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From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. A more sane way to do this would have been with a public t

From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. A more sane way to do this would have been with a public tweet explaining why they were doing it (ad revenue), a 3 month lead time, and an API for helping apps get users to "upgrade" their account.

cercatrova 4y ago
> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. This does not follow, in Twitter's case. If Twitter's API made them money, they wouldn't have shut it down, but it's the exact opposite, it costs them money while providing no monetary benefit. So in this case, from the business perspective, it is correct to start charging for it. Now they could spend 3 months but with debt service payments of a billion dollars a year, I highly doubt that they have the patience to wait that long.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  It provides no direct income. But it provide monetary benefits by attracting and keeping users, which encourages ad spend. Or at least it used to, until the big advertisers were driven away. If someone is trying to run a business and doesn't understand how indirect income works they might want to consider something less challenging. What this actually does is remove API access from small startups, solo developers, and other innovators, and reserves it for corporations.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    The number of users kept via the API is not as high as people might think, so I would actually agree that if that's the case, then Musk correctly shut off the API for people who weren't bringing in more benefits than the costs they were incurring.
    - zpeti 4y ago
      Frankly the guy designed rockets that landed for the first time ever so I think he probably has the brain capacity to make this calculation. He might not be great at decisions where people and politics are involved, but this isn’t one of those decisions. But some people here on HN really want to believe he’s an idiot, which he’s not.
      - cycomanic 4y ago
        Can we please stop saying that the CEO of a company did anything but lead a company (not to downplay the difficulty of leading a company). Musk certainly did not design rockets that land themselves. I highly doubt that he could even write down (let alone solve) the main important equations when asked. It's funny how some execs are attributed with doing everything (Jobs and Musk are the main ones), while nobody would say Adani dug up coal from the ground.
        zpeti 4y ago
        Watching even 1 video of an everyday astronaut interview with Musk makes it completely obvious you are completely wrong. And so do tonnes of testimonials on quora from spacex employees. Musk is the chief engineer of spacex rockets. He's not just a CEO. Do a little research before making comments like this.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Twitter API is what publishers use to bring content onto Twitter. That content is a reason why other users visit Twitter. With that content gone, Twitter is a lot less attractive to many. Will be interesting to observe ... will publishers pay? Will users enjoy without those?
- enkid 4y ago
  The gp comment is talking about the indirect benefits of having an API, which is a large number of free developers and researchers help you improve your product at a pretty low cost (compared to if you paid them directly
logifail 4y ago
> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem I'd love to have free API access to all kinds of companies. Think how much easier and faster it would be booking your travel if all airlines and hotels let you straight in to the raw pricing and availability data from their reservation systems. Think how much money you could save if retailers exposed all their product availability and pricing data, live. They don't, because they all regard this stuff as "commercially sensitive". Why should Twitter be any different?
- ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
  Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive as you don't typically want the end consumers to see how much profit is being made from them and how much discount is given to wholesalers. Twitter data is rarely anything to do with pricing, so that's why it's different.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive [..] I'm not after internal pricing/B2B pricing/discounting, in my thought experiment I "just" want free API access to information that's already on public websites (eg end-user/retail pricing for rooms/flights/widgets). I'm not aware of any airlines/hotels/retailers that allow even that. In bulk, it's commercially sensitive too.
    - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
      I've heard that they do a lot of price manipulation with holidays, so I can see why they wouldn't want to provide enough data for customers to track prices over time. Also, you'd be bypassing their advertising. But yeah, it would be great if we didn't have to use their websites to navigate the data.
      - logifail 4y ago
        > you'd be bypassing their advertising. Right. So back to where we started: what's actually wrong with Twitter deciding to insist on eyeballs on twitter.com instead of scripts pointing at their free API?
smoldesu 4y ago
If charging for API usage amounts to developer alienation, then why is Apple the most successful business in the world? Frankly, I don't think Musk much cares for the developers. From a business perspective, he might be right here - developers aren't the ones watching ads or paying for microtransactions, users are. The developers, at his scale, are a liability. Restricting their capabilities and profiting from their struggle is just part of the modern tech stack. I hate it as much as you do, but calling it "insane" is a hysterical double-standard that crops up just too often on HN.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Apple can nickel and dime developers because a good app on their ecosystem is profitable. Nobody is making enough profit via the Twitter API to make it worth staying on. Twitter is a distant #3 social network that itself has never really made money.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    > Twitter is a distant #3 social network This is being too generous. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are all far larger than Twitter. Reddit is also just barely larger than Twitter, though at that scale you have to consider who has more bots. Twitter claims slightly more MAUs than Snapchat, but since Snapchat isn't a viral network it probably has no bots to speak of, making it larger than Twitter in terms of real users.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  But this comes after pulling the plug on the third-party apps without a word of warning or even acknowledging that they had done it. So those devs turned around and said, well, guess we'll go work on Mastodon apps now. Presumably there was a noticeable drop in engagement as those users cut back their time on twitter. So now twitter is like you can come back if you pay, but we can't tell you what that will cost.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  If the App Store had been free for 15 years and then Apple said "if you don't pay us $100 a year in one week, we'll delete your app" then you can bet that Tim Cook would be seeking new opportunities _within hours_. There's a big difference between "this has always cost something" and "this is going from free to paid with _one week's notice_".
dragonwriter 4y ago
> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. Musk is trying to monetize every last aspect of current Twitter possible while cutting costs to stave off bankruptcy that his acquisition made imminent long enough to pivot Twitter into a completely different business model centering on being a payment intermediary, apparently to relitigate his firing twice from X.com before it became PayPal. He doesn't care about the ecosystem, because its an ecosystem for a completely different busoness than the one he wants Twitter to be. He cares that use of Twitter outside of the 1st party frontends bypasses monetization, so he wants it monetized or gone.
- notahacker 4y ago
  This is true, but I suspect he greatly underestimates how useful the ecosystem is to actually making Twitter relevant enough for a critical mass of people to want to use the first party frontends. Which is odd, because Elon is someone that definitely will remember AOL, MSN messenger and MySpace being things...

cercatrova 4y ago

> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. This does not follow, in Twitter's case. If Twitter's API made them money, they wouldn't have shut it down, but it's the exact opposite, it costs them money while providing no monetary benefit. So in this case, from the business perspective, it is correct to start charging for it. Now they could spend 3 months but with debt service payments of a billion dollars a year, I highly doubt that they have the patience to wait that long.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
It provides no direct income. But it provide monetary benefits by attracting and keeping users, which encourages ad spend. Or at least it used to, until the big advertisers were driven away. If someone is trying to run a business and doesn't understand how indirect income works they might want to consider something less challenging. What this actually does is remove API access from small startups, solo developers, and other innovators, and reserves it for corporations.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  The number of users kept via the API is not as high as people might think, so I would actually agree that if that's the case, then Musk correctly shut off the API for people who weren't bringing in more benefits than the costs they were incurring.
  - zpeti 4y ago
    Frankly the guy designed rockets that landed for the first time ever so I think he probably has the brain capacity to make this calculation. He might not be great at decisions where people and politics are involved, but this isn’t one of those decisions. But some people here on HN really want to believe he’s an idiot, which he’s not.
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      Can we please stop saying that the CEO of a company did anything but lead a company (not to downplay the difficulty of leading a company). Musk certainly did not design rockets that land themselves. I highly doubt that he could even write down (let alone solve) the main important equations when asked. It's funny how some execs are attributed with doing everything (Jobs and Musk are the main ones), while nobody would say Adani dug up coal from the ground.
      - zpeti 4y ago
        Watching even 1 video of an everyday astronaut interview with Musk makes it completely obvious you are completely wrong. And so do tonnes of testimonials on quora from spacex employees. Musk is the chief engineer of spacex rockets. He's not just a CEO. Do a little research before making comments like this.
johannes1234321 4y ago
Twitter API is what publishers use to bring content onto Twitter. That content is a reason why other users visit Twitter. With that content gone, Twitter is a lot less attractive to many. Will be interesting to observe ... will publishers pay? Will users enjoy without those?
enkid 4y ago
The gp comment is talking about the indirect benefits of having an API, which is a large number of free developers and researchers help you improve your product at a pretty low cost (compared to if you paid them directly

logifail 4y ago

> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem I'd love to have free API access to all kinds of companies. Think how much easier and faster it would be booking your travel if all airlines and hotels let you straight in to the raw pricing and availability data from their reservation systems. Think how much money you could save if retailers exposed all their product availability and pricing data, live. They don't, because they all regard this stuff as "commercially sensitive". Why should Twitter be any different?

ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive as you don't typically want the end consumers to see how much profit is being made from them and how much discount is given to wholesalers. Twitter data is rarely anything to do with pricing, so that's why it's different.
- logifail 4y ago
  > Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive [..] I'm not after internal pricing/B2B pricing/discounting, in my thought experiment I "just" want free API access to information that's already on public websites (eg end-user/retail pricing for rooms/flights/widgets). I'm not aware of any airlines/hotels/retailers that allow even that. In bulk, it's commercially sensitive too.
  - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
    I've heard that they do a lot of price manipulation with holidays, so I can see why they wouldn't want to provide enough data for customers to track prices over time. Also, you'd be bypassing their advertising. But yeah, it would be great if we didn't have to use their websites to navigate the data.
    - logifail 4y ago
      > you'd be bypassing their advertising. Right. So back to where we started: what's actually wrong with Twitter deciding to insist on eyeballs on twitter.com instead of scripts pointing at their free API?

smoldesu 4y ago

If charging for API usage amounts to developer alienation, then why is Apple the most successful business in the world? Frankly, I don't think Musk much cares for the developers. From a business perspective, he might be right here - developers aren't the ones watching ads or paying for microtransactions, users are. The developers, at his scale, are a liability. Restricting their capabilities and profiting from their struggle is just part of the modern tech stack. I hate it as much as you do, but calling it "insane" is a hysterical double-standard that crops up just too often on HN.

rchaud 4y ago
Apple can nickel and dime developers because a good app on their ecosystem is profitable. Nobody is making enough profit via the Twitter API to make it worth staying on. Twitter is a distant #3 social network that itself has never really made money.
- kibwen 4y ago
  > Twitter is a distant #3 social network This is being too generous. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are all far larger than Twitter. Reddit is also just barely larger than Twitter, though at that scale you have to consider who has more bots. Twitter claims slightly more MAUs than Snapchat, but since Snapchat isn't a viral network it probably has no bots to speak of, making it larger than Twitter in terms of real users.
Finnucane 4y ago
But this comes after pulling the plug on the third-party apps without a word of warning or even acknowledging that they had done it. So those devs turned around and said, well, guess we'll go work on Mastodon apps now. Presumably there was a noticeable drop in engagement as those users cut back their time on twitter. So now twitter is like you can come back if you pay, but we can't tell you what that will cost.
rsynnott 4y ago
If the App Store had been free for 15 years and then Apple said "if you don't pay us $100 a year in one week, we'll delete your app" then you can bet that Tim Cook would be seeking new opportunities _within hours_. There's a big difference between "this has always cost something" and "this is going from free to paid with _one week's notice_".

dragonwriter 4y ago

> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. Musk is trying to monetize every last aspect of current Twitter possible while cutting costs to stave off bankruptcy that his acquisition made imminent long enough to pivot Twitter into a completely different business model centering on being a payment intermediary, apparently to relitigate his firing twice from X.com before it became PayPal. He doesn't care about the ecosystem, because its an ecosystem for a completely different busoness than the one he wants Twitter to be. He cares that use of Twitter outside of the 1st party frontends bypasses monetization, so he wants it monetized or gone.

notahacker 4y ago
This is true, but I suspect he greatly underestimates how useful the ecosystem is to actually making Twitter relevant enough for a critical mass of people to want to use the first party frontends. Which is odd, because Elon is someone that definitely will remember AOL, MSN messenger and MySpace being things...