Tweetbot is back down again
theverge.com
theverge.com
Even better: access to use third party apps is a second tier that costs $10, and give $1 to the app maker. All the incentives are nicely lined up: the user won't choose to pay more if it's not worth it so the alternative app is guaranteed to offer some added value, the app maker gets paid for their efforts and is inclined to closely follow Twitter's increased rate of feature development so at least they don't fall behind and ideally innovate, Twitter gets value in not just a bit of extra money but also platform interaction experimentation which they can mine for good ideas to integrate back into the official client, they're inclined to make the API good, etc. I don't know how most people would take to this idea, but I like solutions where the incentives are all aligned. Am I missing something?
I've only learned in the last few days how many ads Twitter has. I've never seen any of them, because I've never used the Twitter website, just Tweetbot.
Also: after abruptly pulling the plug without explanation, I'm also pretty unlikely to shell out a dollar for it in the future. Certainly: Tapbots has no reason to invest in the platform anymore.
The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter.
Tapbots are also building a Mastodon client called Ivory: https://tapbots.com/ivory/
It’s good to see that many (if not most) of these affected developers are already working on premium Mastodon clients.
I'm having a hard time seeing ActivityPub reach any kind of mass adaptation.
The difference for me is that those 200 tweets are mostly about the same drama and the replies to every one of them are always full of trolls and genuinely shitty opinions havers (e.g. sports fan bunch of numbers insisting that the police should just shoot protestors) and somehow this stays the same even if I spend ten minutes every now and then just blocking those reply guys.
You can shout "echo chamber" all you want but the lower overall population and stricter crackdowns on trolls and defederation of dodgy instances certainly leads to less noise and more respectful interactions. I'll take one 1000 character reply I disagree with over 200 low-effort trolls and parroted culture war slogans.
Turns out the "public town square" is a much more pleasant space when it's not full of a billion people and their sock puppets shouting slurs at each other all day.
... multiple former-Twitter-app-developers are working on this problem right now. If the apps are user-friendly, it won't matter how esoteric the protocol or web interfaces are.
This might be one of those occasions that we'll look back and wonder why Elon chose to intentionally stepped on this particular rake. Filed under "unintentional first-order consequences". I have a feeling these individually small rebellions will snowball into something fierce.
Considering how bad Mastodon itself is to use, I don't have a ton of belief. And I personally have a hard time figuring out how you can make Mastodon user-friendly. Like, what server is Ivory going to default new users to?
The instance you're on really generally doesn't matter as much as people on HN seem to think, and you can always move.
Good
>I'm probably not going to get BBC Breaking
https://mastodon.cloud/@BBCBreaking_bot
Not official, but why does it matter?
Given that it hasn't posted since 2021, I'd say that it matters.
There's obviously the issue of trust when it comes to unofficial sources masquerading as official.
And the situation is even worse for companies that are less tech-foward.
[0]: I'm using the term somewhat sarcastically as the filter is just about whom you follow, not about which views you agree with. If you follow a diverse enough crowd you'll still be exposed to views you may disagree with simply because you follow persons, not topics.
Twitter already nerfed the API in 2018, and devs of third-party apps have to pay for the current API, so it's not like Twitter isn't making money from that... they're likely making more for charging much-more-popular third-party apps for API access, than they're getting for ads on their own (mediocre) app -- never mind the fact that Twitter for iOS and macOS were just rebranded versions of Tweetie post-acquisition (circa 2010)...
The new "pay to be verified" scheme is absolute nonsense, and makes the new checkmarks absolutely meaningless... and paying to have your tweets be more prominent makes two classes of user and tweet, effectively fracturing your user base.
In November, there were an estimated ~100,000 Twitter Blue subscribers[1] -- meanwhile, more than a million Twitter users[2] were driven to Mastodon, and a number have shuttered or mothballed their Twitter accounts -- especially in the tech scene.
That's not good for business, and it certainly doesn't "incentivise" staying on Twitter, much less paying to do so.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/twitter-blue-elon-musk-subscrib...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/jan/08/elon-m...
And more to the point, you shouldn’t be allowed to, because as a mechanic for social networks it just doesn’t work. No-one wants their timeline to be full of stuff from people who are paying for attention; these people are generally not good enough to get attention without paying for it.
This option is not open to them anymore, they’ve burned too much credibility. I’m not paying Twitter a red cent.
https://insiderpaper.com/twitter-to-increase-blue-subscripti...
Sheer coincidence it decides to show you the sort of folks that might try Mastodon. ;-)
As it is these clients only fed off the main twitter api and when that was turned off it errors out
Instead, he caused free advertising for Tapbot's upcoming Mastodon client and pissed off power users who produce the free content the site relies on to sell ads.
Thirdparty apps wouldn't exist if the official app was good enough.
To allow arbitrary third party apps to decide this would not be a sensible business decision by Twitter.
Third party apps could implement this kind of thing, for sure. However, on an ongoing basis, Twitter would need to ensure that all third party apps had the latest ad presentation logic, and that they worked correctly, and none of the third party apps used sneaky tricks to hide the ads. After all, there's no benefit to the developers of the third-party app in hosting ads that benefit Twitter.
It would quite costly and fiddly for Twitter to administrate this, and IMO, the benefits of a third-party app ecosystem don't really stack up from Twitter's PoV.
The Shit Show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 - Jan 2023 (264 comments)
AIUI they're all embedded in their respective apps... https://gist.github.com/shobotch/5160017
I exclusively used Tweetbot, and checking out the first-party clients this weekend confirms to me that they’re still pretty bad. But I knew that eventually this day was coming. Twitter never made properly supporting third party clients a priority, by either finding a way to charge for access or finding a way to ensure ads were in the feeds. It couldn’t keep going the way it was, and obviously Elon has no interest in devoting any time/attention to it.
3rd party Twitter clients were once considered a design playground where the best elements not only influenced Twitter's future design language, but also that of iOS as a whole. Tweetie's pull-to-refresh is emblematic of that. I'm pretty sure Tweetbot invented the (partial) left/right swipe to invoke different actions on tweets that have since become a mainstay of email apps.
Twitter didn’t have a first party client for years, the clients banned Friday are those that came first.
Core features and the name of those features Twitter has today came from third party apps.
Twitter forces third party clients to pay them money to use the new API which is needed for them to function as full clients but the new API is worse than the old one which was free to use.
Twitter chooses not to show ads for third party clients.
Tweetbot was a client banned on Friday that was released a year after the official Twitter app.
That's one way to put it. The other side is those third-party apps brought Twitter users for years.
I’d already kicked the habit (or rather replaced one addiction with another and moved to mastodon) after the purge of the journalists, but if I hadn’t this would be the end of twitter for me; the first party stuff is borderline unusable.
I suspect Saint Car has misunderstood how dependent power users are on the third party apps.
>If they leave the platform Twitter could risk losing more.
The people leaving need twitter's audience much more than twitter needs them.
I was not disappointed :-)
I thought the larger developers had to pay Twitter to use their API?
* https://tapbots.social/@paul/109691075588560655
Twitter has left 3rd-party vendors with no sunset period, or ability to deal with their customers gracefully, directly impacting not only their apps but their revenue. It is as yet unknown how amenable to 3rd-party Twitter app vendors the app store owners for iOS and Android will be.
Apple proactively gave everyone a refund who bought it.
https://marco.org/2015/09/21/peace-refund
Apple would probably do the same for third party Twitter clients if asked by the author.
Of course Marco could easily take the hit since that was shortly after he made a few million when Tumblr was sold to Yahoo.
And it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of hope for the future of 3rd-party Twitter apps anyway.
Yes, it sucks something you created is struggling due to things out of your control. However, you built your something with a foundation out of your control. I'm just struggling to be sympathetic with the business model.
If this incident truly represents Twitter's change in approach to third-party clients, that change in policy is being executed in the most petty and malicious way it could be done.
This is not to excuse Twitter's actual behavior, which is clearly shitty. But: More petty and malicious would be to shut off access, then contact devs and promise that access would be restored if they just make these tiny changes to their app, and also sign this NDA forbidding discussion of the process. Then string along for a week or a month demanding just one more tiny change after change.
Then ghost.
(This is not a value judgement of Mastodon vs Twitter)
Oh, you had a plan, but you couldn't really get it up in time, well, that's some learning pain. I'll cry a tear in some beer with you.
Tried to make a plan, realized there was no alternatives, but carried on anyways? That's very brave (ahem, read not smart) of you, but if you're a sole proprietor with no employees depending on you, then we can also share a beer of how to be smarter in the next venture. Got employees that are now hat in hand because of your "bravery"? Nope, again, no sympathy for you, but I'll be at the bar with your laid off employees burning you in effigy.
Pedantry is so much fun
The trouble isn't this necessarily; a lot of business models don't exist unless another company does. The App Store is a good example of this; if Apple just disappears then so many other businesses disappear with it.
The trouble is the fact that the relationship between these two parties is so one-sided. Unless these third party Twitter clients have some sort of contractual foundation to stand upon, then yeah, what they've enjoyed so far is basically akin to an ad-hoc, at-will support, that can be terminated at any time with no notice, for no reason.
Whether if it is Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, etc is no different to them locking down API access from third-party apps and can do so at any time, official or not.
No different to this event with the closure of a third-party Discord client [0]. I guess I was right in [1] as it eventually happened to Twitter.
Musk famously does not care about contracts. Note that the only reason he ended up buying Twitter is that Deleware's corporate courts really don't fuck around and were likely going to force him to buy it pronto despite his attempts to wriggle out. But he'll happily screw over lesser people, as he's doing with various vendors, like Twitter's landlords: https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-landlord-sues-compan...
Explain to me how a small software vendor, even with the best contract in the world, is going to force Musk to turn back on their access in a timely enough fashion that they'll still have a business left? And be able to do it for a modest enough amount of money that the ISV will still be turning a profit?
The point was that when you build on top of someone else's platform, [1], then you are beholden to their whims. This is a substantial business risk, which has been happening since forever.
I sympethize with Tweetbot et al, but this day has been inevitable for some time. They are not the first to suffer this fate in tech, and they won't be the last.
[1] I'll add, without paying - ie not being an actual "customer".
I agree that building on other people's platforms is dangerous, but that's true regardless of the contract you have, because contracts only matter to the extent that you can afford to enforce them.
And they had access to a less limited API (request-wise) to make their app work better without constant rate limiting nags.
“Hmm… it is actually the people that have created value for the site by driving engagement that are the true idiots”
In an experiment on Sunday evening, M. Haddad switched out the Twitter API key used by TweetBot, which had already been disabled since Friday 2023-01-13, for an older one that it still possessed that had posting limits. People rushed to confirm that TweetBot was back, only to discover that they could only log in and read, not post. It was approximately 3 hours from then until that API key completely stopped working too, along with all of the other API keys that Tapbots had.
The Twitter API itself is still present, but specific API keys used in several 3rd party apps have ceased functioning.
No developer has received any word from Twitter at all about what is going on.
However, unconfirmed rumour, reported on some WWW sites, had had it that internal communications within Twitter revealed that the disabling of the API keys for specific 3rd-party Twitter apps was intentional, and that Twitter staff had yet to work out how to announce this publicly. M. Haddad took the disabling of the other API keys once they were put into use as confirmation that this rumour was indeed accurate, that this was not an accident or just some bug that would be fixed, but a deliberately targetted move.
This combines with other developments. 3rd party apps could show chronological Twitter timelines, and skip advertisements. The chronological timeline has this same weekend been removed from the Twitter WWW interface and 1st-party app, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the same day that the 3rd party apps stopped working Twitter offered advertisers halved advertising rates if they paid for a blitz of up to $250,000 worth of advertising to Twitter users that must run before 2023-02-28.
* https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-offers-free-ads-b...
Effectively, Twitter is now marketing itself as distinct from the FediVerse, with no 3rd party apps (the FediVerse having several each for iOS and Android, including one in development by Tapbots), an advertising blitz with user attention being sold to advertisers and those who pay Twitter as the funding model (with many FediVerse instances opting for a user-funded or coöperatively-funded model, with organizations that wish an "official" presence funding their own instances for hosting official staff accounts, as Tapbots itself does, and advertisements being banned), and only algorithmic timelines (chronological timelines being the only option in most FediVerse WWW interfaces and apps).
Several users who have disabled their accounts in response to the loss of TweetBot, deleting and archiving all posts, marking the accounts private, and unfollowing everyone, have also reported (in various FediVerse posts) upon checking back that their accounts have had followers re-added to them by Twitter itself.
* https://mastodon.scot/@bodhipaksa/109694529674624449
Unfollowing everyone ensures both that the accounts do not accumulate notifications and concomitant junk e-mail, and that follower counts accurately reflect the real reduced Twitter effectiveness to those others that remain using it. Many (not just Charles Stross) have also stressed the importance of not deleting accounts, and occasional dummy keep-alive posts, in order to prevent impersonation of long-standing public identities. Anecdotal reports over the weekend have already stated much reduced views of Tweets made by those without paid-for accounts, because of the switch to non-chronological viewability only, favouring advertisers and the posts of those who have paid Twitter for accounts. Not paying Twitter is, by those reports, to be no longer read, as much if even at all.
Well, I left a bit ago, but if I hadn't that would be the end for me. That's the only view I used on Twitter, and found the non-chronological timeline to have almost no value at all.
Definitely haven't regretted my decision to leave, but that decision is such a strong reinforcement of that decision.
At least before you could click that "Home" icon and switch to "Latest" and it would reasonably stick.
I gave Twitter a lot more leeway than I should've through all this due to network effect and intertia, and I regret that a lot. When this "For You"/"Following" thing happened I actively went back to Echofon and Tweetbot, and was planning to make a subscription just to avoid what I was seeing on the first-party app/website. And now I can't even do that.
Wouldn't be surprised if Tweetdeck is forced to move over to the "new" Tweetdeck (which is just a wrapper for the web experience) soon.
On WWW, I see the tabs
* For You (which seems to be the recommendation-based feed)
* Following (which appears to be the chronological feed)
* All my favorited lists as separate tabs, which previously had to navigated to on WWW. But which were available as tabs on Android before and still are.
There was also this tweet from EM in response to PG that talked about this update [1]
Appears, but is not. Some tweets are missing from it. So it is chronological with holes, at least mine.
The first tab is the recommended feed, the second the chronological feed, and the third a list I have favorited.
https://twitter.com/search?q=MichaelTakeMP&src=typed_query has no "Latest" where it used to have just last week.
And people have reported (e.g. https://mastodon.social/@bensen/109684048610674491) that "Following" is not in fact in chronological order.
I only heard of the Fediverse today (on mastodon)
Has Twitter ever marketed itself as a member of a federation ?
* https://fedi.tips/mastodon-and-the-fediverse-beginners-start...
Indeed, the Mastodon people are concerned over the trademark dilution aspects of sysops using "mastodon" in their domain names when it isn't the Mastodon WWW server software in use.
* https://joinmastodon.org/sv/trademark
Those familiar with FidoNet will find the FediVerse very familiar in structure, and the distinction between Twitter and the FediVerse is much akin to the distinction between BIX/Compuserve and FidoNet back in the 1980s. Much is the same, including local funding of nodes by sysops and users, local policies set by local sysops, and the fact that not everything gets distributed everywhere.
(There aren't quite FidoNet-style local echoes, but there is a marked difference, even across instances in a single country such as, say, the U.K., as to what can be found on each instance. Quite a lot of discussion in the #TweetBot hashtag can be seen at https://tapbots.social/tags/TweetBot , and markedly fewer -- on Saturday almost none -- of the same posts can be seen at https://know.me.uk/tags/TweetBot .)
To those familiar with Twitter, one way of thinking about it is that it is not one big central Twitter that carries everything on the planet all mushed together, but lots of little separately owned Twitters that can cross-post, and that don't carry everything.
My guess is the 3rd party clients need to stop filtering out the ads or risk making the suspension permanent.
Also if that was the case I’d expect Twitter to communicate about it.
To me, that it hasn’t, we’ll this indicates the block is temporary, showing who’s boss before introducing a new rule like paid users only, or ad exposure.
Either way, it’s an Emperor level decision. Would love to have seen the internal heat when the decision was mandated.
I've had active accounts since 2009. Never had a super active presence, but it's been an incredibly useful tool for communicating support and user outreach.
I just announced that I will be deactivating my accounts.
In particular, for https://jsonip.com I will be setting up a new status endpoint that's also reflected on https://getjsonip.com.
Direct contact will be through charles@getjsonip.com.
I just can't abide this blatant behavior of firing thousands of people and arbitrarily disabling access keys for various client apps with absolutely no prior notification.
Not sure if I should make a post on HN about the change for jsonip.com or not. I have a lot of users but don't know if there enough here to justify a post.
But you need an actual plan to get people to move from the third party app to the first party. You know, figure out why the third party apps are used, build some equivalent features and lure users back. Instead Elon Musk's plan is just "let's break that". Well ok, but you haven't actually managed to get people to come back to your first party app, you've just broken their experience of twitter. Well done, you've broken twitter for your most valuable users. Do you think, having broken the service with no notice at all, and with no viable app that they want to use, that they're going to use your first party app? No! They're just going to fucking leave! What do you think all those developers who were writing great twitter clients are going to do now? You could have hired them, you could have had them writing great twitter clients for you. No instead, you've forced them all to go off and write clients for your competitors social networks. This move has single handedly created the largest developer community for Mastodon.
So yes, we're finally at the point where Twitter is best used through the first party app. We've achieved that by losing the majority of the high value users that you were worried about on the 3rd party app in the first place.
I know Twitter has discussed subscriptions, and this seems like a way to leverage the value of third party apps to directly drive revenue. Maybe even give the third party app developers a cut. Then you have a situation where your developer ecosystem has incentives to drive usage and revenue for you.
Or even better, third-party developers pay for an API key set on a subscription plan to use the Twitter API in their apps, which makes sense and is a win-win-win for Twitter, third-party developers and users.
Presumably buying a Tesla and believing that its the best car in the world, also that Elon musk did everything alone and he's the reason Tesla exists(not true, elon didn't create Tesla).
They're the right-wing commentators and conspiracy theorists who see Twitter as everything wrong with modern society[0]. To them, no matter what Musk does, it'll be beneficial for them. Either Musk reworks the platform to be amenable to them or he drives the company in the ground. Right now he's doing both, so for them it's an absolute win.
That's the flavor of kool-aid Musk is deliberately drinking from and once you realize that, most of his actions make some amount of sense (whilst also having a distressingly low concern about his personal fortune, something which makes it clear that when it comes to right-wing radicalization, he's firmly within the "sucker" group, rather than the "grifter" group; the latter is flexible with their beliefs if it risks losing personal profits, Musk isn't), like the utter nothingburger that is the "Twitter files"[1].
[0]: Point of clarity - this is the people who Musk surrounds himself with, I am not saying anyone who thinks twitter is negative on society is a right wing commentator or conspiracy theorist. Musk specifically is talking and listening to policy advice from these two groups and this is what those groups generally believe.
[1]: Which so far have been extremely boring and generic content moderation requests rather than proof of any "inside jobs" and restatements of old news.
The things he said about freedom of speech ("free speech absolutism", etc.) made a great impact on people. To be fair, there was also some merit in that narrative as censorship was indeed happening in Twitter 1.0.
It's quite easy for a commoner or pleb to think that Elon Musk is single handedly taking on the "mighty establishment" on behalf of the common people. The "Modern day Robin Hood" is a kool-aide stereotype which isn't easy to shake off and Elon seems to have been successful so far in that narrative pitch.
Absolutely not. Musk fans tend to decide good/bad based off of “Musk idea”/“not Musk idea”
Somewhere there’s somebody crafting some version of an “Uptime and usability are ideas from a beta cuck mentality, in this thread I will show that slow-loading brain pill ads on a website facing a mass exodus are the sign of virility and strength…” post right now.
"I fully support Musk taking over Twitter. He is a free speech absolutist and will end censorship."
"Of course you can't have people impersonating others, even for comedy. That's just dangerous."
"Those journalists had it coming. They anyways just post fake news. No one has the right to a Twitter account."
"It's a private company. He can ban whoever he wants. The guy shouldn't have shared locations of his jet."
"Third party clients cut into Twitter's revenue and give nothing back. They deserve to be cut off."
Note that e.g. reinstating far-right accounts banned for hate speech is "free speech" but banning leftist or progressive accounts doesn't contradict that. Only one side of the political divide loves to portray itself as "centrist" to hide its actual beliefs and values.
Are they though? I thought money loss at twitter was at an all time high
Do you want to guess how much it lost in 2022? Hint: Elon Musk's buyout forced Twitter to take on $13 Billion debt... estimated to be $1.3 Billion in interest payments per year.
This "Headcount" fallacy seems to be just the pro-Elon Musk crowd ignoring the fact that the #1 and #2 sources of Twitter's financial woes are:
1. The aforementioned Loan.
2. The $2.5 Billion (estimated) loss in advertiser revenue.
Twitters losses in 2023 will be astronomical. It will not be possible to ignore Twitter's loan issues, or their loss in advertiser revenue.
I am not a fan of Elon Musk, for what it’s worth, and I’m sorry that you felt the need to make this some kind of tribal battle instead of a productive discussion. Twitter’s financial issues were well known before Musk became involved, and it is widely agreed that he greatly overpaid for the company. Nothing he has done with the company should impress anyone at this point. The point stands that the company was going to be experiencing major pain even without him.
$3.8 Billion / year of that pain is directly attributable to Musk, in a company that only had $5 Billion/year revenue.
Its really that simple. Look at the advertising losses due to Elon Musk's right-wing redpilling of the world... and add the $1.3 Billion loan structure Elon Musk is directly responsible for. There's no need to overthink this. We can actually calculate how much revenue Twitter is losing directly related to Elon Musk's behavior.
---------
If you want to argue otherwise, you need to start putting down at least some napkin-level estimates to where the other losses-of-revenue came from for Twitter. Or you need to chip away at the $3.8 Billion number I posted above.
Coming into a $5 Billion revenue company and immediately causing $3.8 Billion (combination lost revenue and new liabilities) is very impressive. I don't think I've ever seen someone wipe out... 76% of a company's revenue in just 3 months before.
The problems you're trying to discuss are almost entirely irrelevant to Twitter's current woes. The actual problems are measured in the $Billions/year size. The problems you discuss are perhaps only a few dozen million/year.
> You are shadowboxing.
You are making a mountain out of a molehill. The $million mistakes should be ignored for the $Billion mistakes happening right now.
It would be reasonable if- (1) Third party clients showed all ads; and (2) The user was subscribed to Twitter Blue
If Twitter wants to be... like, a really bad instagram clone, leaning into the following celebrities thing all the way, then this... maybe works?
In other words, the people who are most lucrative to advertise to are not seeing any ads, and are not paying Twitter for the privilege of an ad-free experience.
As for the UX thing — Twitter owes a huge amount of its own UX to third-party clients. Hell, Twitter’s own iOS client was originally a third-party client they acquired called Tweetie. The developer of Twitteriffic made a list of all the things they pioneered for Twitter: https://furbo.org/2011/03/11/twitterrific-firsts/
There are plenty of good reasons why Twitter might not be comfortable giving ads as an API, and that means they're giving away their resources for free by providing these APIs.
Also, Twitter is a more mature platform now. They probably don't feel like they need the innovation from these apps anymore. But that misses the point, small changes like the view count on tweets are added to improve engagement / profit, so Twitter wants full control of what is seen.
Again, it probably does not help Twitter to support these people, even if they are a small part of the user base. Same mindset as banning competitor links in your bio.
This isn't so much of a problem on Twitter as much as Reddit, though. Their native experience is okay (it's just the users that are insufferable)
Also you should rethink your life if you consider yourself a Twitter/Reddit power user.
I'm not, but people can make money on those platforms nowadays, so don't be so judgmental.