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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Twitter lost a decent chunk of its ecosystem and its users when imposing ridiculous API limits for 3rd party clients and killing them off.

Also, they arbitrarily told Instagram to fuck off by only banning their image embeds, which pissed off even more users.

Now I'm just praying that their new "while you have been away" crap doesn't get default (or if it does, make it opt out). I'm fairly capable of reading an entire day worth of backlog (though, again, provided it is not more than 800 tweets, once again a pointless API limit).

Getting new users all right, do whatever the fuck you want, but do not drive away even more of the most hardcore users unless you want to have a Twitter filled with brainless 12y kids and #cut4bieber/#cut4dagibee and similar junk.

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> Also, they arbitrarily told Instagram to fuck off by only banning their image embeds, which pissed off even more users.

As I understood it at the time, the integration was turned off from Instagram's side - http://status.twitter.com/post/37258637900/instagram-photo-r...

Yep, and the context for this was Facebook's recent purchase of Instagram:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2012/12/05/instagram-twit...

> "We wanted to make sure we direct users to where the content lives originally, so they get the full Instagram experience," Instagram CEO Kevin System said, "It's just about where do you go to interact with that image? We want that to be on Instagram.com because it has a better user experience currently."

>Also, they arbitrarily told Instagram to fuck off by only banning their image embeds, which pissed off even more users.

This makes no sense. The opposite happened: Instagram blocked Twitter.

> Now I'm just praying that their new "while you have been away" crap doesn't get default (or if it does, make it opt out).

This is actually the first thing they've added that really bothers me. Not the feature itself (I'm sure this is incredibly useful for many people), but that there's no way to disable it for people (like you and me) that don't find it the least bit helpful.

Most people (I think) follow very many accounts (many of which are quite "noisy") and probably miss most of the tweets of those they follow - but I don't follow many accounts (and only a handful that tweet more than say a few times a day) so whenever I open Twitter (several times a day) I scroll down to where I left off and read up.

If you click the X in the top right and say no to "did you find this helpful" it disappears forever.

If by forever you mean "until the next time you open the app".

It's possible we're on opposite sides of an A/B test, but it hasn't shown up for me since dismissing it.

I see "do you like this", and I've answered "no" multiple times.

That's wrong. Plus, what if I want to turn it back on later? It just makes zero sense.

I said that like 10 times and still see it almost every time

I follow a few (and definitely have rules about quality over quantity), but I kind of actually don't care about anything on Twitter that happened more than a few hours ago. I have always seen the inability to keep up with the stream as a "feature" of sorts. Twitter has let me connect with people who have made things I've truly loved, and I think that is in no small part because it's about living and responding in the moment, not being strictly a completionary consumer.

Funny enough, this is a recent feature that I value significantly. I've fallen behind on culling my following list, so I frequently see things in the "while you have been away" list that I value but which I would have otherwise missed. I hope it never replaces the strictly chronological feed, but as long as it's there and clearly marked, I'm quite happy.

Twitter has actually recently started placing notifications on my phone's lockscreen containing partial text of tweets from people that I don't even follow.

So, something for you to look forward to.

Putting bullshit on the lockscreen is something I only experienced with Failbook yet, thanks for the warning.

I've never actually used the official app; Twidere works far better in every way.

APIs are great when you want to drive numbers to your business, but at the end of the day, if you want to generate revenue, you either charge for API access or you closely control your ecosystem.

Unfettered Twitter API access would be analogous to Best Buy allowing third party vendors to sell refurbished electronic products in front of their properties..

So why didn't they just start charging above a certain usage level by any one API key?

> brainless 12y kids and #cut4bieber/#cut4dagibee and similar junk.

That's a growing abyss of demographic, not shrinking. There will always be lots and lots of twee teen, shitty bots, and corporate slurry. #titterWillBeFine

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