is careening towards bankruptcy under his management. There are other factors at play. But the buck stops with him, and the buck is getting fucked.
  - TheHappyOddish 4y ago
    Do we? What is this based on?

dang 4y ago

Recent and related: Official Twitter Statement on Revoking API Access to 3rd Party Devs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 - Jan 2023 (11 comments) Twitter kicking off a developer API campaign on January 16, 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410624 - Jan 2023 (107 comments) Tweetbot is back down again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34396664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34396664 - Jan 2023 (210 comments) The Shit Show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 - Jan 2023 (312 comments) Twitter API Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387834 - Jan 2023 (98 comments) Twitter's API is down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34363743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34363743 - Jan 2023 (408 comments)

ceejayoz 4y ago
> Official Twitter Statement on Revoking API Access to 3rd Party Devs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 - Jan 2023 (11 comments) To be clear, this statement was a lie. They added the "long-standing policy" today, retroactively. https://www.engadget.com/twitter-new-developer-terms-ban-third-party-clients-211247096.html https://www.engadget.com/twitter-new-developer-terms-ban-thi... (Musk also promised a vote on major policy changes. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832)
- alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  Musk also promised to step down based on a majority poll. What ever happened to this happening?
  - ccn0p 4y ago
    it might be and you just don't know yet. these things take time.
    - 4y ago

riwsky 4y ago

is sad to see it go

nickcw 4y ago

Why has Twitter shut down the API? Is it because third party clients don't show adverts and it is feeling the pinch? Or for some other reason?

astrange 4y ago
Elon didn't know there were third party clients and immediately shut them off when he found out. They also seem determined to show people the algorithmic timeline, so a client that actually listens to you would fight that.
jeromegv 4y ago
They never mentioned publicly, they never communicated it. But you can likely guess that this is about ads.
dusing 4y ago
I’d guess Ads and it’s confusing the enhancements and rapid product development they are shipping. Makes sense.
amatecha 4y ago
We don't know, neither Twitter nor Musk have said a word about it (that I've noticed, anyway).
Me1000 4y ago
I don't think they actually shut down the API, they just revoked the API keys for popular third party apps. If you're using the API to build something other than a replacement for the official app, then I believe they still allow you to use it. If they did shut down the whole API I was ready to make an argument about how public APIs can be costly to maintain because they're not used by first party software. But again, that's not the case, so I think we're left with the ads explanation.

frankjr 4y ago

If the issue is that 3rd party clients don't show ads, why not just require them to do so? Surely that's a better alternative than shutting them down completely.

jeromegv 4y ago
Some 3rd party apps did mention before they would comply with such a rule if an ads API existed. But they don't exist and now with almost no dev left at twitter, it was unlikely to happen anyway.
drexlspivey 4y ago
"Allow 3rd party apps" should be a benefit of twitter blue, problem solved.
saagarjha 4y ago
I asked myself this for a long time and I worked on a first party client for Twitter. Still don't have a good answer for this.

abrookewood 4y ago

If I didn't know better, I'd be wondering if Musk was shorting Twitter's stock. Has anyone ever managed to do so much damage to a company in such a short amount of time?

EricE 4y ago
Why would he short a stock that he already owns all the shares of? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
- matwood 4y ago
  He doesn’t own all the shares. There is a slightly credible theory that he’s tanking the value so the debt value will fall and he can potentially buy it up on the cheap. The problem for Elon is that bankers aren’t idiots. If he tries to buy his own debt, they will absolute charge a premium or just push for bankruptcy wiping out the shareholders anyway.
- abrookewood 4y ago
  Hence the "if I didn't know better" ... anyway, as someone else pointed out it's private now. It just has the appearance of self-sabotage.
ascagnel_ 4y ago
Twitter is a private company; it’s basically impossible for him to do so. And if a company officer is shorting the company’s stock, that sounds an awful lot like a breach of fiduciary duty.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
People have long speculated that Musk found some way to profit off of running Twitter into the ground, since from day 0, that appeared to be his obvious strategy. No one has yet found a way that he'll profit from Twitter's decline. So he's obviously doing what he thinks is best, it is seemingly going strongly in the opposite direction, but only time will tell how it ends up. One thing's almost certain, he's not going to make money running Twitter into the ground.

tiffanyh 4y ago

Here's the hard truth ... Lesson learned: don't build your business on top of someone else's business, especially if you're not paying (under contract) to access that other service.

rvz 4y ago
Absolutely. The creators of third-party clients have not learned anything about the risks of building on top of someone else's business and APIs and exactly when that service is a completely free API. As predicted here: [0] when a third-party Discord client had to shut down [1] because Discord Inc. controlled the platform, the same has happened to Twitter. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685294 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25684953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25684953
matwood 4y ago
Well said. Too often people say don’t build on others, but you always have to build on top of existing things. What you don’t want is to be building on something that you don’t have a contractual relationship with. Even better is if it’s clear how you both win financially or otherwise.
firecall 4y ago
I dont buy into that line of thinking. You make hay whilst the sunshines. If you can make money from an App, then do so. Of course you have to diversify; dont put all your eggs in one basket. But if there is an opportunity to make money, then go make it. You can build your name on a high profile popular product, even if the product is short lived. Businesses and product lines dont generally last forever! :-)
ProfessorLayton 4y ago
gestures broadly at the mobile app store duopoly
- acdha 4y ago
  This is true but I think there's a key difference which is worth considering if you're in this situation: app stores are in the business of selling apps. This means there's a risk of being Sherlock-ed but in general they're not going to decide that they suddenly want to stop existing. They want you to sell lots of copies since they get a cut of every sale: if you're successful, they make a ton of money for a modest level of expense. Something like a Twitter client is not only not part of their core business of selling ads but diametrically opposed to it so you have a much higher risk of unexpectedly being out of business because their success is not directly linked to yours. Arguments about innovation, bringing in super users, etc. are good but they're more tenuous and exactly the kind of thing some executive will dismiss when compared to the money they can make right now with more ad sales.

partiallypro 4y ago

This isn't the first time Twitter has done this, 3rd party apps used to be massive maybe 10 years ago until they made an API policy change abruptly. IMO the ecosystem never fully recovered from this. One service I enjoyed was "FavStar" which would allow you to find the best/funniest tweets or reward people for tweeting something good.

zouhair 4y ago

Well just found out most of the people I follow on Twitter are on Mastodon, I'm out.

celeritascelery 4y ago
I have the opposite problem. Almost no one I follow on twitter is on mastodon. But I really hate the first party client and all the toxic “trending items” for engagement.

amatecha 4y ago

Sad times. The third-party clients have always been _the_ way to access Twitter. One of my early favorites was Twinkle, made by Tapulous. It was pretty awesome, and even included searching for tweets from nearby users! This was pretty revolutionary and seriously fun in 2008. It helped us organized some Vancouver "tweetups" in 2008 and 2009. (Of course most recently I had settled on TweetBot, which was an amazing iOS Twitter client) Some stuff about Twinkle, since I didn't see anyone else talking about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20080718210738/http://tapulous.com/twinkle/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080718210738/http://tapulous.c... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RSB2MT01BQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RSB2MT01BQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd4u-E5qmxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd4u-E5qmxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_hxXOYIqrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_hxXOYIqrQ

mdmglr 4y ago

There was an opportunity here to open Twitter and position it’s API to become a message broker and discovery service. Have a heathy ecosystem of third party clients. Perhaps require users to have “Blue” subscription to use third party clients with some revenue share agreements.

binkHN 4y ago
This is an interesting approach, and there's always a possibility to reopen those APIs.
teeray 4y ago
The problem is that those people willing to pay for such a service are exactly those who advertisers are most interested in. If you have the disposable income to use an ad-hiding third party client for the cost of an extra subscription, they will outbid you in an effort to capture that income (and more) in their business instead.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  So instead those users will just leave or use the web UI with a browser-based blocker.

factfindingisfn 4y ago

"Finally, if you were subscriber to Twitterrific for iOS, we would ask you to please consider not requesting a refund from Apple. The loss of ongoing, recurring revenue from Twitterrific is already going to hurt our business significantly, and any refunds will come directly out of our pockets – not Twitter’s and not Apple’s. To put it simply, thousands of refunds would be devastating to a small company like ours." So a company builds a system that sits on another system to do a thing, charges for a thing, shuts down that thing, and then asks their customers to not ask for a refund for the thing on the thing that is broken...seems a bit....icky

tshaddox 4y ago
I strongly disagree. Their product’s “reliance” on an external system wasn’t just some incidental reckless dependency. It’s a Twitter client, so it’s i here fly “reliant” on Twitter. It’s not unlike someone selling a book about how to use Twitter’s API, then politely asking people to not ask for refunds for the book years later when Twitter shuts down its API.

doctor_eval 4y ago

I’m sure it’s been said before but if Twitter wants to get away from advertising, this action seems like such a wasted opportunity. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem all that difficult to have phased in an access fee for the API that’s charged to the app developers. There are lots of ways you could do this. From Twitter’s perspective, they’d get all the advantages of the third party ecosystem while externalising the risk of moving to a paid model. Twitter could have kept the “advertising supported” business to itself, at least for a while, while watching the competing apps settle on a price point. I mean the data this would have given Twitter about monetisation would have been fantastic. And at some point they could have released their own paid version too. Oh well. I suppose Elon knows what he is doing.

__warlord__ 4y ago

Imagine if Elon builds his "x app" where everything about you is stored, your money, contacts, social networks and all of the sudden he wakes up on a random Tuesday and decide that he wants to ban everyone who hurted his feelings the day before. I know him blocking access to third party apps might not be related but it sets a precendent (which already everyone knows) that doing business with him is not safe.

alwayslikethis 4y ago

https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication-of-users.html https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication...

nunez 4y ago

i'm glad nitter still works! this sucks overall though.

wildpeaks 4y ago

So long and thanks for all the fish, it was one of the extremely few applications that were on my home screen, probably even the application installed the longest.

micheljansen 4y ago

This really feels like the end of an era. Goodbye old friend!