4 ms·

Many moons ago Twitter used to have RSS (Atom?) feeds for each user so you could use any old news aggregator to keep up to date.

pavlov 2y ago
But that's too sensible and user-friendly. It would be obviously weird and wrong if they inserted ads and Musk's tweets into someone's RSS feed. Yet showing those unwanted insertions is the whole purpose of the company now.
- sunaookami 2y ago
  Twitter shut off RSS access over 10 years ago along with their popular 1.1 API.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    I know. Because it wasn’t compatible with their aim of showing ads. And nothing has changed after Twitter went private under Musk, except that the reasons for stuffing unwanted content into users’ timelines are slightly different.
    - xNeil 2y ago
      I don't think that's fair - getting back the chronological timeline itself made the purchase a good one in my eyes, alongside the For You feed, which seems to work wonderfully (for me). Not to forget you can literally turn off ads if you want. I seem to be a real minority, but I do genuinely believe Musk has done a great job with Twitter (or X).
spondylosaurus 2y ago
You could get SMS notifications whenever a user tweeted, too. Imagine signing up for that today!
- sahila 2y ago
  That makes more sense to disable as SMS is expensive. This is still fairly easy to set up yourself using a tool like IFTTT[1] or similar. [1] https://ifttt.com/search/query/twitter https://ifttt.com/search/query/twitter
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  You could also for a long time send SMS (if you registered your number) to 40404 to tweet to Twitter. It's still in my address book from the era when I was tweeting T9 from dumb phones or using voice-to-SMS to tweet on early smart phones.
crystal_revenge 2y ago
Social media used to be about content sharing, but it's clear that it's far more profitable to keep your users on your site at all times and keep the content they create in house rather than linked somewhere else. HN is probably the last true aggregator site left that I know of. It's partly why the web is so much worse. There's really no reason to create content outside of a walled platform is it is getting increasingly difficult to find an audience for it. Even blogging is an uphill battle since more and more social media sites penalize link sharing (they want you to create the content on their platform and leave it there). That's why it's not surprising that these APIs are disappearing since the fundamental model has changed.

pavlov 2y ago

But that's too sensible and user-friendly. It would be obviously weird and wrong if they inserted ads and Musk's tweets into someone's RSS feed. Yet showing those unwanted insertions is the whole purpose of the company now.

sunaookami 2y ago
Twitter shut off RSS access over 10 years ago along with their popular 1.1 API.
- pavlov 2y ago
  I know. Because it wasn’t compatible with their aim of showing ads. And nothing has changed after Twitter went private under Musk, except that the reasons for stuffing unwanted content into users’ timelines are slightly different.
  - xNeil 2y ago
    I don't think that's fair - getting back the chronological timeline itself made the purchase a good one in my eyes, alongside the For You feed, which seems to work wonderfully (for me). Not to forget you can literally turn off ads if you want. I seem to be a real minority, but I do genuinely believe Musk has done a great job with Twitter (or X).

spondylosaurus 2y ago

You could get SMS notifications whenever a user tweeted, too. Imagine signing up for that today!

sahila 2y ago
That makes more sense to disable as SMS is expensive. This is still fairly easy to set up yourself using a tool like IFTTT[1] or similar. [1] https://ifttt.com/search/query/twitter https://ifttt.com/search/query/twitter
WorldMaker 2y ago
You could also for a long time send SMS (if you registered your number) to 40404 to tweet to Twitter. It's still in my address book from the era when I was tweeting T9 from dumb phones or using voice-to-SMS to tweet on early smart phones.

crystal_revenge 2y ago

Social media used to be about content sharing, but it's clear that it's far more profitable to keep your users on your site at all times and keep the content they create in house rather than linked somewhere else. HN is probably the last true aggregator site left that I know of. It's partly why the web is so much worse. There's really no reason to create content outside of a walled platform is it is getting increasingly difficult to find an audience for it. Even blogging is an uphill battle since more and more social media sites penalize link sharing (they want you to create the content on their platform and leave it there). That's why it's not surprising that these APIs are disappearing since the fundamental model has changed.