10 ms·

I don't think they realise the damage this change has done. I have been on board with or ambivalent about most of the changes. I don't care if there's less mod

I don't think they realise the damage this change has done. I have been on board with or ambivalent about most of the changes. I don't care if there's less moderation, I think Twitter probably did have too many employees, and I like the idea of a paid account with fewer (preferably no) ads. I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot. But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many of the power users who are most engaged with Twitter and who make it a thing other people want to engage with. I have sent 10,000s of Tweets but I can't see it being much more than a handful more. I don't think Mastodon is a good replacement for Twitter at all, but I am going to have to try it. The fact that Tapbots are enthusiastically supporting it with Ivory is a good sign (though @tapbots, if you're listening, I'd happily donate 10x more to Ivory as an open source project than you'd make from selling it to me as a closed source app ;-).

wstuartcl 4y ago
I also do not think Musk understands just who the primary userbase on many of these 3rd party apps were -- many of those pesky advertisers/brands that he seems to be both courting and at war with exclusively use api apps for tracking posting/responding and integrations.
- karmelapple 4y ago
  Those aren't the same APIs that were turned off for third party clients though, correct?
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Who knows? Probably someone who got fired on a previous round, that is. Disabling APIs won't win you any friends
  - _rs 4y ago
    My understanding is they didn't turn off the APIs, they disabled API keys for any large clients
- cmelbye 4y ago
  Which 3rd party apps specifically were used by marketers and are now banned?
  - wstuartcl 4y ago
    Having worked with many PR/Marketing/Media brand teams I do not know of one group that utilized twitter client in any of their workflows -- they all used a mix of third party clients for reading and other integrations/clients for posting and managing conversations and ad work. Sure much of the API surface area for latter still works but there was a goodly portion of impacted folks on these clients that were the same people that were on the same teams that impact ad spend and brand usage.
    - graublau 4y ago
      I've never seen a PR/Marketing tweet from any of the bespoke artisanal apps (tweetbot, twitterific etc) Hootsuite, buffer are web apps, not for "ride or die" iOS nerds
- seydor 4y ago
  Interesting, do instgram and facebook etc allow third party clients?
  - pvarangot 4y ago
    No, but unlike Twitter their advertiser tools are at least halfway decent.
  - erk__ 4y ago
    One of the tools used is Buffer [0], and they seem to support both Instagram and Facebook, and it seems that they are going to continue with Twitter as well. [0]: https://buffer.com https://buffer.com Note: They seem to support "Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profile"
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Buffer's not a third-party client (in the sense of Tweetbot etc.), though. You can't consume or publish to a personal Facebook profile or an individual Instagram account; it's restricted to Facebook Business Pages, Groups, and Instagram Business accounts. It does compete with the Meta Business Suite, though.
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      Buffer's support for non-business Instagram is "set a reminder for you to post by hand" because Instagram removed scheduled posting ability a good long while back. I suspect their non-business Facebook support is similar. I know I was a heavy user until (uh) 5? years ago when Instagram and Facebook posting was nerfed into uselessness.
- erk__ 4y ago
  One of the big ones Buffer [0] do not believe that they will be impacted this may not be an issue [1] [0]: https://buffer.com https://buffer.com [1]: https://twitter.com/buffer/status/1616418191718207488 https://twitter.com/buffer/status/1616418191718207488
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    It would appear that Elon understands his paying customer's after all. Cynical interpretation would be that he just made Twitter API access more scarce and therefore valuable. Still, mine is just a guess. edit: Come to think of it, didn't FB eventually moved from super open API to.. friend and family model?
    - w0m 4y ago
      IIRC, FB was originally public-first before (lawsuits). Not API, just default privacy settings.
rideontime 4y ago
Keep in mind that "fewer ads" is (and likely will forever be) "coming soon," because Elon promised it before doing the math.
- jchw 4y ago
  He also complained pretty bad about the "algorithmic" feed when he was in the process of acquiring Twitter. In the past the Twitter website would periodically switch you to it, with some kind of backoff, presumably hoping deeply that you would not notice. Now, it doesn't do that... there is just no URL that goes to the latest feed, you need to select it every time you load the page. I'm not really a Twitter user, but I can only assume that he thought "I'm going to do things right" until seeing the balance sheet.
unshavedyak 4y ago
Sidenote, as an Ivory user i'm quite pleased with it. Getting an invite can be a bit challenging, currently. Following @ivory@tapbots.social for invites is how i got mine, fwiw. edit: https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109683219720510229 https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109683219720510229 though it seems they intend to get Ivory out ASAP due to how this decision has impacted their business. So maybe waiting for Invites won't be needed for long
- riley_dog 4y ago
  No more invites. Their TestFlight allocation is full.
  - unshavedyak 4y ago
    Correct, that's what i meant by following them on Mastodon for invites. For now, you have to wait for invites to become available if you want one.
- treesknees 4y ago
  Challenging is an understatement. The beta invites are sent out in waves of 1000 every so often. It takes less than 15 seconds for all 1000 to be claimed[1]. [1] https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109552637982709508 https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109552637982709508
98codes 4y ago
> I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot. I had thought since they first started locking down 3rd party apps years ago that if/when they ever had a "Twitter Pro" or whatever, that allowing subscribed users to use a third party app would be part of it. After all, lots of online service subs eliminate ads in the product, so why not Twitter? I assumed rational thinking on their part, I suppose.
- barnabee 4y ago
  Yeah, that would have been so incredibly obvious that this whole episode is surely final and clinching proof to anyone still on the fence that he doesn't have a clue what he's doing. Pitiful.
- joegahona 4y ago
  > After all, lots of online service subs eliminate ads in the product, so why not Twitter? Lots of online service subs are eliminating the ad-free thing now, because they know they can prove more value of paying users to their advertisers. I don't think the NY Times subscription was ever ad-free, and many publishers are now removing that perk. But I agree with you. I would've paid for Twitter Blue if it were completely ad-free. This is the main value of YouTube Premium to me.
drcongo 4y ago
There's a truly excellent, open-source Mastodon client called Ice Cubes which hit the App Store yesterday. The very first thing I did was donate the maximum possible IAP.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  Annoyingly, seems to be Mastodon-specific - can't OAuth to GotoSocial and flat-out refuses to even consider an Akkoma instance. Let's hope they sort that out soon (since both of them support enough of the MastoAPI that other clients work fine.)
  - ihuman 4y ago
    They just added GoToSocial support [0], and they are adding support for more instance types [1] [0] https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/pull/135 https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/pull/135 [1] https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/issues/16 https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/issues/16
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      Good stuff! (I wish the FediActivityPub people had spec'd up an API to avoid this kind of multi-implementation-who-supports-what shambles.) EDIT: Amusingly, I fixed the "cannot login to Pleroma" problem for `madon` this week - Pleroma/Akkoma require form data in the body, not the URL, for POST requests (which is fair since the HTML spec suggests this is the Right Way.)
ericmay 4y ago
What's the saying? First they came for the moderation, but I didn't care because they weren't moderating me. Then they fired employees so as to not have to pay severance or whatever but I didn't care because I don't work at Twitter. Then they came for the API and there was noone left to speak for me... Twitter and Elon have already done quite a bit of damage to the company, platform, and reputation. This is just a continued pattern, and it is disappointing. -edit- Just to be clear with the original comment I'm just giving OP a little bit of a hard time on a Friday :)
- blowski 4y ago
  It’s not like people didn’t speak out for the moderators or employees, just that Musk didn’t listen. If you’re looking for Nazi Germany analogies, perhaps Blitzkrieg is better - quickly destroying its entire userbase.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Some spoke out. But many were in the sickos-yes-yes.png camp of being absolutely gleeful. And a much larger number were indifferent or in the wait-and-see camp.
  - graublau 4y ago
    ITT comparing 3rd party api limits to nazi germany
    - dylan604 4y ago
      what does the International Telephone & Telegraph company have to do with this thread?
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        In This Thread.
    - labster 4y ago
      Twitter needs more lebensraum for its own APIs.
akovaski 4y ago
> I'd happily donate 10x more to Ivory as an open source project than you'd make from selling it to me as a closed source app Tweetbot apparently cost $6/year, so are you saying you would donate $60/year if they released an open source Mastodon client? Are there other open source apps you donate to? I'm genuinely curious how people approach payment/donations for open source software, I'm not trying to pull some gotcha on you. I don't donate to any open source projects, but I feel that I probably should.
- rrix2 4y ago
  i'm donating 5$/mo to no less than five open source patreon/opencollective right now
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- barnabee 4y ago
  I would donate $10 per month to a decent open source Mastodon client, at least while I was using it regularly (and would have done so for Tweetbot). I donate to a number of open source projects, a decent number of them regularly. I am lucky enough to be able to afford to buy software when I need to and donate to projects I think are worthy of support. It makes me extremely happy every time I am able to donate to an open source project instead of buying software. It makes me sick every time I capitulate and end up renting softare. Software subscriptions can die in a fire. I'd encourage you to donate if you can afford to, but if you can't, that's ok. A world dominated by open computing platforms and software is such an exciting prospect that it's worth putting a bit of money and effort into. And if that doesn't pan out, at least you helped the maintainers a little!
- bcrl 4y ago
  Linux Weekly News ended up with this kind of model. A long time ago back in 2002, LWN was about to shut down, but those of us in the Linux community found it had tremendous value and asked for options to pay, as well as options to pay more. Here we are 2 decades later and LWN is still around! Sometimes it pays to let your users help out financially.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
e-clinton 4y ago
Blocking journalists was the last straw for me.
rtkwe 4y ago
It wasn't just pay for fewer ads though it was supposedly going to be pay for algorithmic upranking, extra say with reports and in polls, and many other things.
Swizec 4y ago
> But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many of the power users who are most engaged with Twitter As the "author" of some 80,000+ tweets (can't find number anymore), their mobile app was unusable. I've been on TweetBot for close to 10 years I think. TweetBot2 was my first mobile twitter client iirc. No more mobile twitter for me. Shame. But probably better this way. It really hasn't felt like a fun place for the last 3 or 4 years. More like a cigarette habit you can't shake.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Between this and the blue-check thing it's like he doesn't get that the primary draw of the site is high-volume posters and/or famous people who(se PR teams) post. Like, ease of finding and reading (plus interacting with—responding, rewteeting, et c) posts by famous (or at least Internet-famous) power users is the main reason Twitter's a bigger draw than, say, Mastodon. If people just wanted to read their non-famous pals' posts, they could do that on any chat app. It'd be like YouTube charging top creators for access (sure, the blue checks aren't "access", but they're a huge discovery-aid and solve problems for Twitter) then also cutting off any 3rd-party tools those creators use to make their jobs easier, which would obviously be a giant WTF. Why on earth would you make things more difficult for the very people providing the content that makes your site worth anything to begin with!
  - Swizec 4y ago
    > just wanted to read their non-famous pals' posts I suspect Elon lives in a bubble where all of his friends are famous or highly desirable in some way. He doesn't understand that most people's friends _aren't_ a brand.
- MandieD 4y ago
  All of the drama of the last three months has helped me finally kick that filthy habit, so thanks, Elon.
riley_dog 4y ago
> I don't think Mastodon is a good replacement for Twitter at all, but I am going to have to try it. What exactly leads you to believe it's not a good replacement, especially considering you haven't tried it?
- MBCook 4y ago
  My only issue with Mastodon is the network effect. There are many accounts I follow on Twitter, relatively popular accounts not friends with 5 followers, that aren’t on Mastodon. So I’m missing a bunch of what I had. I found new things too, which is great. But it’s still never going to be a 1:1 replacement.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- criddell 4y ago
  My main entry point to Twitter is their search box (I’m basically a read-only user). Mastodon seems to be resisting multi-instance searching and that makes it more cumbersome for me to use. If Mastodon isn’t interested in this functionality, it would be cool to see Google add a “mastodon:” search operator that works like their “site:” operator.
moneywoes 4y ago
What’s wrong with mastodon?

wstuartcl 4y ago

I also do not think Musk understands just who the primary userbase on many of these 3rd party apps were -- many of those pesky advertisers/brands that he seems to be both courting and at war with exclusively use api apps for tracking posting/responding and integrations.

karmelapple 4y ago
Those aren't the same APIs that were turned off for third party clients though, correct?
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Who knows? Probably someone who got fired on a previous round, that is. Disabling APIs won't win you any friends
- _rs 4y ago
  My understanding is they didn't turn off the APIs, they disabled API keys for any large clients
cmelbye 4y ago
Which 3rd party apps specifically were used by marketers and are now banned?
- wstuartcl 4y ago
  Having worked with many PR/Marketing/Media brand teams I do not know of one group that utilized twitter client in any of their workflows -- they all used a mix of third party clients for reading and other integrations/clients for posting and managing conversations and ad work. Sure much of the API surface area for latter still works but there was a goodly portion of impacted folks on these clients that were the same people that were on the same teams that impact ad spend and brand usage.
  - graublau 4y ago
    I've never seen a PR/Marketing tweet from any of the bespoke artisanal apps (tweetbot, twitterific etc) Hootsuite, buffer are web apps, not for "ride or die" iOS nerds
seydor 4y ago
Interesting, do instgram and facebook etc allow third party clients?
- pvarangot 4y ago
  No, but unlike Twitter their advertiser tools are at least halfway decent.
- erk__ 4y ago
  One of the tools used is Buffer [0], and they seem to support both Instagram and Facebook, and it seems that they are going to continue with Twitter as well. [0]: https://buffer.com https://buffer.com Note: They seem to support "Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profile"
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Buffer's not a third-party client (in the sense of Tweetbot etc.), though. You can't consume or publish to a personal Facebook profile or an individual Instagram account; it's restricted to Facebook Business Pages, Groups, and Instagram Business accounts. It does compete with the Meta Business Suite, though.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    Buffer's support for non-business Instagram is "set a reminder for you to post by hand" because Instagram removed scheduled posting ability a good long while back. I suspect their non-business Facebook support is similar. I know I was a heavy user until (uh) 5? years ago when Instagram and Facebook posting was nerfed into uselessness.
erk__ 4y ago
One of the big ones Buffer [0] do not believe that they will be impacted this may not be an issue [1] [0]: https://buffer.com https://buffer.com [1]: https://twitter.com/buffer/status/1616418191718207488 https://twitter.com/buffer/status/1616418191718207488
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  It would appear that Elon understands his paying customer's after all. Cynical interpretation would be that he just made Twitter API access more scarce and therefore valuable. Still, mine is just a guess. edit: Come to think of it, didn't FB eventually moved from super open API to.. friend and family model?
  - w0m 4y ago
    IIRC, FB was originally public-first before (lawsuits). Not API, just default privacy settings.

rideontime 4y ago

Keep in mind that "fewer ads" is (and likely will forever be) "coming soon," because Elon promised it before doing the math.

jchw 4y ago
He also complained pretty bad about the "algorithmic" feed when he was in the process of acquiring Twitter. In the past the Twitter website would periodically switch you to it, with some kind of backoff, presumably hoping deeply that you would not notice. Now, it doesn't do that... there is just no URL that goes to the latest feed, you need to select it every time you load the page. I'm not really a Twitter user, but I can only assume that he thought "I'm going to do things right" until seeing the balance sheet.

unshavedyak 4y ago

Sidenote, as an Ivory user i'm quite pleased with it. Getting an invite can be a bit challenging, currently. Following @ivory@tapbots.social for invites is how i got mine, fwiw. edit: https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109683219720510229 https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109683219720510229 though it seems they intend to get Ivory out ASAP due to how this decision has impacted their business. So maybe waiting for Invites won't be needed for long

riley_dog 4y ago
No more invites. Their TestFlight allocation is full.
- unshavedyak 4y ago
  Correct, that's what i meant by following them on Mastodon for invites. For now, you have to wait for invites to become available if you want one.
treesknees 4y ago
Challenging is an understatement. The beta invites are sent out in waves of 1000 every so often. It takes less than 15 seconds for all 1000 to be claimed[1]. [1] https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109552637982709508 https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109552637982709508

98codes 4y ago

> I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot. I had thought since they first started locking down 3rd party apps years ago that if/when they ever had a "Twitter Pro" or whatever, that allowing subscribed users to use a third party app would be part of it. After all, lots of online service subs eliminate ads in the product, so why not Twitter? I assumed rational thinking on their part, I suppose.

barnabee 4y ago
Yeah, that would have been so incredibly obvious that this whole episode is surely final and clinching proof to anyone still on the fence that he doesn't have a clue what he's doing. Pitiful.
joegahona 4y ago
> After all, lots of online service subs eliminate ads in the product, so why not Twitter? Lots of online service subs are eliminating the ad-free thing now, because they know they can prove more value of paying users to their advertisers. I don't think the NY Times subscription was ever ad-free, and many publishers are now removing that perk. But I agree with you. I would've paid for Twitter Blue if it were completely ad-free. This is the main value of YouTube Premium to me.

drcongo 4y ago

There's a truly excellent, open-source Mastodon client called Ice Cubes which hit the App Store yesterday. The very first thing I did was donate the maximum possible IAP.

zimpenfish 4y ago
Annoyingly, seems to be Mastodon-specific - can't OAuth to GotoSocial and flat-out refuses to even consider an Akkoma instance. Let's hope they sort that out soon (since both of them support enough of the MastoAPI that other clients work fine.)
- ihuman 4y ago
  They just added GoToSocial support [0], and they are adding support for more instance types [1] [0] https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/pull/135 https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/pull/135 [1] https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/issues/16 https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/issues/16
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    Good stuff! (I wish the FediActivityPub people had spec'd up an API to avoid this kind of multi-implementation-who-supports-what shambles.) EDIT: Amusingly, I fixed the "cannot login to Pleroma" problem for `madon` this week - Pleroma/Akkoma require form data in the body, not the URL, for POST requests (which is fair since the HTML spec suggests this is the Right Way.)

ericmay 4y ago

What's the saying? First they came for the moderation, but I didn't care because they weren't moderating me. Then they fired employees so as to not have to pay severance or whatever but I didn't care because I don't work at Twitter. Then they came for the API and there was noone left to speak for me... Twitter and Elon have already done quite a bit of damage to the company, platform, and reputation. This is just a continued pattern, and it is disappointing. -edit- Just to be clear with the original comment I'm just giving OP a little bit of a hard time on a Friday :)

blowski 4y ago
It’s not like people didn’t speak out for the moderators or employees, just that Musk didn’t listen. If you’re looking for Nazi Germany analogies, perhaps Blitzkrieg is better - quickly destroying its entire userbase.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Some spoke out. But many were in the sickos-yes-yes.png camp of being absolutely gleeful. And a much larger number were indifferent or in the wait-and-see camp.
- graublau 4y ago
  ITT comparing 3rd party api limits to nazi germany
  - dylan604 4y ago
    what does the International Telephone & Telegraph company have to do with this thread?
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      In This Thread.
  - labster 4y ago
    Twitter needs more lebensraum for its own APIs.

akovaski 4y ago

> I'd happily donate 10x more to Ivory as an open source project than you'd make from selling it to me as a closed source app Tweetbot apparently cost $6/year, so are you saying you would donate $60/year if they released an open source Mastodon client? Are there other open source apps you donate to? I'm genuinely curious how people approach payment/donations for open source software, I'm not trying to pull some gotcha on you. I don't donate to any open source projects, but I feel that I probably should.

rrix2 4y ago
i'm donating 5$/mo to no less than five open source patreon/opencollective right now
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
barnabee 4y ago
I would donate $10 per month to a decent open source Mastodon client, at least while I was using it regularly (and would have done so for Tweetbot). I donate to a number of open source projects, a decent number of them regularly. I am lucky enough to be able to afford to buy software when I need to and donate to projects I think are worthy of support. It makes me extremely happy every time I am able to donate to an open source project instead of buying software. It makes me sick every time I capitulate and end up renting softare. Software subscriptions can die in a fire. I'd encourage you to donate if you can afford to, but if you can't, that's ok. A world dominated by open computing platforms and software is such an exciting prospect that it's worth putting a bit of money and effort into. And if that doesn't pan out, at least you helped the maintainers a little!
bcrl 4y ago
Linux Weekly News ended up with this kind of model. A long time ago back in 2002, LWN was about to shut down, but those of us in the Linux community found it had tremendous value and asked for options to pay, as well as options to pay more. Here we are 2 decades later and LWN is still around! Sometimes it pays to let your users help out financially.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

e-clinton 4y ago

Blocking journalists was the last straw for me.

rtkwe 4y ago

It wasn't just pay for fewer ads though it was supposedly going to be pay for algorithmic upranking, extra say with reports and in polls, and many other things.

Swizec 4y ago

> But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many of the power users who are most engaged with Twitter As the "author" of some 80,000+ tweets (can't find number anymore), their mobile app was unusable. I've been on TweetBot for close to 10 years I think. TweetBot2 was my first mobile twitter client iirc. No more mobile twitter for me. Shame. But probably better this way. It really hasn't felt like a fun place for the last 3 or 4 years. More like a cigarette habit you can't shake.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Between this and the blue-check thing it's like he doesn't get that the primary draw of the site is high-volume posters and/or famous people who(se PR teams) post. Like, ease of finding and reading (plus interacting with—responding, rewteeting, et c) posts by famous (or at least Internet-famous) power users is the main reason Twitter's a bigger draw than, say, Mastodon. If people just wanted to read their non-famous pals' posts, they could do that on any chat app. It'd be like YouTube charging top creators for access (sure, the blue checks aren't "access", but they're a huge discovery-aid and solve problems for Twitter) then also cutting off any 3rd-party tools those creators use to make their jobs easier, which would obviously be a giant WTF. Why on earth would you make things more difficult for the very people providing the content that makes your site worth anything to begin with!
- Swizec 4y ago
  > just wanted to read their non-famous pals' posts I suspect Elon lives in a bubble where all of his friends are famous or highly desirable in some way. He doesn't understand that most people's friends _aren't_ a brand.
MandieD 4y ago
All of the drama of the last three months has helped me finally kick that filthy habit, so thanks, Elon.

riley_dog 4y ago

> I don't think Mastodon is a good replacement for Twitter at all, but I am going to have to try it. What exactly leads you to believe it's not a good replacement, especially considering you haven't tried it?

MBCook 4y ago
My only issue with Mastodon is the network effect. There are many accounts I follow on Twitter, relatively popular accounts not friends with 5 followers, that aren’t on Mastodon. So I’m missing a bunch of what I had. I found new things too, which is great. But it’s still never going to be a 1:1 replacement.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
criddell 4y ago
My main entry point to Twitter is their search box (I’m basically a read-only user). Mastodon seems to be resisting multi-instance searching and that makes it more cumbersome for me to use. If Mastodon isn’t interested in this functionality, it would be cool to see Google add a “mastodon:” search operator that works like their “site:” operator.

moneywoes 4y ago

What’s wrong with mastodon?