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Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

I have absolutely no problem with Twitter trying to earn money. I just don't get how they are trying to do it?

When I'm reading my Twitter timeline in Twitterific, I'm not seeing ads. Which is probably why twitter wants me to use their website.

But why don't they just require third-party apps to show paid tweets? IIRC it's not even possible currently, because ads don't show up in their API output.

It seems insane to stymie the universe of alternative CLIENTS when what you contrl is the MESSAGES.

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What I don’t understand is why Twitter don’t maintain the existing streaming chronological ad-free API and allow third party clients to connect to it, but to charge users a subscription to enable it for their account. This, to me, is so obvious that I must be missing something. Potentially it’s along the lines of Facebook’s quoted $35/month income per US user, but I can’t be alone in being tempted to abandon the platform if forced to an ad-ridden 1st-party-client (or no client on desktop) with an algorithmic feed.

With the insane pricing plans Twitter just announced for third parties, it's approaching $15/month per user to maintain current feature parity and have things like push notifications and stats info.

Feels like they are shooting themselves in the foot considering how many of their longest influential users are on Tweetbot and Twitteriffic, not to mention ingrateful considering how important Twitteriffic in particular was to many of the Twitter norms early on.

Also lame considering what hot garbage the native official desktop app is in comparison, all of this just makes me truly likely to seek alternatives if third party apps must go away, maybe micro.blog

I wonder if it is the pricing issue. The Techcrunch article has a screenshot of Twitter's paid pricing, and they show "25 subscriptions" as "$339/month"... which is $13.56 USD/month per subscription.

If Twitter is actually charging $13.56/mth per account, I guess that explains why they never did a consumer subscription. I've always wanted to pay for Twitter, but that's more than Netflix, more than Dropbox, more than Spotify.

Unless I have drastically misread that image, which is entirely possible. I'm not clear on what is included in one "subscription".

Presumably a publicly released app isn't going for a 25 subscriptions at $14/account deal, they must be targeting some special enterprise/social marketing space. It isn't obvious that a random consumer would expect to pay the same.

The makers of Twitterrific (desktop Mac app) have confirmed the pricing per 3rd-party user and that they likely can't continue:

"It’s looking like it won’t be financially possible for us to afford the new account activity API from twitter."

"Many of you have done the math and seen it would be about $12/user/month for notifications - but don’t forget that in order to do a subscription we’d have to cover Apple’s 30% overhead and make enough for us to pay for food and shelter. So, uh… yeah."

"This isn’t a “wow that’s kind of expensive” situation. This is “deathblow expensive” situation."

[1] https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/996785022886608896

[2] https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/996831340740972549

Yeah, I just meant that the move seems to pretty clearly be "no more API access for consumer apps, only for internal enterprise type use cases".

The whole history of twitter is that they stumbled onto something that works and then had no idea how to capitalise on it.

I sincerely believe they don't even have a good understanding on how and why their platform really works for people.

The trend of shutting down clients and api has been going on for years now. This is ridiculous.

Impressions are an important ad metric. How can you trust a third party app to accurately measure impressions?

Here are two options, I'm sure there are more:

- Require third party apps to install an impression tracking SDK

- Return URLs in API responses to media hosted on Twitter's servers and do tracking server side

You could contractually require it, and verify it with random sampling on the client apps. If a Twitter employee views a tweet on the third-party app and Twitter doesn't get an impression notification, then there is a problem.

Seems practical. They already have an army of content moderators responsible for millions of feeds. Having them spot-check several hundred or several thousand third-party clients once every month or two doesn't seem like a large increase in their workload.

I mean, that's a single full-time employee (or less). If there are 2000 third-party clients and the goal is to spot-check them once per month, this hypothetical full-time employee would need to check 80 of them per day. That's one spot check every six minutes for eight hours a day if they work 25 days a month.

Not exactly the most exciting work, but easily doable. And that doesn't need to exactly be a highly paid employee either. I believe the big social media companies offshore a lot of that grunt work to other countries.

So we're talking what, thirty or forty grand a year for Twitter to implement that?

Have a sandbox level, then Twitter reviews the app to ensure impressions are being accurately reported, and then allow it to go live.

This is exactly the approach that resulted in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Have the clicks redirect through a twitter server?

impressions are not clicks.

No, but impressions do require downloading content from a server, which can be tracked. The trouble would be cases where apps are preloading content, so it's downloaded but the user might not have seen it yet.

Or - as is often the case - the consumer is caching api responses for some period.

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