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Comment by terhechte | Hacker News Reader

Context for those not following: Twitter has silently shut down their API for many third party clients without any communication. Companies with apps that have been using the API for 15+ years are left in the dark:

https://blog.iconfactory.com/2023/01/state-of-the-twitterver...

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Context for those new to the party - this is something that happens again and again. Twitter messing with the API and insta-killing businesses depending on it is a meme at this point.

C.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8284398 - my comment from 9 years ago, reminiscing the Twitter API fiasco 10 years ago. Also 8 years ago, as the cycle started anew: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10427530.

EDIT: I still think the quote there perfectly describes the situation, so I'll repost it verbatim yet again.

  * Sovereign from Mass Effect on using someone else's technology
    
    "Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays,
    our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths
    we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You
    exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."

To be fair, for all the issues around Twitter limiting APIs in the past none of it was this bad. Nor were any changes done with zero warning and communication.

This is categorically different from what happened before.

The moment Musk acquired Twitter they should've known this would happen. The guy doesn't care about anyone except himself.

Musk might care if this move drives all the influential power users away.

I'm not influential – I almost never tweet and have almost no followers – but I've read Twitter almost every day for the last 15 years. If I can't use Tweetbot, I'm just going to stop using Twitter. The official client and the website are just not usable for me.

Sure, they haven't been getting any ad revenue from me using a third-party client, so they won't miss me, but they never even attempted to provide those ads to the third-party clients.

> If I can't use Tweetbot, I'm just going to stop using Twitter. The official client and the website are just not usable for me.

This is the situation for me. I haven't been on the platform since this disruption.

To be fair you could argue the same for 3rd parties. Twitter may have grown cos of 3rd party apps but it would die to 3rd party apps too if it can’t make money.

Sure, you could argue that, but...

Without API we go back to web scraping, Selenium, etc. Now guess which method is more expensive for any company (including Twitter)? Web scraping. Its the entire reason an API started to exist in the first place. Besides, if there is authentication involved, the user is logged in, and API calls can be profiled.

So I would say to your statement: "Definitely not." Only on the short term. And those users you lose you might be able to write off as dead weight or leeches but if a couple of big fish will have impact on the power of the network effect. And once that is reduced, the domino effect might take place.

This happened before Musk. Twitter decided to 'pivot' to 'enterprise users' to sell 'influencer data' to them. They suddenly shut down their api and changed their api pages to some b2b sales pitch. You couldnt even open an account without giving them excrutiating detail about the size of your enterprise and how big you were (there were poll questions to pass before signing up). When they noticed that they killed their developer base, they started a mailing campaign saying something like 'We love developers' (cringe). But by that time it was done and gone. Again - this happened before Musk.

Thanks. The foaming at the mouth rabble here following this closely apparently expect everyone to be up to date on the movements of Twitter at all times.

> Companies with apps that have been using the API for 15+ years are left in the dark:

This is quite predictable of any service really as I already did predict this [0]. Third-party apps have little to no hope against first party ones even if it is better. [1]

Companies and projects being dependent on someone else's API is inevitable to be shut off, clamped down or rising costs on plans to keep it alive. An uphill battle which the first party can compete against you and shut you down.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685294

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25684953

What’s the state of third-party clients for GitHub, Reddit, and YouTube?

Reddit is surprisingly still open w/ their API at this point. Some features have been purposefully left out of the APIs accessible to "old" reddit, but many were not.

Apollo is a Reddit client for iOS and the major feature it doesn't have from the official client is "Chat". To be clear, you can still send/receive DMs, but the IM chat is not available. For time sensitive events (/r/place) I believe there was support in the official app, but that makes sense not to expose to 3rd parties.

Most other "features" can be recreated by the client independently as long as they have access to your posts/history.

All of that said, I would not hold my breath that this will still be true in 10 years. The only reason that the 3rd party clients are still supported is because Reddit is able to make enough revenue from those users to justify the expense. If/when that changes, so will API access. To their credit, it is possible to spend Reddit coins and give awards via the current API, but you need to use an official client to top up your account. This at least provides a path for 3rd party client users to generate revenue for Reddit directly.

Apollo is so popular that API revocation would lead to a category 5 shitstorm among power users.

I personally prefer Narwhal on iOS, but if I were forced to use native Reddit app—or really anything resembling ‘new’ Reddit—I’d immediately leave and never come back.

Yepp. Ive been an active Reddit user for around 12 years. I browsed on desktop for a few years and then switched to mobile and never looked back. The communities I engage with just don’t require a full keyboard/mouse setup for me to get value from them.

If Apollo stops working, then I assume the other 3rd party apps would also be disabled so then I’m out. I’m a bit too young to have been active during RSS and and IRC days, but I’m exploring what a modern version of that experience looks like in case Reddit goes kaput.

I continue to completely disbelieve that Reddit is as popular as it is, whilst it is an apparently known fact it is completely unusable on mobile without a third party client.

I think the users that find the reddit app "unusable" are generally tech-literate power users. Most normies I've met who use Reddit don't mind using the default app (until they are exposed to a 3rd party client anyway!)

Contrary to the OP's claims AFAICT most third-party clients/apps for successful services are usually well supported.

A much easier way for a first party to kill third parties that may be hurting their businesses is buying them out and/or incorporating their functionality into the first party apps.

If users are choosing third party apps it's usually because (a) they are breaking some pretty obvious rules, like copyright and/or not displaying ads, in which case they will be in a constant struggle to survive, (b) they are providing functionality the first party does not or cannot provide, in which case it's still beneficial for the first party since the third party app is helping them keep the users.

I think it's fair to say Git as an option for accessing GitHub is likely to stick around.

Baconreader still works for Reddit.

Youtube is a lot more adversarial because of all the copyright issues, but there's NewPipe, and yt-dlp as well as all the authorized third party clients like non-Android TVs.

Reddit recently started using a nonstandard Markdown implentation so that escaped links are broken via the API (and old.reddit.com).

How many is "many"? Looks like the only affected apps were those which provided a different means to access Twitter without ads. This feels like a storm in a teacup with the majority of developers on the API being unaffected.

> Looks like the only affected apps were those which provided a different means to access Twitter without ads.

I'd be happy to pay some sort of subscription to the API in order to keep using the third party client. Not sure why this isn't a thing. I'd much rather pay a fe bucks per month for API access than "Twitter Blue" or whatever.

As for the apps: while it's an asshat move, I'd be really careful about building anything commercial on top of anyone else's project without any guarantees about the service even existing tomorrow.

It's not actually possible to serve twitter ads from an API client.

There are at least 28 known apps that were banned without any reason or explanation.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1O27Co27g2fWRon7g...

While I do agree that Twitter was pretty exceptional in allowing these clients to exist, as usual it’s about just doing it silently and not giving any rationale. At least have the courage to admit what you’ve done!

> the only affected apps were those which provided a different means to access Twitter without ads

Isn't that the whole purpose of an API to send and retrieve content without ads - or any other presentation-layer addition?

It's definitely the purpose of the Twitter API because it does not serve ads when you fetch the timeline.

While that's clearly the right choice for professional social media manager type apps which might pay some monthly fee, it's very strange that in so many years they've never created two tiers of API feeds, with an ad-filled one for normal third party apps.

It affected the most popular apps, and it was done without any warning or even communication after the fact. Storm in a teacup? It shows what anybody using the API will have to put up with going forward.

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