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Twitter API Page

developer.twitter.com

176 pointsmrzool98 comments

I don't know whether killing Tweetbot was intentional or deliberate. However I was a pretty heavy user of Twitter - scrolling through my timeline on the tram, in cafes, on the toilet or whenever I had a spare moment. I assumed that the API outage was temporary so I didn't download the "official" app, and figured I'd just wait a day or so for Tweetbot to be fixed. It's now been ~3 days, I don't miss not having Twitter, I don't check it at all. I'm maybe missing a couple of @dril posts, podcast recommendations or funny images I could've shared with friends but that's nothing.

So intentional or not, I'm effectively lost as a Twitter user. I'm not claiming to be particularly high value, but I don't imagine my experience is unique. I'm quite far from a fan of Musk but I enjoyed my Twitter experience enough that his meddling was just an amusing side-show until now. It's not a dramatic rage quit, just a sort of accidental "oh I guess I didn't need that" realisation that I didn't plan on having at all. Weird.

Interestingly if Twitter had said "We are killing off Tweetbot, you have to use our app" I probably would have just begrudgingly downloaded the Twitter app. But because they didn't say anything, I just waited and went through the "cold turkey" period, where every now and then I'd instinctively tap the Tweetbot icon before thinking "ah yeah it's down, oh well" - before completely losing that habit. What an own goal.

I deactivated my twitter, after constantly checking it for updates and the like all the time. I don't miss it at all, don't even have urge to find it again. Think that might speak a lot to the attention economy and how fragile it can be for free apps. Twitter is doomed, the experience is broken, the recommendations were all trash and seeing promoted comments from people who paid to have a checkmark was like the most idiotic move I've seen in an app.

> that might speak a lot to the attention economy and how fragile it can be for free apps

Yep, well said - this is a more clearly worded version of the point I was trying to make

Haha same. It has almost been 6 years for me. I recently looked up some people I used to follow and they're tweeting the same damn content. I thought it was kinda sad.

I always wondered why people choose to make these "I no longer use X and now I am happier" kind of posts, where X could be a number of things including Twitter, as opposed to quietly fading away. For people who were happy with X, these posts just sound like sour grapes[1].

I am not a top Twitter user by any metric, but I have been happy with the content I got. I wonder if all the problems I hear about are limited to the English speaking parts of Twitter?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

Why? Because it's a discussion about a change and these are some results.

Seems normal to talk about impact of decisions.

In this specific instance I was talking about my experience of unintentionally quitting my Twitter habit, so the comments where people describe how they also stopped using it are relevant. But I wouldn't be so quick to assume sour grapes, otherwise. It could be that these people found their experience of quitting Twitter to be pretty transformative and fulfilling and genuinely want to let others know about it.

I suppose they do it for themselves, a public statement that reinforces and legitimises their choice.

It doesn't contribute or take away anything from society.

It makes them happy and doesn't hurt anyone. Let people be :)

I did not say anywhere that I was happier, rather I was surprised that something I feverishly would check constantly multiple times a day could disappear and I wouldn't have any problem with it or urge to get it back. It's anecdotal but I've had friends who have also disconnected and realized that it doesn't seem to change anything, most of the information you consume is crap and forgotten.

Twitter was making no money off you so I doubt Elon Musk will care.

I thought about this, so I wasn't seeing the sponsored tweets ... but I don't see why they couldn't have just modified the feed they provided to Tweetbot, Twitterific et al to include these ads.

I agree that Elon doesn't care, but he probably should care that heavy users like me can be so quickly and easily lost. And in addition to being more bad PR, 3rd party developers will interpret this as a clear signal not to invest much in integrating with Twitter.

With a third party client Twitter can’t (easily?) measure if an ad was actually seen by the end user (impression) or if it was just served by the API but never rendered on the users screen. A lot of ad measurement follows from there.

That’s a fair point but IMO still not a completely unsolvable problem

His goal is to reduce costs, not increase or maintain the user base.

That thinking only works for so long. If you drive away enough users, eventually your network effect starts to weaken making it easier for even more users to leave.

I also think it's an odd decision now that they're exposing view count to users. Driving away users on third party clients will cause that number to drop.

Also, even if they weren't making money from such users, if this is a common experience, the opportunity to make money from them with advanced warning to switch to the official client existed but has now been lost.

> If you drive away enough users

We don't have any hard numbers but I'm curious why you think network effects would apply here.

Twitter's audience is not the same as it was 10 years ago, when the tech/tech-adjacent Twitter audience made a huge fuss over API access, and they were probably generating close to a majority of the content at that time.

I think it's likely this group is too small to matter now.

But it's likely they could have made money off of 3rd party apps. For some reason they didn't figure out how or didn't care to try.

My twitter usage is so fine tuned to tweetbot, that I'm also just a lost user. I miss some of the people I followed, but it's fine. I have no interest in using the official twitter app.

It's back to RSS feeds for me, which I find fill a similar niche to twitter.

In theory at one point it could have been something more interesting than a forum for people who are paying Elon money. But that ship probably sailed long ago.

Considering that Twitter Blue isn't even available in my country, I'm not sure if Twitter is actually that interested in making money off of me.

Not sure why you've been downvoted, you've called out the most likely concern.

Despite the APIs bringing in some money, I doubt they've covered the ad revenue loss, especially in recent years as more and more advertisers started using Twitter at scale, and as more of the world joined Twitter.

The audience using these APIs via Tweetbot, Twitterific, etc, has become an ever smaller percentage of Twitter's userbase. It's probably not even worth the effort to figure out how to better monetize the APIs, given the small audience.

And not everyone is so desperate to avoid the algo timeline that they're willing to pay a 3rd party app.

Personally, I was a Tweetbot user from around 2013 to 2018, but I kept switching over to the first party app more and more, as Twitter started to add more features that weren't available to Tweetbot. And then I discovered I was spending all my time in the first party app anyway because of the algo timeline, so I quit using Tweetbot.

Same.

I don't miss it. I would use Tweetbot again if it becomes available again, but for now I am good. If it is not coming back, I am not going to download the official client.

I am also not interested in Mastodon either.

I'm not sure what that link was supposed to be before it 404ed. But clicking through from the Twitter Developer homepage you can get to these:

https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api

All links to dev portal, product information and docs seem to work.

I assume the post is suggesting the Twitter api has been "removed" in relation to the reader apps being blocked. But it looks like everything is there still. Anyone got more context on what the "missing" page was?

This is version from 2022-11-19: https://web.archive.org/web/20221119170753/https://developer...

That's a well built page look's great

Apparently Twitter has specifically deactivated api access to certain apps, like Tweetdeck. That’s probably sparked uncertainty around the future of the twitter API

https://twitter.com/theinformation/status/161439876957066854...

TweetDeck would be really strange since it is owned by Twitter itself, but yeah it is apps like Tweetbot and other mobile apps. It is rather sad since 3rd party apps was a big plus for Twitter users especially before they made their API worse, but that was years ago.

> owned by Twitter

I can see that becoming the new go-to meme when things go belly-up

Yeah I surely don't want to be owned by them in both meanings of the word, they also recently shut down Revue which was a pretty cool thing

https://www.getrevue.co/

Twitter has a number of clients that don't run ads.

Tweetdeck specifically still seems to be working - but since that’s an alternative first-party client it’s an exceptional case.

That has nothing to do with this post however.

> I assume the post is suggesting the Twitter api has been "removed" in relation to the reader apps being blocked.

Your assumption is right, that’s what I was hinting at. I might be wrong but I strongly suspect this is all intentional.

> Anyone got more context on what the "missing" page was?

I don’t know exactly, I assume some sort of landing page with links to your aforementioned resources.

EDIT: Here’s the Web Archive link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221119170753/https://developer...

Ah, looking at the archived page, I remember someone in the earlier related threads saying that Twitters own "API Explorer" was down and seemed to be be experiencing the same issue as the blocked apps. I think this must have been that?!

> strongly suspect this was intentional

Considering the 404 of that page

> This page is down

> I scream. You scream. We all scream... for us to fix this page. We’ll stop making jokes and get things up and running soon.

vs the 404 of other developer.twitter/error pages

> You've washed ashore on null island

> Sadly, the party is over. Head back to the mainland. Or, if you're up for some exploring, try the search bar above.

I'd say it's quite likely rub-it-in-your-face intentional.

That looks more like a 500 error to me.

In fact the server returns a 503 Service Unavailable

https://web.archive.org/web/20220426000049/https://developer...

The Information reports that the suspension of third-party Twitter clients is intentional, and they haven’t worked out the comms strategy yet.

TI has a very good track record on this kind of reporting, so I’m inclined to believe the internal messages they’ve seen are real.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-intent...

Paywalled, sadly.

DF has a summary https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/01/14/information-twi...

There’a no comms because Twitter no longer has a comms department.

This doesn't deserve to be downvoted. It is a factual statement.

I would like to thank Elon for helping me to kick of my doom scrolling Twitter addiction.

My usage has been dropping perceptibly over the last 3 months as my feed has gotten stale however now that my Twitter client hasn't had any new tweets in the last 3 days I may finally be able to kick the habit for good.

if your self-control really that bad?

Yes.

Some people have neurobiology that makes them more susceptible to things of this nature through no fault of their own.

Some people also have poor self-control.

It reminds me of: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" which describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

I understand that Twitter no longer employs a comms team, so no comms on that particular issue. But... has the revolution come?

It's is a ruse from the communication dept. They are inciting the revolution all that time.

So many minor flags already that the problem could be completely accidental. For example people search in android client no longer checks my following&followers. Odd audio behavior in Spaces. More than a few scattered bits of broken micro features work and then don't again. Meanwhile press coverage is look how they only needed half the people on staff so let's do this everywhere asap and recapture value for the poor shareholders.

> So many minor flags already that the problem could be completely accidental.

I hope you're right, but honestly there are also legit reasons to think otherwise. It could be a fuck up due to staff shortage and knowledge loss crisis, but it could also be an impromptu, poorly implemented and communicated decision. Both scenarios would not be surprising at this point.

It’s at least a fuck up with poor communications considering Twitter still hasn’t communicated what is going on

The longer it goes on, I'm thinking it's both. The initial down was an accident/breakage, but the people who could fix it were fired. Obviously this situation is embarrassing for Musk so no communication. But, now that's it's down there are probably discussions about leaving it down with no decision made yet.

Hasn’t it been established that it’s intentional?

I can only speculate as to whether it’s embarrassing for Musk, but my assumption is that he enjoys flaunting his power to cause wreckage without justification rather than being embarrassed by it.

Everything I’ve seen is unconfirmed hearsay. /shrug

This is pretty much the kind of decay that people were expecting. Twitter's decline will be a "death by a thousand bites."

I don't think anyone reasonable was suggesting that the site would just disappear overnight after such a large loss of staff. (Despite even chieftwit claiming this as evidence for business as usual.)

I agree. Twitter has too much momentum alone for it to disappear overnight.

Which is arguable a good thing, as it allows alternatives to grow into the space

There was, unfortunately, a lot of nonsensical claims by people with no technical knowledge that Twitter would go down overnight.

But anyone with a modicum of experience would know that makes no sense. Websites of all sizes are designed to largely self operate with no manual intervention for decent periods of time. Otherwise all large websites would be down during holidays, etc.

It's been a while longer than a typical holiday break. Sites typically have some sort of serious incident that requires human intervention every so often; at some point the humans to handle it will not be present.

PagerDuty engineer here. There is much to discuss with respect to "Websites of all sizes are designed to largely self operate with no manual intervention for decent periods of time." The phrase "decent periods of time" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

You also said "Otherwise all large websites would be down during holidays, etc." What makes you think large websites don't go down in some fashion or another during Holidays? Are you thinking that there would be nobody to handle incidents over a holiday?

Because every large website has people on call over holidays, and they handle incidents that would become extended outages if left unattended. Many large companies publish incident reports, and if you care to review them, you may find that indeed, their sites do experience partial outages all the time, with no exceptions for holidays (full outages are rare, of course).

Many companies do have "skeleton staffing" during major holidays, so they try to mitigate the risk of a major outage by instituting "code freezes" and not shipping new features.

That doesn't speak to how resilient those sites are, it speaks to the fact that yes, it's a normal things for sites to go down, and yes, humans are needed to keep them up. This whole thing speaks to the difference between "robust" and "resilient."

Robust: The site doesn't go down.

Resilient: When the site goes down, it comes back up with no or little impact on the user/customer experience.

Robust is an architectural property. Resilient is both an architectural and organizational property. Cutting staff impacts resilience, but not robustness. But for most users, the difference between them is invisible. If you see a site that appears to remain up over a holiday, it may be resilient rather than robust.

The problem happens over time when both properties begin to fail after changes are made to the system by people unfamiliar with the system, and make worse when sudden failures are addressed by the same people, which creates a feedback loop of failures. Eventually the system becomes unusable. Generally companies don't lay off huge swatches of people randomly, so this kind of bit rot is fairly rare.

My last employer one day had virtually every system fail in the world at the same time due to a hidden dependency on some routing in a single data center; it took 8 hours to restart all the systems since that had not happened before. It was a fun slack to follow. There was a lot of institutional knowledge that was able to get everything working again. Imagine this kind of issue with people having no idea how things work...

> My last employer one day had virtually every system fail in the world at the same time due to a hidden dependency on some routing in a single data center; it took 8 hours to restart all the systems since that had not happened before. It was a fun slack to follow.

I think every company eventually has at least once of these. It is usually a wake up call to the company that what used to work when they had N number of users no longer scales with 10x the traffic…

(It also usually has a lot of “I told you so” moments too)

>Resilient: When the site goes down, it comes back up with no or little impact on the user/customer experience.

Resilience has three aspects:

1. Anticipating and preventing problems ahead of time 2. Preventing a problem that has already occurred from getting worse 3. Recovering to a good state after a problem has occurred

That's a reasonable model to work from. My observations:

First, "Anticipating and preventing problems ahead of time" is of a manifestly different character to either "Preventing a problem that has already occurred from getting worse" (sometimes called stabilization) or "Recovering to a good state after a problem has occurred" (sometimes called remediation).

Another model we use that emphasizes the difference is to divide the work into "proactive" and "reactive" categories. Everything we do that is not during an incident is proactive, everything that happens during an incident is "reactive."

It's a simpler model than the three categories you presented, but it can be helpful to highlight the fact that companies often under-invest in proactive processes and end up paying the "robustness and resilience debt" in reactive activities.

Second, I suggest that proactive work such as "Anticipating and preventing problems ahead of time" applies to both resilience and robustness. If there is an incident that is resolved by rebooting a service that has some kind of memory leak, that's reactive.

If the postmortem identifies a bug in the code causing the leak and a bug fix is deployed to prevent that incident from happening again, the system has become more robust.

Whereas, if no bug fix is made, but the runbook is updated to suggest rebooting the service when it runs out of memory, this is going to increase resilience. Proactive activities drive better outcomes in both cases.

Could be both! APIs decay, someone makes the realization those APIs feed third party clients, and same someone decides it's not a priority with limited labor to fix.

Anybody else notice that the “latest” page for search results is gone as well?

There used to be a top level group for seeing the most recent tweets matching a search term. It no longer appears for non-logged in users: https://twitter.com/search?q=Twitter%20search%20latest%20gon...

The submission is unclear. I get "The apge is down". I guess the submitter wants to tell us that the page might have been intentionally removed? Or Twitter have too few employees left to keep their stuff maintained?

Well, I have come to my conclusion some weeks ago: I don't want to have anything to do with Twitter anymore.

It's alluding to the fact that the Developer API seems to have been decommissioned.

Maybe it was reactive to reduce load on the platform but more likely it's because it was a deliberate change.

Not sure how a bunch of static pages for developer API docs would reduce load. Compared to the load of actually using the API, it’s minuscule.

Oh. He said "Developer API", not the "Developer API Docs."

I believe he meant all of the countless bots and apps and "remindme" etc 3rd party functionality that developers have added on to twitter.

At some point I'd be un-surprised to see all of those removed, and replaced as internal for-pay functionality, given the way things are going.

> I guess the submitter wants to tell us that the page might have been intentionally removed?

Pretty much. At the very least I wanted to spark some sort of conversation about it.

Weren't third party Twitter clients already banned several years ago?

That’s spot on, they weren’t.

Yes, around 2012. A few years later, its CEO apologized and restored it.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-apolo...

So it’s not something completely controversial that Twitter management broke third party platforms, those that might cut into their advertising and data collection machinery.

Incidentally, this is the Tragedy of the Commons that keeps breaking messaging interoperability and stillbirthed the whole pindaric ode that was UDDI SOA, a Corporate oriented declination of TBL’s Semantic Web

Not sure if "complaning about moderation" is taboo, but I'm a bit saddened that my comments to this issue are being diligently downvoted. I don't see any other reason other than "not having enough contempt for Elmo", although they do have some merit. I would expect such behavior on Arstechnica but here? SMH

I'm assuming it's mostly because this ban was already reversed 10 years ago (an actual decade ago) because of the value these third-party clients brought to the platforms. Twitter may not have made money on targeted advertising to these users, but they consumed content, amplified, tweeted and probably drove(/became) traffic to "native" marketing by Twitter's advertisers. (Like: tweets by @Target or whatever)

Yeah, that’s a reasonable argument, thanks. OTOH 10 years is a long time, also business strategies and needs change.

Just chalking it off to “Elmo does stupid” is cheap IMHO

Oh I definitely think it’s yet another short-sighted move by Elon. A “they’re using OUR data and NOT paying for it” kind of move.

There is no reason for Twitter to remove third-party clients unless they want to move ads outside of the main feed. If you allowed the API anyone could build a Twitter minus the ads.

This approach would allow them to decommission their existing ad system likely because they have lost too much institutional knowledge about how to run the previous one. Especially given it is heavily intertwined [1] with the fundamental timeline systems.

And given that I am constantly recommended random ads e.g. fertilizer and industrial mining machinery my guess is that the ML models powering the ads system have not been retrained since the last major wave of firings.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593899029531803649

As mentioned here [1], the tweets received via the API do not contain the ads, so third-party clients usually don’t display them. Twitter never tried - so a better and probably more effective change would have been to include the sponsored messages in the API stream and have third party clients display them. I doubt that many clients would have actively filtered them, and doing so could have been grounds for revoking their API keys.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/01/14/information-twi...

Twitter has started showing me soft pornography and other teams football fans that I don’t follow in my main feed. Either is a step too far for me, I’ve logged out on all devices (web, I’ve never had the app) and I’m going to see how many days I can go before logging back in.

Elon Musk is not a product person he’s building something nobody wants in my opinion and I’m happier without it. API being turned off is just another mark against a terrible product.

The "For You" & "Following" tabs are exactly what I have wanted for ages. Even still, I'm pleased to see that people are exploring other options or logging out altogether.

> The "For You" & "Following" tabs are exactly what I have wanted for ages.

Just so we’re all on the same page, these options always existed behind the sparkle menu. The sparkle menu has been removed in favor of tabs but the content has always been there. FYP was the default unless you hit sparkle -> latest tweets.

No this isn’t the same thing, I am convinced I largely used to only see things from followers and certainly never and big breasted random women. And Chelsea, Man United and Sp*rs fans - no thanks!

The sparkle used to be about chronological feed ordering vs hate/AI based tweet ordering.

Here’s proof I was correct, downvoters: https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/how-to-view-tweet...

That is a tutorial on how to switch from the For You algorithmic view that was the default view on Twitter to the chronological view.

> vs hate/AI based tweet ordering

The For You tab is an algorithmically generated list of tweets that is assembled by an AI based on your viewing habits, location, and other engagement metrics. That algorithm may have been adjusted in some ways since Musk took over but those are algorithmic tweaks, they're not a new method of displaying tweets.

So “Following” is in chronological order? That’s really unclear if true. The algorithm has definitely been messed with. What is the difference when the end result is the algorithm producing different results because a) parameters have been changed b) there is a new algorithm ? How do you know that you’re right and I’m wrong? The answer is you have absolutely no proof.

It is, yes. "Following" is the same "Latest Tweets" chronological feed. I just confirmed it on my device to be sure. (by scrolling a large distance several times and checking timestamps)

I use the web app too, and it's incredible how laggy it is compared to accessing it via API-driven 3rd party apps.

Absolute joke isn’t it, going back if you have typed something freezes the tab for 3-5 seconds while it decides if it should warn you about losing your edits…

Sidenote, this post reminds me that Musk exists. For a while there he was spamming controversial stuff non-stop and was in my "news" daily. Someone must have silenced him due to his stocks tanking? Or maybe people got bored of his news, not sure. It's been a nice break for me though.

I need some type of plugin-filter to just remove all Elon/Twitter mentions lol, but i'm also attracted to observing the chaos.

To document, it says this right now for me:

---

This page is down

I scream. You scream. We all scream... for us to fix this page. We’ll stop making jokes and get things up and running soon.

An incidental data point - I run a number of Twitter bots (nice bots that are helpful), and those are still working.

So the API hasn’t been fully turned off. At least, not for all API users.

If Musk's goal was to destroy Twitter from the inside, he seems to be succeeding.

Musk really is putting sterling work into his application to become the brand ambassador of the Dunning Kruger effect.

Elon's a genius. </s>

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