23 ms·

The Twitter API is now effectively unmaintained

432 points by edent 4y ago

killingtime74 4y ago
Twitter is now effectively unmaintained.....
ZunarJ5 4y ago
At a premium cost too.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TheChaplain 4y ago
Perhaps Twitter is becoming the golden example of how not to run a business?
- thedailymail 4y ago
  It really does seem like a historic moment in business history. I'm strugling to think of a precedent, other than cases of outright fraud, where a prominent firm (= its management) experienced so much negative publicity and self-owning.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    More than half of that negative publicity is due to the people who make publicity (journalists) having their hang out taken over by a billionaire they hate. No comment on the other half.
    - e40 4y ago
      Literally everything I have heard about twitter came from twitter or here and it was all negative.
      - freeone3000 4y ago
        Yes, Twitter is defined by its users hating it. (This does prove some issues with monetization)
    - d23 4y ago
      Here it is, that tired old argument that’s also used to defend Trump: it’s the biased media. And just like Trump, I can look at Musk’s tweets too and see how obnoxious, narcissistic, petty, and disingenuous they are for myself. In fact, it’s hard to avoid now that he appears to have goosed the algorithm to shove his tweets down everyone’s throat.
      - concordDance 4y ago
        It's possible for someone to suck AND the media to be biased against them. Just reading Trump and Musk's tweets will tell you plenty with zero bias. And indeed, this is how you can tell that Trump is legitimately a fool and Musk is simultaneously whimsical and stubborn. This does not mean there isn't also an extra bit of anti-Musk/Trump stuff piled on top (in Musk's case the stuff about him inheriting an Emerald mine and lying about his child dying in his arms and in Trump's case the stuff about him being a big anti-LGBT guy).
        d23 4y ago
        You said it's "more than half" of the negativity, not "an extra bit." > This does not mean there isn't also an extra bit of anti-Musk/Trump stuff piled on top (in Musk's case the stuff about him inheriting an Emerald mine and lying about his child dying in his arms I guess you're implying the emerald mine stuff is false? Or are you saying it's not a big deal? And re: the child dying in his arms, the media is quoting his wife, who said he's lying. Are they to just ignore a story like that?
        concordDance 4y ago
        "Half" vs "a bit" is far too big an argument for a hackernews comment section On the rest: He did not inherit an Emerald mine and no reliable source has alleged he did, nor that his father even owned any part in the mine after the 90s, nor are there any reliable sources stating that Musk's father monetarily helped him in business other than a $28k loan he paid back. Heck, they even failed at doing a quick Google to figure out how much a pocket full of uncut emeralds actually goes for (a few hundred dollaras). And yet he's often portrayed as a trust fund kid who was given millions and never worked a day in his life. On the child dying, neither his wife nor he lied: https://twitter.com/justinemusk/status/1595539044217552896 https://twitter.com/justinemusk/status/1595539044217552896 The baby death rattled in her arms but he felt the last heartbeat. When journalists dislike you they will knowingly propagate misleading distortions and myths and will never correct inaccuracies that went against you or promote facts that are in your favour.
  - bakuninsbart 4y ago
    While this is true, it doesn't really seem to damage Twitter as a platform for now. - And it is not as if Musk turned a great profitable business into trash, Twitter never had a sustainable business model.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    To be fair, corporate acquisitions do often fall into disrepair and failure. It’s just that usually the company making the acquisition… still has their existing business. When it’s an individual making a botched acquisition, you get to watch the company disintegrate instead.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Sears.
  - derf_ 4y ago
    With one memo, Stephen Elop [1] drove Nokia's market cap from its peak of over $57b in March of 2010 to a trough of less than $7b in July of 2012 [2]. [1] https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/08/coining-term-elop-effect-when-you-combine-osborne-effect-and-ratner-effect.html https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/08/coinin... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NOK/nokia/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NOK/nokia/market-c...
  - antifa 4y ago
    Imagine if Twitter actually came out of this fine and then business schools decided to build a generation of "tough guy CEO" MBAs. Or worse, imagine if Twitter continues to plummet as we currently see it, then business schools decide to write history as if it were a success story anyways.
    - skeeter2020 4y ago
      Not sure how old you are but this already happened in the 80's. We also got an entire generation of "Steve Jobs was a successful asshole, ergo asshole => success" MBAs
  - KineticLensman 4y ago
    Gerald Ratner who described the products of his own jewellery company as ‘crap’ [edit] he actually said ‘total crap’ and lost £500m.
- spiderfarmer 4y ago
  So far it has exposed the real business acumen of Elon Musk. The only company he runs by himself, arguably the easiest to run, is losing him a staggering amount of money in one year. I wonder how he rates his own perfomance.
  - croisillon 4y ago
    Looking into it.
  - nxm 4y ago
    Twitter was doing that before Elon bought them
    - halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
      They had just recently become profitable before the Elon takeover.
      - garyrob 4y ago
        Data?
      - adql 4y ago
        The 2020 was in negative, 2021 was also in negative. That's not "becoming profitable"
  - KoftaBob 4y ago
    The way I see it, it more-so shows that his strength is in companies that are heavy on complex engineering problems. Twitter on the other hand, is a company dealing with sociological/societal challenges, being that it's a social network. That takes an entirely different kind of skill set to do well as a CEO for.
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      I don't buy it. Internal reports from SpaceX and Tesla detail Musk's chaotic, capricious management style that they have to spend resources to actively manage. SpaceX is better at it I guess, because he's seemed to have caused far more problems at Tesla with his antics. Either way, he's essentially abdicated his CEO role at both companies, and his chaotic management style is on full display now, which confirms the Tesla and SpaceX reports. But why did Tesla and SpaceX thrive where Twitter is failing? Because the former companies grew up to create processes that contain Musk; whereas Twitter was bought outright, so his blast radius is unlimited there. Twitter has no Musk immune response. At SpaceX when Musk suggests X, where X is... I dunno, an really dumb idea that no one would ever want, the people at SpaceX know how to redirect Musk until he drops it, or they know how to shape it into a good idea. At Twitter, they have no idea how to do this, and so Musk always gets his way, every time. All the people with the skills to turn bad ideas into good ones have left, all the people who tried to manage Musk were fired, so now he's left to his whims. And it shows. If anything, Musk has proven how ceremonial the CEO role is. He has the title CEO of at least 4 companies, and claims 80 hours per week is a full time role. So at best CEO is a part time job.
- okeuro49 4y ago
  It seems to me that Musk is moving away from advertisements, to trying to build the first social network that doesn't rely on the user being the product, but rather paying for the product. That's supposedly what tech people root for, but because its Elon Musk, who eschews many of the shibboleths of the Left, people criticise Twitter as a proxy for his political views.
  - bhaak 4y ago
    This would be a laudable direction to take the company towards ... ... if he didn't start by putting $12.5 billions of debt on the balance sheet after the buyout. Which means that Twitter has to pay $1 billion of interest each year which it didn't have to do before that hostile takeover. How many people would need to buy Twitter Blue to offset the interest alone? ~~125 million users which is about a third of its whole active user base~~ 10 million which is about 3% of their active user base (I can't do maths, thanks supermatt, luckily I'm good looking and can program).
    - ed_elliott_asc 4y ago
      Just to pay off the interest? Ouch ouch ouch
    - supermatt 4y ago
      1bn / $8/m (excluding costs, etc) / 12 months = ~ 10m
  - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
    And so how’s that going?
  - draugadrotten 4y ago
    Buying twitter was never about profiting - at least not the profiting from the company balance sheet. The profit can come elsewhere, by the influence gained from owning and controlling the twitter firehose and recommendation algorithms. In a way, this is Elon buying a newspaper like rich people always did to influence politics, except that he is buying a modern version of a newspaper. Musk bought twitter because it is and was an integral part in social media campaigns for the last few elections. Targeted ads on twitter can reach journalists and politicians, their timelines "for you" controlled by Elon's and they might not even understand that they are being nudged by the content shown in the app. Heck, just by unbanning Trump and allowing MFA Russia on the app, he is moving the Overton window a bit. The proof is in the pudding as they say. How many million people now see Elon Musks personal twitter posts, that did not see them before he bought twitter?
- concordDance 4y ago
  A year ago it was the golden example of how not to run a business, it's now the golden example of how not to run a tech system/service.
  - muyuu 4y ago
    a year ago it had just lost over US$1B over the running year
    - illiarian 4y ago
      So, like Uber, or any of HN's top startups. In modern times this is called a shining example of how to run a company.
    - tlholaday 4y ago
      Compared to losing US$24B with Musk.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      Now it's spending $1.3B p.a. on servicing loans alone. Does that sound like an improvement?
- muyuu 4y ago
  I don't think Twitter is alone in that respect. Twitter is unique in that it was acquired for US$ 44B when it was a business that lost huge amounts of money consistently for years, and the owner intended it to have it run old school style, as in making a profit, but also doing so in such short notice that he dismantled entire branches of the company wholesale. Obviously for people relying on pre-existing services and rates from Twitter, it sucks. But the root problem is that Twitter had not been a sustainable business for a long, long time. One has to wonder how did they even subsist for so long and how much institutional money, not just VC/investor money, and who knows what sort of government/agencies pay-to-play deals made it even possible because the sort of money they cashed in during the only few years they've even been profitable seems absurdly high and they have never replicated that under normal circumstances. With the ad model struggling and institutional ads sort of in retreat, the entire sector is struggling.
  - oxfordmale 4y ago
    Not sustainable? Twitter generated $5 billion revenue in 2021, a 35% increase on 2020 figures and a significant improvement on the 8% and 13% increase the two years before. Cut backs were needed, as advertising revenue would have been significantly down this year, given the economic down turn. However, there was no need to gut the company to make it profitable.
    - zpeti 4y ago
      > Cut backs were needed I mean, you are both claiming cuts were needed and they’re too much. So how much was right? How do you know? You’d do a better job than the people who have access to the numbers? That’s a fairly arrogant position
      - oxfordmale 4y ago
        Most FAANGS have been cutting by 10 to 15%. That trims excess fat without gutting a company. Twitter seems to have a serious cultural problem at the moment, and that is generally a lot harder to fix than to rehire when the growth curve inverses. I am sure Musk had to cut by 50%, if only because Twitter's interest payments are now significant. However, that does bring significant challenges.
- eclipsetheworld 4y ago
  I'll take the contrarian stance here. During the Morgan Stanley Conference interview, Elon Musk forecasted that Twitter had the potential to achieve a positive cash flow status by the second quarter of 2023. Advertisers are returning to the platform and they just announced their new API monetization plans [0]. The company's strategic direction notwithstanding, Twitter may be a profitable company soon. [0] https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1641222782594990080 https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1641222782594990080
  - Kye 4y ago
    But which advertisers? It's not enough to get +10,000 people trying out a $10 or $100 ad while rates are low due to low bidding competition. Twitter needs the big advertisers who expect to have someone at the company support their campaigns. The new owner fired the people who did that. Worse, he fired the people who'd spent years earning those advertisers' trust and patience.
    - eclipsetheworld 4y ago
      Performance-focused advertisers. Growing this segment was already set as a strategic direction for Twitter in 2021, however, Musk's takeover and the subsequent departure of brand-focused advertisers seem to have accelerated these plans [0]. As for brand-focused advertisers, I can see parallels to 2017's "YouTube Adpocalypse" in which advertisers paused their spending due to their ads being displayed before videos containing offensive content. They recovered from it by demonitizing offensive content. Twitter will have to address "brand safety" concerns, however, [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/have-the-ads-in-your-twitter-feed-changed-theres-a-reason-for-that-1772f9f3 https://www.wsj.com/articles/have-the-ads-in-your-twitter-fe...
  - comte7092 4y ago
    At this point I’ve learned not to take anything Elon says about the future, especially the near future, at face value. Could it happen? Certainly. Will it happen the way he says it will? Probably not.
  - adql 4y ago
- wongarsu 4y ago
  He only owns the company for 5 months so far. He seems set on transforming Twitter, and any company looks bad while in the middle of a transformation. I'm not saying Elon is doing a good job, all signs point to the opposite. He probably though so too when he announced to step down from CEO (though that has yet to happen). But if he was doing a good job, it would also be really hard to tell in this phase. I don't think we are far enough into this to draw any good conclusions.
  - rurp 4y ago
    It's not really hard to tell if he's doing a good job, he's clearly not. Losing nearly half of revenue in only a few months, adding crippling debt payments, stiffing employees on their severance, refusing to pay rent and other services, plus countless other debacles make it clear this is a dysfunctional company. Network effects and resilient architecture can keep a company humming along for some time despite incompetent management, but those resources will get depleted and they are hard to regain.
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  More like, how not to buy a business. Elon basically started with the Private Equity leveraged buyout playbook - borrow money to buy a business, then assign that business the debt used to buy it. But it’s unclear how he’s going to do part 2, which is to either suck enough value out of it to recoup the purchase price before it fails completely, or turn it around and make it more valuable than when he bought it. Right now Twitter needs to drastically increase its revenue and decrease its expenses just to service the new debt load. Hence Elon firing everyone and trying to charge more for every little thing. It’s amazing that Twitter was more or less self-sustaining prior to this, and now it’s not.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    I think it's a mistake to evaluate his success with it in purely financial terms like that. He's proven himself thin skinned, egotistical, and capricious, and is easy to provoke into vindictive & retributive actions even if not in his best interests. I think a big part of why he bought twitter was a sense of grievance, basically that the wrong people were getting positive attention, that people were being mean to and making fun of him and his friends & allies. He wanted to restructure the mechanics and incentives of the platform to better support the people and outcomes he values. I'm not sure whether he succeeded by these terms either, it's still too early to tell I think. But I do think it's an important factor in evaluating whether he succeeded in what he set out to do when buying twitter. And from that perspective "make it good or (let it) die trying" may be an acceptable compromise. He doesn't get the musk-adoration platform he wants, but at least there is no longer the musk-ridicule platform he perceived it to be.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Remember, he didn't want to buy Twitter. He pitched it in the first place purely in an attempt to get leverage over the board. He didn't really want to own it. The board called his bluff and said "sold!", then Musk spent a great deal of time and effort trying to wiggle out of the deal. He failed, and now he's stuck with it. Everything he's doing now is trying to minimize the amount of financial damage this debacle will cause him.
- mjr00 4y ago
  No, it's the complete opposite: the fact that Twitter has laid off 80% of its staff and is still operating has encouraged execs at other tech companies to push staff cuts. Vanity Fair wrote an article about this yesterday.[0] I do think there are long term-issues with laying off that many employees, but clearly the "if you fire all these engineers the service is going to collapse and stop working" doomsaying was unfounded. [0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/big-tech-layoffs-2023-twitter-meta-amazon-google https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/big-tech-layoffs-202...
  - revel 4y ago
    Twitter has remained functional largely because all the former employees did their jobs effectively. I've seen what happens when companies lay a tech department to waste and it looks like this. This is a one-way cost reduction program that will forever reduce the quality of workers available to the company. The way this pans out is that in the short term, nothing much happens except deadlines start to get pushed out. As time goes on everything becomes more and more dysfunctional. All progress grinds to a halt; simply treading water created by ongoing churn and operational needs ends up becoming impossible. Next the business tries to get more and more out of the remaining staff until they get fed up with it and leave. Shortly before the wheels really come off, legal and compliance issues will suddenly start ballooning. That's where we are now. Nobody wants to work on these kind of projects -- they do nothing for your career and nobody will celebrate your work -- but they are not optional. Elon seems to have decided simply not to comply with laws he dislikes in regulatory environments where he thinks he can get away with it. This can work for a while, but companies with no internal governance and that regularly flout laws can don't tend to last for too long without making painful changes. Let's see how it turns out. Given the reported state of the company it sounds like he has about a year to figure it out.
    - Caldwell-77 4y ago
      In cutting its workforce down from 7,500 to 1,800 employees, I wonder what percentage of Twitter's legal/compliance staff were kept on.
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
- misssocrates 4y ago
  Perhaps Twitter will be the golden example of how to run a business like SpaceX and Tesla became after many years of derision?
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    Buy a company for $44 Billion, and now offers equity at $20 Billion valuation? https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-offers-new-equity-grants-to-staff-938ee7f8 https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-offers-new-equity-grant... The company has lost over half its value in just 5 months.
    - misssocrates 4y ago
      He overpaid and that was already well known before he even took the reigns.
      - dragontamer 4y ago
        Overpaying by well over double is... a bad business decision. Is it not? Even as bad as the stock market was last year, very few companies lost 50%+ of their value. -------- There's a lot of other decisions that are very strange coming out of Tesla, such as the removal of RADAR and Ultrasonic Sensors. Does Elon Musk really believe he can compete against next-generation companies when he's removing sensors from his cars?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        zaroth 4y ago
        Regarding the Tesla comments; Radar is back by the way, with an increased resolution that makes it more useful in highways where overhead signs false positive as a collision risk on the old sensor. The ultrasonic sensors IMO were basically worthless. Initial analysis of the new v4 FSD hardware indicates they are adding more cameras - including bumper cameras to cover blind spots that previously would have relied on ultrasonics. It doesn’t seem like HW4 can be retrofit like HW3 was, so it will be very interesting how that all plays out! https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-hardware-4-hd-radar-first-look-photos/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-hardware-4-hd-radar-first-lo... https://mobile.twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1625905220432671015 https://mobile.twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1625905220432...
- onion2k 4y ago
  The antagonist forces of "Ha! Look how much the revenue fell!" versus "Hmm.. look how much they slashed costs.." means it's really hard to tell how well Twitter will do in the long term.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
swyx 4y ago
and the new twitter api limits announced is like 50 per 24 hours… https://twitter.com/igorbrigadir/status/1641201626449956865?s=46&t=90xQ8sGy63D2OtiaoGJuww https://twitter.com/igorbrigadir/status/1641201626449956865?...
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  Hilariously, the https://developer.twitter.com/en/portal/products/free https://developer.twitter.com/en/portal/products/free link takes me to the "we're evaluating your application for V2 access" holding page. Which, IIRC, I applied for in March 2021. Just a clusterfuck of an omnishambles.
- jimmySixDOF 4y ago
  What a huge missed opportunity for Usage Based Pricing [1] [1] https://openviewpartners.com/blog/state-of-usage-based-pricing https://openviewpartners.com/blog/state-of-usage-based-prici...
aww_dang 4y ago
I'm seeing more and more Twitter integrations based on scrapers.
- dekimir 4y ago
  Me too. Probably the way of the future. Each of us could run a little personal scraper, and the Twitter servers wouldn't know the difference.
creshal 4y ago
For being unmaintained for months it's holding up remarkably well. Edit: And the sole active Ads developer who was still actively responding when the blog post was written, was apparently laid off a week after the article was posted. Ouch.
- cldellow 4y ago
  Eh, for some values of well. My post is one of the "12 [...] about Twitter not responding to the standard API access request process". It's easy to keep an API running if you reject access to it, no? Due to a delightful quirk of how the Twitter Ads API review process works, our entire application no longer works, even for non-Ads API use. Genius way to manage the load.
- imwithstoopid 4y ago
  > For being unmaintained for months which describes probably 90% of web apis out there imho, unless a company is dogfooding its own api, I assume it is broken/bitrotted/owner-left-the-company etc twitter is by no means alone
t344344 4y ago
> Another data point: of the 20 newest posts on this forum, 12 are about Twitter not responding to the standard API access request process, and 4 seem to be about API bugs. This has been the pattern for a while now. It seems like Twitter is now largely ignoring all manual processes and bugs. Non-responsiveness is pretty normal for large corporations. Try to send email to Google or Facebook. Calling their products "unsupported" and "unmaintained" may actually fit dictionary definition!
- dannyr 4y ago
  The author was making comparisons to previous activity from Twitter employees not to other normal corporations.
amitrip 4y ago
[dead]
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Twitter following the LinkedIn playbook. And LinkedIn is still more generous. Absurd that these platforms have no scruples about gathering data from users, but if you try doing the opposite, they’ll block you at every turn.
- foreverobama 4y ago
  What's really absurd is that people are still using that platform at all.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > Absurd that these platforms have no scruples about gathering data from users, but if you try doing the opposite, they’ll block you at every turn. Most people have no problem getting paid too much for something they're selling, but they'll try to block you at every turn if you want them to overpay.
- dekimir 4y ago
  For personal consumption, one can always scrape one's feed[1]. I wonder why more of us don't do it. [1] https://twitter.com/feedliness/status/1638580147304505349?s=20 https://twitter.com/feedliness/status/1638580147304505349?s=...
social_quotient 4y ago
The blog is over a month old, the api is still up and running. I’m not exactly how this is on page 1 of HN?
- segmondy 4y ago
  up and running is different from "unmaintained"
  - social_quotient 4y ago
    Yes, I view keeping the lights on generally different from continuous improvement and new development. The api is not accidentally online still, so it would be reductive to say zero people are in charge and aware of it being online and available.
- zpeti 4y ago
  Because complaining about how badly Twitter is run about as popular as claiming depositors are investors in SVB.
  - foreverobama 4y ago
    [dead]
- oxfordmale 4y ago
  Unmaintained APIs are generally not a problem as long as the underlying platform doesn't change. Let's talk again in 18 months.
- myko 4y ago
  the api no longer serves complete tweets, it cuts text off of those larger than 280 characters it's busted
h11h 4y ago
One data point is that there is no way to get the full text of long tweets from the API. Twitter Blue subscribers have been able to post tweets longer than 280 characters since early February but the API only returns the first 280 or so characters.
- titaniumtown 4y ago
  That's hilarious. The complete incompetence over there lol.
  - stainablesteel 4y ago
    is it incompetent to not maintain something you don't want to maintain?
    - addisonl 4y ago
      It's incompetent to not want to maintain it.
      - 100721 4y ago
        * without taking it offline
    - pcthrowaway 4y ago
      The incompetence is at the very top, choosing not to maintain something that they were apparently making $400m/year from paid subscribers for
      - cutemonster 4y ago
        Yes, at the same time, this: > complete incompetence over there sounded to me as if it also includes the employees
      - dev_daftly 4y ago
        The post seems to talk about 2 different APIs, a public one they are not continuing to work on and a commercial one that makes $400mm/year
jwmoz 4y ago
Crazy to watch Twitter being built and scaled back in the Ruby days and now effectively destroyed.
- realjhol 4y ago
  It works fine though
  - top_sigrid 4y ago
    Does it? Besides numerous malfunctions over the last months one current example is that I can see posts of accounts that I blocked or that blocked me in my feed, which I have seen reported by others aswell. This is _basic_ functionality.
    - realjhol 4y ago
      The claim was that Twitter would experience some kind of total collapse- that Musk had no choice but to capitulate to demands of a disgruntled work force, many of whom were incensed that the platform would no long actively censor the speech of huge numbers of people. As it turns out Musk mostly didn't need them, and firing them didn't harm his interests to any tangible degree.
      - anigbrowl 4y ago
        No it wasn't. And if Musk's actions aren't harming his interests, that's only because he says he doesn't mind losing ~$20 billion. I do not believe that he is going to be able to grow it into a $200 billion company on the back of frog Twitter.
        realjhol 4y ago
        None of this about money, though is it. It's about control. The ones who are most upset about this have an ideology that is a house of cards that has to be shielded from all interrogation, mocking and critique, lest it implode under the weight of its own internal inconsistencies. These people know very well how to distinguish friend and enemy, and Elon is decidedly not a friend. To lose this castle to an enemy like Musk is a huge problem for them because of its strategic importance, hence the fire-storm of consternation. In the wider world, the ones who are upset about this are vastly outnumbered by those who just want to have fun and express themselves on the Internet, so if Twitter can become that kind of a place it will do very well.
drstewart 4y ago
If only it had the rock solid reliability of something like GitHub or Reddit
rvz 4y ago
Another giant nothing complain post. It just means that companies should not build their entire business on someone else's API and Twitter can change it and their prices at anytime. No different to other platforms that allow third party apps. Contrary to this complaint post, the API is still up and far from 'unmaintained' or its 'immediate death' as incorrectly predicted 5 months ago with still 200M - 220M daily active users continuing to use the platform, even after all the chaos and nonsense articles. Free APIs forever is unsustainable for a business and eventually price increases will happen. Believing otherwise is essentially wishful thinking, just like basing an entire business on someone else's API and not paying for it. There is always a cost.
- phailhaus 4y ago
  You didn't read the article, because it has nothing to do with business users. The team responsible for maintaining the Twitter API is down to zero engineers. This is the product that brought in $400M ARR.
  - rvz 4y ago
    And you did not read the guidelines [0]. "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article". Once again, my point still stands. Unchallenged. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - phailhaus 4y ago
      Great point! Here's my updated response, unchallenged: The article has nothing to do with business users. The team responsible for maintaining the Twitter API is down to zero engineers. This is the product that brought in $400M ARR.
arecurrence 4y ago
From the comments that Musk has made over the last few months, this appears to be as intended. He doesn't seem to view the API as a benefit to the company nor a fit for his plans on where he wants to go with it.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  sounds like a hard job to quantify "can/does maintaining the API make the company money" on one hand you've got a knee-jerk answer: "absolutely! how could it not?!" on the other... maybe he's getting rid of it for a reason? sucks for people who integrated against it but is it is "right" to effectively screw these people over who aren't paying for (but are benefitting from) the API? maybe give them the option to pay?
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    > maybe he's getting rid of it for a reason? Probably, but is it a good reason? IMO, he lost the benefit of doubt many decisions ago.
  - sleepybrett 4y ago
    If there is an api someone can, and has, written a client that makes twitter work better. You can subvert most the dumb shit they keep trying to throw into the experience that ruin the user experience. Ad's... don't show them, timeline... put it in order, etc. Also there is a small community of researchers out there that use the api to detect botnets, follow networks, etc. Can't have that with musk around.
    - throwaway50607 4y ago
      > Ad's... don't show them, timeline... put it in order, etc. People doing that are probably why they're deprecating the API.
      - sleepybrett 4y ago
        They never put ads into the API actually.
andrewguy9 4y ago
The api hurts the Twitter. My company extracted lots of value from it, which Twitter didn’t monetize at all. But they had huge infrastructure and engineering effort to support the api. They never should have built it.
- saryant 4y ago
  Twitter made hundreds of millions a year selling API access.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Curious how did they extract value?
whoomp12342 4y ago
you mean deeply damaging layoffs lead to a shitty product? whodathunk
olalonde 4y ago
Given the amount of bad predictions and misinformation regarding post-acquisition Twitter, I'd take this with a grain of salt. Remember that many on HN thought that Twitter would literally stop operating shortly after the first rounds of layoffs[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647882
- olalonde 4y ago
  As expected, Twitter announces a v2 API just hours ago: https://twittercommunity.com/t/announcing-new-access-tiers-for-the-twitter-api/188728 https://twittercommunity.com/t/announcing-new-access-tiers-f... Not the kind of announcement you typically expect from an unmaintained API!
  - saryant 4y ago
    The v2 API was built over the last several years. It’s not new and was announced a long time ago, well before the acquisition. Source: led the search API at Twitter until last year.
adql 4y ago
It's ironic that the latest post on it is now info about tiered paid api access with some absolutely joke limits and pricing.
steviedotboston 4y ago
I applied for Twitter API access for a small personal app a few weeks ago. I receive the following response yesterday: Thank you for applying for access to the Twitter API. We’re working on exciting updates including new access types and will have more to share soon. Please stay tuned to @TwitterDev and resubmit your application as soon as we launch our new API. In the meantime, you can learn more about the Twitter API v2 and find resources on developer.twitter.com. We appreciate your continued interest in developing on the Twitter API. Thanks, Twitter
- james_pm 4y ago
  Better than the emoji you get back if you email press@twitter.com.
  - favsq 4y ago
    I tried that and it didn't work for me.
    - notatoad 4y ago
      if that means they've set up auto-responders with the poop emoji, but only to certain news outlets, that's even funnier than just responding with it to everybody
- oluwie 4y ago
  ????
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35367552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35367552
- olalonde 4y ago
  FWIW, it seems the new API was launched a few hours ago: https://twittercommunity.com/t/announcing-new-access-tiers-for-the-twitter-api/188728 https://twittercommunity.com/t/announcing-new-access-tiers-f...
segasaturn 4y ago
Something I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues. Because none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk. It could be that Elon is perfectly OK with letting the site go from 99.99999% uptime to just 99% because he knows nobody will leave, and the engineers behind those extra five 9's were being paid hundreds of thousands.
- thih9 4y ago
  > none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk To offer another data point, some of the people I know have actually stopped using Twitter and started using other platforms more. Then again, none of them said the site’s uptime was the reason.
- aftbit 4y ago
  I have reactivated my Mastodon server this week, and unlike when I last attempted in mid-2020, there are actually people I want to follow on there now.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    I need a dummies guide to mastodon. Do you need an always on machine to have a ‘server’?
    - gpm 4y ago
      To have your own, yes, more or less (it handles downtime to some extent). Running your own server is not the "for dummies" version. The for dummies version is "just go sign up on a instance with open sign ups and reasonable moderation", I'd recommend hachyderm.io to the tech crowd. It doesn't matter that much what server you're on.
      - jamiek88 4y ago
        ok! Thank you! I will of course spend the time to learn more as well but that was very helpful.
maliker 4y ago
Sad but honestly a reasonable concession to make while Twitter fights to just remain solvent.
- organsnyder 4y ago
  It's going to be hard to remain solvent if key services become unusable.
- tehwebguy 4y ago
  Yeah, if the number of scrapers spun up in response don’t use even more resources
- tehjoker 4y ago
  important to remember the insane debt Twitter is in is due to Musk's leveraged buyout where he got the debt for his loans to attach to the company he bought with them.
justinhj 4y ago
"Twitter already had a $400m paid API business…They fired the entire team so that business will go to $0 soon." Any fact checking on this?
- saryant 4y ago
  There is one SRE left from that team. That’s it.
dier 4y ago
This post is more than a month old. Twitter announced pricing tiers yesterday (March 29). From the first link on the blog post: > Today we are launching new Twitter API access tiers! We’re excited to share more details about our new plans and what you should expect in terms of next steps and timeline. > Free: For write-only use cases and testing the Twitter API (1,500 Tweets per month) > $100: For hobbyists or students learning code (50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level) > Current access plans including Standard (v1.1), Essential (v2), Elevated (v2), and Premium will be deprecated over the next 30 days, so we recommend that you migrate to the new tiers as soon as possible for a smooth transition. Any non-migrated developer accounts will be impacted by April 29th, 2023 at the latest. It's not unmaintained. They were just putting it behind a pay wall.
- jehb 4y ago
  > $100: For hobbyists or students learning code (50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level) Students being famously known for spending three figures a month on hobby API access. /s
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    If you have an app that sends out one tweet a minute, that strikes me as a bit more than a hobby.
    - Avshalom 4y ago
      or one read a month.
- hn_20591249 4y ago
  Unmaintained and putting up a pay-wall are not mutually exclusive. Sounds like they are going to layer a new pricing model on-top and leave it at that.
- pradn 4y ago
  It looks its still possible to write a tweetbot within the free tier. That's good, I've been meaning to for a long time.
sylware 4y ago
Nitter for all now?
uptownfunk 4y ago
Why don't they let me add people to a starred/favorited list of people I care about listening to, and then the rest whose toxicity I can only tolerate in small doses. :) Elon if you're listening
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  Twitter has lists.
transitivebs 4y ago
This has been my experience as well. And now w/ the new twitter API pricing, I will have to shut down my open source ChatGPTBot which has over 100k followers. Sad.
entelechy0 4y ago
[dead]
submeta 4y ago
Twitter used to be my number one source for quick user generated updates across the globe. An event in my city or around the globe and I wanted to tune in what others are saying and what’s going on? There was nothing faster than Twitter. Then came the bots and bot farms. They started polluting Twitter and manipulating the masses. Elon Musk is right in some of his observations. But he did not have the right action plan. He started doing things haphazardly, and many were saying: This is the way he approaches projects, too hastily, apparently very chaotic, but in the end he succeeds. The thing is: This time his ego got in his way. The platform he tries to redefine and reinvent is also his mirror, for polishing his own ego by chasing likes. Musk is killing Twitter, and Jack Dorsey was complicit in this.
brunes 4y ago
Name a single other major social network around today that has an API and allows third-party clients. The only one I can think of is Reddit - and even in that case, there are numerous features already being locked out of third-party clients. They are on the same path as Twitter, and at some point they will realize that maintaining a gigantic cost center that provides no revenue (since they don't control ads) and does not allow them to rapidly innovate or build a brand (since they don't control the app) does not make a lot of business sense. The death of the Twitter API is long, long overdue. Bad for us consumers? Sure. But these companies are not charities, they exist to make money.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  The API is not just about 3rd party clients. The API is about integrating all kinds of stuff from 3rd parties, and it's absolutely required if Elon Musk wants to make Twitter an "everything app" like WeChat.
  - wankle 4y ago
    Twitter I used for several years and may go back now that someone with common sense is at the helm but only ever heard of WeChat and what I heard was mostly negative.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      > only ever heard of WeChat and what I heard was mostly negative WeChat is pretty lit and contains a whole internet, sort of akin to how Facebook Pages might contain the only information or updates about many businesses and municipalities. Yes, a state agency will censor some things, just like a corporation will censor some things. Yes, they collect your data and share it with third parties including the government, just like a series of corporation do on every other network. You're not Chinese, you're not going to disappear, its rare they experience anything more than a message disappearing too, its the same user experience. I don't find the reality to be different enough to warrant the perception of reality.
- deleted 4y ago
anigbrowl 4y ago
OK, but on the plus side you'll soon be able to access it for only $100 month, or for free if your only ambition is to post tweets automatically. Now, people say the previous entry-level, elevated, and academic tiers were all free and provided a lot more functionality leading to lots of utility for twitter users, social science etc., but most of those same people balk when asked to affirm that 'Elon Musk is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.'
RobertRoberts 4y ago
Does Mastodon have an API I can use to access everyone's feed? I am curious because I have never used the API, and I can see Mastodon taking over if they have an API that let's 3rd parties interact and download content.
MauroIksem 4y ago
This explains why they denied me access to the API a few days ago.
zactato 4y ago
Is there research that shows that a well maintained API adds value to large established companies? Maintaining a good API for an ever changing product is VERY non-trivial. Designing easy to consume APIs and writing good documentation requires some specialized skills. Internal APIs are often very different than external ones. Some times APIs need to be duplicated which can make breaking changes of the underlying systems more complex. I can see the value of APIs for a growing company that is trying to establish itself, but there must be a line somewhere. I suspect a large amount of API support over the last decade has been driven by brand development and recruiting.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > I can see the value of APIs for a growing company that is trying to establish itself, but there must be a line somewhere. I suspect a large amount of API support over the last decade has been driven by brand development and recruiting. It brought INSANE value to Twitter in it's early days. The API allowed a client to be written for every platform around by domain experts way before the Twitter team could get to them. They got Apple to integrate it natively on iOS 5. That's right, the OS had built-in support for Twitter. You didn't need to install an app. It's one of the things that cemented Twitter's presence in the social media's landscape.
- saryant 4y ago
  The API was 10% of the company’s revenue before Musk took over. That’s a good amount of value.
ChicagoDave 4y ago
But Merlin expects it to be a $250 billion business at some point.
lprd 4y ago
The documentation and usability of Twitter's API has been in decline for at least a few years now. I gave up in 2018/19 (or whenever they implemented the new version of their API?). This has nothing to do with the advent of Musk, and anyone blaming him are insufferable Musk haters (which is pretty standard these days). In the beginning, their API was a joy to use and a lot of neat software popped up around it. There was some drama around them making changes internally (API changes) which put some of these companies out of business. People became weary of their API since. That said, I would love to see a completely revamped API with great documentation.
- d23 4y ago
  You gave up on it 5 years ago but are sure nothing happened in the last few months, while the team that was actively maintaining it is saying they were all fired. Sorry for being "insufferable," but why is your take more credible than theirs?
  - lprd 4y ago
    > You gave up on it 5 years ago but are sure nothing happened in the last few months I said that it's been in decline. If its unusable now, I'm not shocked because of the way it was headed even a few years ago. Musk very well might have realized the dumpster fire that is their API and shelved it for the time being. > why is your take more credible than theirs? What can I say, I'm just a simple user? Whether you find my "take" credible or not is purely up to you. ymmv
dangoodmanUT 4y ago
That API has always been atrocious to use. Missing features between v1 and v2, etc.
userbinator 4y ago
When I think of "free tier API" for Twitter I think of the one you get when you go to the site in a browser. I doubt that one won't go away without some serious loss of userbase.
pessimizer 4y ago
I don't understand the problem. Can't everybody just convert their businesses into Mastodon tools and interfaces? If Mastodon is the future, why complain about twitter? Why so desperate to cultivate an actual, literal fascist's newly-walled garden?
- th16row 4y ago
  Mastodon is most definetly not the future. I think Twitter will still be a thing in 10 years while Mastodon (and even ActivityPub/Fediverse for that matter) will still be a niche or failed idea.
randyrand 4y ago
What is the business reason for having an api? I’ve always found it kind of strange that they have one.

432 points by edent 4y ago

killingtime74 4y ago

Twitter is now effectively unmaintained.....

ZunarJ5 4y ago

At a premium cost too.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

TheChaplain 4y ago

Perhaps Twitter is becoming the golden example of how not to run a business?

thedailymail 4y ago
It really does seem like a historic moment in business history. I'm strugling to think of a precedent, other than cases of outright fraud, where a prominent firm (= its management) experienced so much negative publicity and self-owning.
- concordDance 4y ago
  More than half of that negative publicity is due to the people who make publicity (journalists) having their hang out taken over by a billionaire they hate. No comment on the other half.
  - e40 4y ago
    Literally everything I have heard about twitter came from twitter or here and it was all negative.
    - freeone3000 4y ago
      Yes, Twitter is defined by its users hating it. (This does prove some issues with monetization)
  - d23 4y ago
    Here it is, that tired old argument that’s also used to defend Trump: it’s the biased media. And just like Trump, I can look at Musk’s tweets too and see how obnoxious, narcissistic, petty, and disingenuous they are for myself. In fact, it’s hard to avoid now that he appears to have goosed the algorithm to shove his tweets down everyone’s throat.
    - concordDance 4y ago
      It's possible for someone to suck AND the media to be biased against them. Just reading Trump and Musk's tweets will tell you plenty with zero bias. And indeed, this is how you can tell that Trump is legitimately a fool and Musk is simultaneously whimsical and stubborn. This does not mean there isn't also an extra bit of anti-Musk/Trump stuff piled on top (in Musk's case the stuff about him inheriting an Emerald mine and lying about his child dying in his arms and in Trump's case the stuff about him being a big anti-LGBT guy).
      - d23 4y ago
        You said it's "more than half" of the negativity, not "an extra bit." > This does not mean there isn't also an extra bit of anti-Musk/Trump stuff piled on top (in Musk's case the stuff about him inheriting an Emerald mine and lying about his child dying in his arms I guess you're implying the emerald mine stuff is false? Or are you saying it's not a big deal? And re: the child dying in his arms, the media is quoting his wife, who said he's lying. Are they to just ignore a story like that?
        concordDance 4y ago
        "Half" vs "a bit" is far too big an argument for a hackernews comment section On the rest: He did not inherit an Emerald mine and no reliable source has alleged he did, nor that his father even owned any part in the mine after the 90s, nor are there any reliable sources stating that Musk's father monetarily helped him in business other than a $28k loan he paid back. Heck, they even failed at doing a quick Google to figure out how much a pocket full of uncut emeralds actually goes for (a few hundred dollaras). And yet he's often portrayed as a trust fund kid who was given millions and never worked a day in his life. On the child dying, neither his wife nor he lied: https://twitter.com/justinemusk/status/1595539044217552896 https://twitter.com/justinemusk/status/1595539044217552896 The baby death rattled in her arms but he felt the last heartbeat. When journalists dislike you they will knowingly propagate misleading distortions and myths and will never correct inaccuracies that went against you or promote facts that are in your favour.
- bakuninsbart 4y ago
  While this is true, it doesn't really seem to damage Twitter as a platform for now. - And it is not as if Musk turned a great profitable business into trash, Twitter never had a sustainable business model.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  To be fair, corporate acquisitions do often fall into disrepair and failure. It’s just that usually the company making the acquisition… still has their existing business. When it’s an individual making a botched acquisition, you get to watch the company disintegrate instead.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Sears.
- derf_ 4y ago
  With one memo, Stephen Elop [1] drove Nokia's market cap from its peak of over $57b in March of 2010 to a trough of less than $7b in July of 2012 [2]. [1] https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/08/coining-term-elop-effect-when-you-combine-osborne-effect-and-ratner-effect.html https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/08/coinin... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NOK/nokia/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NOK/nokia/market-c...
- antifa 4y ago
  Imagine if Twitter actually came out of this fine and then business schools decided to build a generation of "tough guy CEO" MBAs. Or worse, imagine if Twitter continues to plummet as we currently see it, then business schools decide to write history as if it were a success story anyways.
  - skeeter2020 4y ago
    Not sure how old you are but this already happened in the 80's. We also got an entire generation of "Steve Jobs was a successful asshole, ergo asshole => success" MBAs
- KineticLensman 4y ago
  Gerald Ratner who described the products of his own jewellery company as ‘crap’ [edit] he actually said ‘total crap’ and lost £500m.
spiderfarmer 4y ago
So far it has exposed the real business acumen of Elon Musk. The only company he runs by himself, arguably the easiest to run, is losing him a staggering amount of money in one year. I wonder how he rates his own perfomance.
- croisillon 4y ago
  Looking into it.
- nxm 4y ago
  Twitter was doing that before Elon bought them
  - halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
    They had just recently become profitable before the Elon takeover.
    - garyrob 4y ago
      Data?
    - adql 4y ago
      The 2020 was in negative, 2021 was also in negative. That's not "becoming profitable"
- KoftaBob 4y ago
  The way I see it, it more-so shows that his strength is in companies that are heavy on complex engineering problems. Twitter on the other hand, is a company dealing with sociological/societal challenges, being that it's a social network. That takes an entirely different kind of skill set to do well as a CEO for.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    I don't buy it. Internal reports from SpaceX and Tesla detail Musk's chaotic, capricious management style that they have to spend resources to actively manage. SpaceX is better at it I guess, because he's seemed to have caused far more problems at Tesla with his antics. Either way, he's essentially abdicated his CEO role at both companies, and his chaotic management style is on full display now, which confirms the Tesla and SpaceX reports. But why did Tesla and SpaceX thrive where Twitter is failing? Because the former companies grew up to create processes that contain Musk; whereas Twitter was bought outright, so his blast radius is unlimited there. Twitter has no Musk immune response. At SpaceX when Musk suggests X, where X is... I dunno, an really dumb idea that no one would ever want, the people at SpaceX know how to redirect Musk until he drops it, or they know how to shape it into a good idea. At Twitter, they have no idea how to do this, and so Musk always gets his way, every time. All the people with the skills to turn bad ideas into good ones have left, all the people who tried to manage Musk were fired, so now he's left to his whims. And it shows. If anything, Musk has proven how ceremonial the CEO role is. He has the title CEO of at least 4 companies, and claims 80 hours per week is a full time role. So at best CEO is a part time job.
okeuro49 4y ago
It seems to me that Musk is moving away from advertisements, to trying to build the first social network that doesn't rely on the user being the product, but rather paying for the product. That's supposedly what tech people root for, but because its Elon Musk, who eschews many of the shibboleths of the Left, people criticise Twitter as a proxy for his political views.
- bhaak 4y ago
  This would be a laudable direction to take the company towards ... ... if he didn't start by putting $12.5 billions of debt on the balance sheet after the buyout. Which means that Twitter has to pay $1 billion of interest each year which it didn't have to do before that hostile takeover. How many people would need to buy Twitter Blue to offset the interest alone? ~~125 million users which is about a third of its whole active user base~~ 10 million which is about 3% of their active user base (I can't do maths, thanks supermatt, luckily I'm good looking and can program).
  - ed_elliott_asc 4y ago
    Just to pay off the interest? Ouch ouch ouch
  - supermatt 4y ago
    1bn / $8/m (excluding costs, etc) / 12 months = ~ 10m
- BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
  And so how’s that going?
- draugadrotten 4y ago
  Buying twitter was never about profiting - at least not the profiting from the company balance sheet. The profit can come elsewhere, by the influence gained from owning and controlling the twitter firehose and recommendation algorithms. In a way, this is Elon buying a newspaper like rich people always did to influence politics, except that he is buying a modern version of a newspaper. Musk bought twitter because it is and was an integral part in social media campaigns for the last few elections. Targeted ads on twitter can reach journalists and politicians, their timelines "for you" controlled by Elon's and they might not even understand that they are being nudged by the content shown in the app. Heck, just by unbanning Trump and allowing MFA Russia on the app, he is moving the Overton window a bit. The proof is in the pudding as they say. How many million people now see Elon Musks personal twitter posts, that did not see them before he bought twitter?
concordDance 4y ago
A year ago it was the golden example of how not to run a business, it's now the golden example of how not to run a tech system/service.
- muyuu 4y ago
  a year ago it had just lost over US$1B over the running year
  - illiarian 4y ago
    So, like Uber, or any of HN's top startups. In modern times this is called a shining example of how to run a company.
  - tlholaday 4y ago
    Compared to losing US$24B with Musk.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    Now it's spending $1.3B p.a. on servicing loans alone. Does that sound like an improvement?
muyuu 4y ago
I don't think Twitter is alone in that respect. Twitter is unique in that it was acquired for US$ 44B when it was a business that lost huge amounts of money consistently for years, and the owner intended it to have it run old school style, as in making a profit, but also doing so in such short notice that he dismantled entire branches of the company wholesale. Obviously for people relying on pre-existing services and rates from Twitter, it sucks. But the root problem is that Twitter had not been a sustainable business for a long, long time. One has to wonder how did they even subsist for so long and how much institutional money, not just VC/investor money, and who knows what sort of government/agencies pay-to-play deals made it even possible because the sort of money they cashed in during the only few years they've even been profitable seems absurdly high and they have never replicated that under normal circumstances. With the ad model struggling and institutional ads sort of in retreat, the entire sector is struggling.
- oxfordmale 4y ago
  Not sustainable? Twitter generated $5 billion revenue in 2021, a 35% increase on 2020 figures and a significant improvement on the 8% and 13% increase the two years before. Cut backs were needed, as advertising revenue would have been significantly down this year, given the economic down turn. However, there was no need to gut the company to make it profitable.
  - zpeti 4y ago
    > Cut backs were needed I mean, you are both claiming cuts were needed and they’re too much. So how much was right? How do you know? You’d do a better job than the people who have access to the numbers? That’s a fairly arrogant position
    - oxfordmale 4y ago
      Most FAANGS have been cutting by 10 to 15%. That trims excess fat without gutting a company. Twitter seems to have a serious cultural problem at the moment, and that is generally a lot harder to fix than to rehire when the growth curve inverses. I am sure Musk had to cut by 50%, if only because Twitter's interest payments are now significant. However, that does bring significant challenges.
eclipsetheworld 4y ago
I'll take the contrarian stance here. During the Morgan Stanley Conference interview, Elon Musk forecasted that Twitter had the potential to achieve a positive cash flow status by the second quarter of 2023. Advertisers are returning to the platform and they just announced their new API monetization plans [0]. The company's strategic direction notwithstanding, Twitter may be a profitable company soon. [0] https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1641222782594990080 https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1641222782594990080
- Kye 4y ago
  But which advertisers? It's not enough to get +10,000 people trying out a $10 or $100 ad while rates are low due to low bidding competition. Twitter needs the big advertisers who expect to have someone at the company support their campaigns. The new owner fired the people who did that. Worse, he fired the people who'd spent years earning those advertisers' trust and patience.
  - eclipsetheworld 4y ago
    Performance-focused advertisers. Growing this segment was already set as a strategic direction for Twitter in 2021, however, Musk's takeover and the subsequent departure of brand-focused advertisers seem to have accelerated these plans [0]. As for brand-focused advertisers, I can see parallels to 2017's "YouTube Adpocalypse" in which advertisers paused their spending due to their ads being displayed before videos containing offensive content. They recovered from it by demonitizing offensive content. Twitter will have to address "brand safety" concerns, however, [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/have-the-ads-in-your-twitter-feed-changed-theres-a-reason-for-that-1772f9f3 https://www.wsj.com/articles/have-the-ads-in-your-twitter-fe...
- comte7092 4y ago
  At this point I’ve learned not to take anything Elon says about the future, especially the near future, at face value. Could it happen? Certainly. Will it happen the way he says it will? Probably not.
- adql 4y ago
wongarsu 4y ago
He only owns the company for 5 months so far. He seems set on transforming Twitter, and any company looks bad while in the middle of a transformation. I'm not saying Elon is doing a good job, all signs point to the opposite. He probably though so too when he announced to step down from CEO (though that has yet to happen). But if he was doing a good job, it would also be really hard to tell in this phase. I don't think we are far enough into this to draw any good conclusions.
- rurp 4y ago
  It's not really hard to tell if he's doing a good job, he's clearly not. Losing nearly half of revenue in only a few months, adding crippling debt payments, stiffing employees on their severance, refusing to pay rent and other services, plus countless other debacles make it clear this is a dysfunctional company. Network effects and resilient architecture can keep a company humming along for some time despite incompetent management, but those resources will get depleted and they are hard to regain.
SkyMarshal 4y ago
More like, how not to buy a business. Elon basically started with the Private Equity leveraged buyout playbook - borrow money to buy a business, then assign that business the debt used to buy it. But it’s unclear how he’s going to do part 2, which is to either suck enough value out of it to recoup the purchase price before it fails completely, or turn it around and make it more valuable than when he bought it. Right now Twitter needs to drastically increase its revenue and decrease its expenses just to service the new debt load. Hence Elon firing everyone and trying to charge more for every little thing. It’s amazing that Twitter was more or less self-sustaining prior to this, and now it’s not.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  I think it's a mistake to evaluate his success with it in purely financial terms like that. He's proven himself thin skinned, egotistical, and capricious, and is easy to provoke into vindictive & retributive actions even if not in his best interests. I think a big part of why he bought twitter was a sense of grievance, basically that the wrong people were getting positive attention, that people were being mean to and making fun of him and his friends & allies. He wanted to restructure the mechanics and incentives of the platform to better support the people and outcomes he values. I'm not sure whether he succeeded by these terms either, it's still too early to tell I think. But I do think it's an important factor in evaluating whether he succeeded in what he set out to do when buying twitter. And from that perspective "make it good or (let it) die trying" may be an acceptable compromise. He doesn't get the musk-adoration platform he wants, but at least there is no longer the musk-ridicule platform he perceived it to be.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Remember, he didn't want to buy Twitter. He pitched it in the first place purely in an attempt to get leverage over the board. He didn't really want to own it. The board called his bluff and said "sold!", then Musk spent a great deal of time and effort trying to wiggle out of the deal. He failed, and now he's stuck with it. Everything he's doing now is trying to minimize the amount of financial damage this debacle will cause him.
mjr00 4y ago
No, it's the complete opposite: the fact that Twitter has laid off 80% of its staff and is still operating has encouraged execs at other tech companies to push staff cuts. Vanity Fair wrote an article about this yesterday.[0] I do think there are long term-issues with laying off that many employees, but clearly the "if you fire all these engineers the service is going to collapse and stop working" doomsaying was unfounded. [0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/big-tech-layoffs-2023-twitter-meta-amazon-google https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/big-tech-layoffs-202...
- revel 4y ago
  Twitter has remained functional largely because all the former employees did their jobs effectively. I've seen what happens when companies lay a tech department to waste and it looks like this. This is a one-way cost reduction program that will forever reduce the quality of workers available to the company. The way this pans out is that in the short term, nothing much happens except deadlines start to get pushed out. As time goes on everything becomes more and more dysfunctional. All progress grinds to a halt; simply treading water created by ongoing churn and operational needs ends up becoming impossible. Next the business tries to get more and more out of the remaining staff until they get fed up with it and leave. Shortly before the wheels really come off, legal and compliance issues will suddenly start ballooning. That's where we are now. Nobody wants to work on these kind of projects -- they do nothing for your career and nobody will celebrate your work -- but they are not optional. Elon seems to have decided simply not to comply with laws he dislikes in regulatory environments where he thinks he can get away with it. This can work for a while, but companies with no internal governance and that regularly flout laws can don't tend to last for too long without making painful changes. Let's see how it turns out. Given the reported state of the company it sounds like he has about a year to figure it out.
  - Caldwell-77 4y ago
    In cutting its workforce down from 7,500 to 1,800 employees, I wonder what percentage of Twitter's legal/compliance staff were kept on.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
misssocrates 4y ago
Perhaps Twitter will be the golden example of how to run a business like SpaceX and Tesla became after many years of derision?
- dragontamer 4y ago
  Buy a company for $44 Billion, and now offers equity at $20 Billion valuation? https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-offers-new-equity-grants-to-staff-938ee7f8 https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-offers-new-equity-grant... The company has lost over half its value in just 5 months.
  - misssocrates 4y ago
    He overpaid and that was already well known before he even took the reigns.
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      Overpaying by well over double is... a bad business decision. Is it not? Even as bad as the stock market was last year, very few companies lost 50%+ of their value. -------- There's a lot of other decisions that are very strange coming out of Tesla, such as the removal of RADAR and Ultrasonic Sensors. Does Elon Musk really believe he can compete against next-generation companies when he's removing sensors from his cars?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - zaroth 4y ago
        Regarding the Tesla comments; Radar is back by the way, with an increased resolution that makes it more useful in highways where overhead signs false positive as a collision risk on the old sensor. The ultrasonic sensors IMO were basically worthless. Initial analysis of the new v4 FSD hardware indicates they are adding more cameras - including bumper cameras to cover blind spots that previously would have relied on ultrasonics. It doesn’t seem like HW4 can be retrofit like HW3 was, so it will be very interesting how that all plays out! https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-hardware-4-hd-radar-first-look-photos/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-hardware-4-hd-radar-first-lo... https://mobile.twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1625905220432671015 https://mobile.twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1625905220432...
onion2k 4y ago
The antagonist forces of "Ha! Look how much the revenue fell!" versus "Hmm.. look how much they slashed costs.." means it's really hard to tell how well Twitter will do in the long term.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

swyx 4y ago

and the new twitter api limits announced is like 50 per 24 hours… https://twitter.com/igorbrigadir/status/1641201626449956865?s=46&t=90xQ8sGy63D2OtiaoGJuww https://twitter.com/igorbrigadir/status/1641201626449956865?...

zimpenfish 4y ago
Hilariously, the https://developer.twitter.com/en/portal/products/free https://developer.twitter.com/en/portal/products/free link takes me to the "we're evaluating your application for V2 access" holding page. Which, IIRC, I applied for in March 2021. Just a clusterfuck of an omnishambles.
jimmySixDOF 4y ago
What a huge missed opportunity for Usage Based Pricing [1] [1] https://openviewpartners.com/blog/state-of-usage-based-pricing https://openviewpartners.com/blog/state-of-usage-based-prici...

aww_dang 4y ago

I'm seeing more and more Twitter integrations based on scrapers.

dekimir 4y ago
Me too. Probably the way of the future. Each of us could run a little personal scraper, and the Twitter servers wouldn't know the difference.

creshal 4y ago

For being unmaintained for months it's holding up remarkably well. Edit: And the sole active Ads developer who was still actively responding when the blog post was written, was apparently laid off a week after the article was posted. Ouch.

cldellow 4y ago
Eh, for some values of well. My post is one of the "12 [...] about Twitter not responding to the standard API access request process". It's easy to keep an API running if you reject access to it, no? Due to a delightful quirk of how the Twitter Ads API review process works, our entire application no longer works, even for non-Ads API use. Genius way to manage the load.
imwithstoopid 4y ago
> For being unmaintained for months which describes probably 90% of web apis out there imho, unless a company is dogfooding its own api, I assume it is broken/bitrotted/owner-left-the-company etc twitter is by no means alone

t344344 4y ago

> Another data point: of the 20 newest posts on this forum, 12 are about Twitter not responding to the standard API access request process, and 4 seem to be about API bugs. This has been the pattern for a while now. It seems like Twitter is now largely ignoring all manual processes and bugs. Non-responsiveness is pretty normal for large corporations. Try to send email to Google or Facebook. Calling their products "unsupported" and "unmaintained" may actually fit dictionary definition!

dannyr 4y ago
The author was making comparisons to previous activity from Twitter employees not to other normal corporations.

amitrip 4y ago

[dead]

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Twitter following the LinkedIn playbook. And LinkedIn is still more generous. Absurd that these platforms have no scruples about gathering data from users, but if you try doing the opposite, they’ll block you at every turn.

foreverobama 4y ago
What's really absurd is that people are still using that platform at all.
luckylion 4y ago
> Absurd that these platforms have no scruples about gathering data from users, but if you try doing the opposite, they’ll block you at every turn. Most people have no problem getting paid too much for something they're selling, but they'll try to block you at every turn if you want them to overpay.
dekimir 4y ago
For personal consumption, one can always scrape one's feed[1]. I wonder why more of us don't do it. [1] https://twitter.com/feedliness/status/1638580147304505349?s=20 https://twitter.com/feedliness/status/1638580147304505349?s=...

social_quotient 4y ago

The blog is over a month old, the api is still up and running. I’m not exactly how this is on page 1 of HN?

segmondy 4y ago
up and running is different from "unmaintained"
- social_quotient 4y ago
  Yes, I view keeping the lights on generally different from continuous improvement and new development. The api is not accidentally online still, so it would be reductive to say zero people are in charge and aware of it being online and available.
zpeti 4y ago
Because complaining about how badly Twitter is run about as popular as claiming depositors are investors in SVB.
- foreverobama 4y ago
  [dead]
oxfordmale 4y ago
Unmaintained APIs are generally not a problem as long as the underlying platform doesn't change. Let's talk again in 18 months.
myko 4y ago
the api no longer serves complete tweets, it cuts text off of those larger than 280 characters it's busted

h11h 4y ago

One data point is that there is no way to get the full text of long tweets from the API. Twitter Blue subscribers have been able to post tweets longer than 280 characters since early February but the API only returns the first 280 or so characters.

titaniumtown 4y ago
That's hilarious. The complete incompetence over there lol.
- stainablesteel 4y ago
  is it incompetent to not maintain something you don't want to maintain?
  - addisonl 4y ago
    It's incompetent to not want to maintain it.
    - 100721 4y ago
      * without taking it offline
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    The incompetence is at the very top, choosing not to maintain something that they were apparently making $400m/year from paid subscribers for
    - cutemonster 4y ago
      Yes, at the same time, this: > complete incompetence over there sounded to me as if it also includes the employees
    - dev_daftly 4y ago
      The post seems to talk about 2 different APIs, a public one they are not continuing to work on and a commercial one that makes $400mm/year

jwmoz 4y ago

Crazy to watch Twitter being built and scaled back in the Ruby days and now effectively destroyed.

realjhol 4y ago
It works fine though
- top_sigrid 4y ago
  Does it? Besides numerous malfunctions over the last months one current example is that I can see posts of accounts that I blocked or that blocked me in my feed, which I have seen reported by others aswell. This is _basic_ functionality.
  - realjhol 4y ago
    The claim was that Twitter would experience some kind of total collapse- that Musk had no choice but to capitulate to demands of a disgruntled work force, many of whom were incensed that the platform would no long actively censor the speech of huge numbers of people. As it turns out Musk mostly didn't need them, and firing them didn't harm his interests to any tangible degree.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      No it wasn't. And if Musk's actions aren't harming his interests, that's only because he says he doesn't mind losing ~$20 billion. I do not believe that he is going to be able to grow it into a $200 billion company on the back of frog Twitter.
      - realjhol 4y ago
        None of this about money, though is it. It's about control. The ones who are most upset about this have an ideology that is a house of cards that has to be shielded from all interrogation, mocking and critique, lest it implode under the weight of its own internal inconsistencies. These people know very well how to distinguish friend and enemy, and Elon is decidedly not a friend. To lose this castle to an enemy like Musk is a huge problem for them because of its strategic importance, hence the fire-storm of consternation. In the wider world, the ones who are upset about this are vastly outnumbered by those who just want to have fun and express themselves on the Internet, so if Twitter can become that kind of a place it will do very well.

drstewart 4y ago

If only it had the rock solid reliability of something like GitHub or Reddit

rvz 4y ago

Another giant nothing complain post. It just means that companies should not build their entire business on someone else's API and Twitter can change it and their prices at anytime. No different to other platforms that allow third party apps. Contrary to this complaint post, the API is still up and far from 'unmaintained' or its 'immediate death' as incorrectly predicted 5 months ago with still 200M - 220M daily active users continuing to use the platform, even after all the chaos and nonsense articles. Free APIs forever is unsustainable for a business and eventually price increases will happen. Believing otherwise is essentially wishful thinking, just like basing an entire business on someone else's API and not paying for it. There is always a cost.

phailhaus 4y ago
You didn't read the article, because it has nothing to do with business users. The team responsible for maintaining the Twitter API is down to zero engineers. This is the product that brought in $400M ARR.
- rvz 4y ago
  And you did not read the guidelines [0]. "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article". Once again, my point still stands. Unchallenged. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    Great point! Here's my updated response, unchallenged: The article has nothing to do with business users. The team responsible for maintaining the Twitter API is down to zero engineers. This is the product that brought in $400M ARR.

arecurrence 4y ago

From the comments that Musk has made over the last few months, this appears to be as intended. He doesn't seem to view the API as a benefit to the company nor a fit for his plans on where he wants to go with it.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
sounds like a hard job to quantify "can/does maintaining the API make the company money" on one hand you've got a knee-jerk answer: "absolutely! how could it not?!" on the other... maybe he's getting rid of it for a reason? sucks for people who integrated against it but is it is "right" to effectively screw these people over who aren't paying for (but are benefitting from) the API? maybe give them the option to pay?
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > maybe he's getting rid of it for a reason? Probably, but is it a good reason? IMO, he lost the benefit of doubt many decisions ago.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  If there is an api someone can, and has, written a client that makes twitter work better. You can subvert most the dumb shit they keep trying to throw into the experience that ruin the user experience. Ad's... don't show them, timeline... put it in order, etc. Also there is a small community of researchers out there that use the api to detect botnets, follow networks, etc. Can't have that with musk around.
  - throwaway50607 4y ago
    > Ad's... don't show them, timeline... put it in order, etc. People doing that are probably why they're deprecating the API.
    - sleepybrett 4y ago
      They never put ads into the API actually.

andrewguy9 4y ago

The api hurts the Twitter. My company extracted lots of value from it, which Twitter didn’t monetize at all. But they had huge infrastructure and engineering effort to support the api. They never should have built it.

saryant 4y ago
Twitter made hundreds of millions a year selling API access.
moneywoes 4y ago
Curious how did they extract value?

whoomp12342 4y ago

you mean deeply damaging layoffs lead to a shitty product? whodathunk

olalonde 4y ago

Given the amount of bad predictions and misinformation regarding post-acquisition Twitter, I'd take this with a grain of salt. Remember that many on HN thought that Twitter would literally stop operating shortly after the first rounds of layoffs[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647882

olalonde 4y ago
As expected, Twitter announces a v2 API just hours ago: https://twittercommunity.com/t/announcing-new-access-tiers-for-the-twitter-api/188728 https://twittercommunity.com/t/announcing-new-access-tiers-f... Not the kind of announcement you typically expect from an unmaintained API!
- saryant 4y ago
  The v2 API was built over the last several years. It’s not new and was announced a long time ago, well before the acquisition. Source: led the search API at Twitter until last year.

adql 4y ago

It's ironic that the latest post on it is now info about tiered paid api access with some absolutely joke limits and pricing.

steviedotboston 4y ago

I applied for Twitter API access for a small personal app a few weeks ago. I receive the following response yesterday: Thank you for applying for access to the Twitter API. We’re working on exciting updates including new access types and will have more to share soon. Please stay tuned to @TwitterDev and resubmit your application as soon as we launch our new API. In the meantime, you can learn more about the Twitter API v2 and find resources on developer.twitter.com. We appreciate your continued interest in developing on the Twitter API. Thanks, Twitter

james_pm 4y ago
Better than the emoji you get back if you email press@twitter.com.
- favsq 4y ago
  I tried that and it didn't work for me.
  - notatoad 4y ago
    if that means they've set up auto-responders with the poop emoji, but only to certain news outlets, that's even funnier than just responding with it to everybody
oluwie 4y ago
????
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35367552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35367552
olalonde 4y ago
FWIW, it seems the new API was launched a few hours ago: https://twittercommunity.com/t/announcing-new-access-tiers-for-the-twitter-api/188728 https://twittercommunity.com/t/announcing-new-access-tiers-f...

segasaturn 4y ago

Something I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues. Because none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk. It could be that Elon is perfectly OK with letting the site go from 99.99999% uptime to just 99% because he knows nobody will leave, and the engineers behind those extra five 9's were being paid hundreds of thousands.

thih9 4y ago
> none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk To offer another data point, some of the people I know have actually stopped using Twitter and started using other platforms more. Then again, none of them said the site’s uptime was the reason.
aftbit 4y ago
I have reactivated my Mastodon server this week, and unlike when I last attempted in mid-2020, there are actually people I want to follow on there now.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  I need a dummies guide to mastodon. Do you need an always on machine to have a ‘server’?
  - gpm 4y ago
    To have your own, yes, more or less (it handles downtime to some extent). Running your own server is not the "for dummies" version. The for dummies version is "just go sign up on a instance with open sign ups and reasonable moderation", I'd recommend hachyderm.io to the tech crowd. It doesn't matter that much what server you're on.
    - jamiek88 4y ago
      ok! Thank you! I will of course spend the time to learn more as well but that was very helpful.

maliker 4y ago

Sad but honestly a reasonable concession to make while Twitter fights to just remain solvent.

organsnyder 4y ago
It's going to be hard to remain solvent if key services become unusable.
tehwebguy 4y ago
Yeah, if the number of scrapers spun up in response don’t use even more resources
tehjoker 4y ago
important to remember the insane debt Twitter is in is due to Musk's leveraged buyout where he got the debt for his loans to attach to the company he bought with them.

justinhj 4y ago

"Twitter already had a $400m paid API business…They fired the entire team so that business will go to $0 soon." Any fact checking on this?

saryant 4y ago
There is one SRE left from that team. That’s it.

dier 4y ago

This post is more than a month old. Twitter announced pricing tiers yesterday (March 29). From the first link on the blog post: > Today we are launching new Twitter API access tiers! We’re excited to share more details about our new plans and what you should expect in terms of next steps and timeline. > Free: For write-only use cases and testing the Twitter API (1,500 Tweets per month) > $100: For hobbyists or students learning code (50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level) > Current access plans including Standard (v1.1), Essential (v2), Elevated (v2), and Premium will be deprecated over the next 30 days, so we recommend that you migrate to the new tiers as soon as possible for a smooth transition. Any non-migrated developer accounts will be impacted by April 29th, 2023 at the latest. It's not unmaintained. They were just putting it behind a pay wall.

jehb 4y ago
> $100: For hobbyists or students learning code (50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level) Students being famously known for spending three figures a month on hobby API access. /s
- bdcravens 4y ago
  If you have an app that sends out one tweet a minute, that strikes me as a bit more than a hobby.
  - Avshalom 4y ago
    or one read a month.
hn_20591249 4y ago
Unmaintained and putting up a pay-wall are not mutually exclusive. Sounds like they are going to layer a new pricing model on-top and leave it at that.
pradn 4y ago
It looks its still possible to write a tweetbot within the free tier. That's good, I've been meaning to for a long time.

sylware 4y ago

Nitter for all now?

uptownfunk 4y ago

Why don't they let me add people to a starred/favorited list of people I care about listening to, and then the rest whose toxicity I can only tolerate in small doses. :) Elon if you're listening

kayodelycaon 4y ago
Twitter has lists.

transitivebs 4y ago

This has been my experience as well. And now w/ the new twitter API pricing, I will have to shut down my open source ChatGPTBot which has over 100k followers. Sad.

entelechy0 4y ago

[dead]

submeta 4y ago

Twitter used to be my number one source for quick user generated updates across the globe. An event in my city or around the globe and I wanted to tune in what others are saying and what’s going on? There was nothing faster than Twitter. Then came the bots and bot farms. They started polluting Twitter and manipulating the masses. Elon Musk is right in some of his observations. But he did not have the right action plan. He started doing things haphazardly, and many were saying: This is the way he approaches projects, too hastily, apparently very chaotic, but in the end he succeeds. The thing is: This time his ego got in his way. The platform he tries to redefine and reinvent is also his mirror, for polishing his own ego by chasing likes. Musk is killing Twitter, and Jack Dorsey was complicit in this.

brunes 4y ago

Name a single other major social network around today that has an API and allows third-party clients. The only one I can think of is Reddit - and even in that case, there are numerous features already being locked out of third-party clients. They are on the same path as Twitter, and at some point they will realize that maintaining a gigantic cost center that provides no revenue (since they don't control ads) and does not allow them to rapidly innovate or build a brand (since they don't control the app) does not make a lot of business sense. The death of the Twitter API is long, long overdue. Bad for us consumers? Sure. But these companies are not charities, they exist to make money.

newaccount74 4y ago
The API is not just about 3rd party clients. The API is about integrating all kinds of stuff from 3rd parties, and it's absolutely required if Elon Musk wants to make Twitter an "everything app" like WeChat.
- wankle 4y ago
  Twitter I used for several years and may go back now that someone with common sense is at the helm but only ever heard of WeChat and what I heard was mostly negative.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    > only ever heard of WeChat and what I heard was mostly negative WeChat is pretty lit and contains a whole internet, sort of akin to how Facebook Pages might contain the only information or updates about many businesses and municipalities. Yes, a state agency will censor some things, just like a corporation will censor some things. Yes, they collect your data and share it with third parties including the government, just like a series of corporation do on every other network. You're not Chinese, you're not going to disappear, its rare they experience anything more than a message disappearing too, its the same user experience. I don't find the reality to be different enough to warrant the perception of reality.
deleted 4y ago

anigbrowl 4y ago

OK, but on the plus side you'll soon be able to access it for only $100 month, or for free if your only ambition is to post tweets automatically. Now, people say the previous entry-level, elevated, and academic tiers were all free and provided a lot more functionality leading to lots of utility for twitter users, social science etc., but most of those same people balk when asked to affirm that 'Elon Musk is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.'

RobertRoberts 4y ago

Does Mastodon have an API I can use to access everyone's feed? I am curious because I have never used the API, and I can see Mastodon taking over if they have an API that let's 3rd parties interact and download content.

MauroIksem 4y ago

This explains why they denied me access to the API a few days ago.

zactato 4y ago

Is there research that shows that a well maintained API adds value to large established companies? Maintaining a good API for an ever changing product is VERY non-trivial. Designing easy to consume APIs and writing good documentation requires some specialized skills. Internal APIs are often very different than external ones. Some times APIs need to be duplicated which can make breaking changes of the underlying systems more complex. I can see the value of APIs for a growing company that is trying to establish itself, but there must be a line somewhere. I suspect a large amount of API support over the last decade has been driven by brand development and recruiting.

908B64B197 4y ago
> I can see the value of APIs for a growing company that is trying to establish itself, but there must be a line somewhere. I suspect a large amount of API support over the last decade has been driven by brand development and recruiting. It brought INSANE value to Twitter in it's early days. The API allowed a client to be written for every platform around by domain experts way before the Twitter team could get to them. They got Apple to integrate it natively on iOS 5. That's right, the OS had built-in support for Twitter. You didn't need to install an app. It's one of the things that cemented Twitter's presence in the social media's landscape.
saryant 4y ago
The API was 10% of the company’s revenue before Musk took over. That’s a good amount of value.

ChicagoDave 4y ago

But Merlin expects it to be a $250 billion business at some point.

lprd 4y ago

The documentation and usability of Twitter's API has been in decline for at least a few years now. I gave up in 2018/19 (or whenever they implemented the new version of their API?). This has nothing to do with the advent of Musk, and anyone blaming him are insufferable Musk haters (which is pretty standard these days). In the beginning, their API was a joy to use and a lot of neat software popped up around it. There was some drama around them making changes internally (API changes) which put some of these companies out of business. People became weary of their API since. That said, I would love to see a completely revamped API with great documentation.

d23 4y ago
You gave up on it 5 years ago but are sure nothing happened in the last few months, while the team that was actively maintaining it is saying they were all fired. Sorry for being "insufferable," but why is your take more credible than theirs?
- lprd 4y ago
  > You gave up on it 5 years ago but are sure nothing happened in the last few months I said that it's been in decline. If its unusable now, I'm not shocked because of the way it was headed even a few years ago. Musk very well might have realized the dumpster fire that is their API and shelved it for the time being. > why is your take more credible than theirs? What can I say, I'm just a simple user? Whether you find my "take" credible or not is purely up to you. ymmv

dangoodmanUT 4y ago

That API has always been atrocious to use. Missing features between v1 and v2, etc.

userbinator 4y ago

When I think of "free tier API" for Twitter I think of the one you get when you go to the site in a browser. I doubt that one won't go away without some serious loss of userbase.

pessimizer 4y ago

I don't understand the problem. Can't everybody just convert their businesses into Mastodon tools and interfaces? If Mastodon is the future, why complain about twitter? Why so desperate to cultivate an actual, literal fascist's newly-walled garden?

th16row 4y ago
Mastodon is most definetly not the future. I think Twitter will still be a thing in 10 years while Mastodon (and even ActivityPub/Fediverse for that matter) will still be a niche or failed idea.

randyrand 4y ago

What is the business reason for having an api? I’ve always found it kind of strange that they have one.