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Comment by electic | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Twitter is that the demolished their developer ecosystem. The attacked the very developers and companies that taught people how to use Twitter and developed solutions that made it a viable use case. Without those myriad of solutions built upon it, Twitter is a very basic SMS broadcast medium. It has a sloppy unsegmented home feed full of noise and its mechanics are horrible so it does a poor job of burying hate.

With that in mind, the numbers show. The people that get it are on it. Most of the rest of us just see glimmers of it embedded in news articles. Sadly, it is too late to reverse this. Trust has been lost.

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Twitter had to kill their ecosystem in order to make any money on advertising. There was just no way to sell ads if so many users were going to be using 3rd party clients.

You may be right that killing off the 3rd party ecosystem hurt their usage, but from a business perspective, there wasn't any point keeping it if it was damaging their business model.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12516190

Not really. The vast majority of their ads are in the timeline. I don't see why they couldn't just serve those to third party developers. If the third parties try to block or prevent them then you revoke their API keys. Done.

I dunno, I think to do that they'd have to have an Apple App Store level of oversight on their third party devs products, which would be about as restrictive to the devs as the changes they actually did make, plus prohibitively expensive for Twitter.

Seems doable. They have over 3,500 people there (really don't see why they're not at, say, 150). Surely they have enough resources to handle the necessary oversight. I would imagine most could be automated with spot checking by actual people.

That's not true at all. As someone who had multiple Twitter API apps killed by them, I would have welcome app store level review processes. Limiting tokens (killing any popular app) and killing games that let you tweet easily because they are too much like general purpose clients like they did was just ridiculous. The best apps I know, like Foursquare, just switched back to asking users for username and password at the time because the token limitation basically broke integration.

I came here just to say the exactly same thing.

Back in 2008 (or so), I was under impression that Twitter will be become "informational highway": all messages will go thru their pipe. Something like world wide message queue. Twitter website and Twitter mobile app would be just one of many views to that pipe.

And people had crazy ideas how to make something like Slack on top of Twitter, payment systems, voting, encrypted channels, integration with games, apps for customer support, etc.

But, now, Twitter is just a social web app very similar to other social networks but without no clear advantage over others.

>The problem with Twitter is that the demolished their developer ecosystem

I honestly don't think that matters that much. Yes it sucked to be the developer of a profitable Twitter client, but from Twitters point of view, those clients where potentially in the way of profit. Unless Twitter charged the third party clients for access to their API, how where they suppose to help Twitter make money? Increased user based? If Twitter can't make money on the users they have now, getting more won't help them.

So many people claim that love Twitter, it's their only source news, the way they keep in contact and so on. Fine, pay Twitter $20 per year, that seem reasonable, and it would keep spammers and trolls of Twitter.

You are viewing the 3rd party clients as a negative. This was their greatest asset. Instead of destroying them, why not give them an SDK? If they put that SDK to show promoted tweets and other adverts in the stream, they could have sold far more inventory and still have all the metrics they need to show advertisers.

Instead, they destroyed them, destroyed the user growth they provided, destroyed the engagement they provided, and worse destroyed far more earnings potential they could have had if they instead just worked with all the clients to get the ad placements in there. They tried to copy Facebook and how they did things, but instead destroyed their most prized asset.

The SDK would only be able to show the advertisers that the ads where pushed to the clients, not that it was actually shown. So I doubt that would sit well with advertisers. Even if tracking normal online ads is just as sketchy.

Still don't feel it like would have made much of a difference. Twitter still have more than enough traffic, on which is fails to monetize.

And again, what's wrong with paying for Twitter? $20 per year for personal account, $300 for businesses.

The SDK would only be able to show the advertisers that the ads where pushed to the clients, not that it was actually shown.

The apps themselves wouldn't have been anonymous. If many of one's ads were seen through TwitView3000, one might have had reason to examine TwitView3000 to see how ads were handled in that app. If one had discovered that ads were dropped, a single phone call would have been enough to revoke the app's API key.

> what's wrong with paying for Twitter? $20 per year for personal account, $300 for businesses.

Well, there's plenty wrong with the system you describe. Is Taylor Swift's account personal or business?

To me it seems like it would make sense to charge for accounts based on the number of followers. Followers are what make an account valuable.

Completely agree. An SDK with advertising that led to revenue for the developers would have been a major boon.... and potentially unlocked a lot of innovative ideas and approaches.

They, for example, could have added an adsAllowed flag to the API. If you deselect it, you get a 15min delayed feed. Want the recent one? Show the ads. Even an affiliate program for popular clients, sharing ad revenue with them, is not something I would consider totally unreasonable.

But the reality is, unless somebody from Twitter shows up, we will not know which options they investigated, and why the alternatives could not beat the solution they went with.

Maybe Twilio could buy Twitter, if the price was rational.

Twitter is currently worth 3 times Twilio, that would be a dramatic deal.

It would be dramatic tomorrow, but maybe not in a couple of years when Twilio's identity business is more mature.

Twilio could make Twitter for less than what it would cost just to negotiate the deal.

We could have made Twitter with the time sunk into this HN thread. But that's irrelevant.

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