Twitter has blocked 3rd party apps | Hacker News Reader

Twitter has blocked 3rd party apps

tapbots.com

141 pointsnomdep30 comments

I think this is going to have a pretty substantial impact on the service. The power users who create a lot of the content on Twitter are very likely to be using 3rd party apps because the official app (and web version) are, in my opinion, completely unusable. Constantly switching the timeline view back to "Top Tweets" in order to surface more promoted posts and 'popular' tweets is annoying on any service, but doubly so on Twitter which is the platform where I expect to be reading the most current discussions.

This might be a blessing in disguise. It absolutely sucks for the maintainers of the projects affected but hopefully it's another step towards Twitters irrelevance.

I'm more inclined to believe something broke and the person who knows how to fix it is enjoying a mai-tai in the Toldyaso Islands

That's not the correct title. This is just speculation. It could be an explicit block or it could be a failure that affects API access for features used by 3rd party clients.

There's a good chance for either option at this point really...

Well, it’s been more than 24 hours without a peep from Twitter. Seems like a legitimate bug/failure would have at least been acknowledged by now.

Twitter was down in NZ and Australia for something like 16h recently with no official communication and no status update. It's the new normal.

Twitter has for years had an antagonistic relationship with third party apps, heavily restricting API access.

Then Elon comes along and bans mere links to third party social networking profiles (only rescinded because of the outcry).

While we can't prove that this is a duck yet, it's certainly a waddling object that is quacking like crazy.

> Twitter has for years had an antagonistic relationship with third party apps.

Twitter has antagonistic relationships across the board now, both internally and externally.

There's literally no comms people left to communicate it, and it seems like Musk's fellow shareholders have finally sufficently threatened him to get him to shut up.

I was a teenager once and sometimes you just don’t come up with something (you think is) clever to say.

Developers are seeing their API keys being suspended. I'd say that's a pretty explicit block.

https://twitter.com/feather_ios/status/1613749938428727297

Elon Musk cannot milk Tweetbot users as much, so, goodbye 3rd-party. Predictable.

Well, for me it means I'll juste stop to use it. I guess we are a minority.

The great irony for me is that all the conversation about how bad twitter is becoming is still happening on twitter. After all this time, people are still unable or unwilling to switch to something else. That's how strong the platform lock-in has become.

Not all. I’m reading it here on HN, for example.

There’s lots of those discussions on Mastodon.

I thought I never could switch away from Twitter, until I did. I try to avoid Twitter stuff in my Mastodon timeline, but this has crept in (mostly from the app developers)

But the only reason there is no monetisation via ads and other “innovations” in these apps is because Twitter have deliberately degraded the APIs and not kept them current with the official site/app for a decade now.

Twitter could also start charging app devs for API licenses, or restrict 3rd party apps to Twitter blue users if they want to change things up.

> Twitter could also start charging app devs for API licenses

It already does, which is why Tweetbot, Twitterific and the others had to shift to subscription models.

Ironically, because those third party apps pay for API access for all their global users, and Twitter Blue is only available in about five countries, cutting off third party clients will have an immediate negative impact on Twitter’s revenue.

I wonder if Twitter is in breach of contract by restricting API access to their customers (the third party apps).

Probably, and some are looking into it. But it seems the penalties are meaningless.

https://esq.social/@andrew/109684497703065388

> But it seems the penalties are meaningless.

As noted in the thread, the agreement itself includes a tiny cap on damages, but there are legal factors which plausibly could nullify the effect of that cap.

I find this a bit less ethically questionable given that Tweetbot itself is earning monthly/annual subscription revenue from its users and then blocking ads. If Tweetbot's developer account isn't generating enough revenue to offset the ad revenue loss, this would be completely expected.

Tweetbot isn’t blocking ads, and the big third party clients pay for API access.

Twidere seems broken, but Frittr (read-only) seems fine as do the nitter instances I use.

So what happens to other sites login with twitter?

Generally social sign-in uses oauth apis[1]. These are most likely unaffected as they aren't part of the general twitter api that would be used by 3rd party apps.

[1] https://www.sitepoint.com/demystifying-modern-social-apis-so...

Twitter API uses oAuth for authentication. Third-party clients saw their keys revoked, meaning oauth social sign-in ain't going to work either.

I run one that hasn’t been blocked and is working as normal. This definitely looks selective to me.

It’s slapdash, and maybe just based on cutting off the top N most used ones.

Fenix is blocked on Android, but not on iOS, explain that!

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