Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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 :)

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 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.

> 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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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