Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
twitter.com
twitter.com
This seems like more management by manchild. I strongly suspect that Musk realized his promises of cutting down bots etc. were failing and that they either couldn't or wouldn't develop abuse detection, so he's decided to solve the problem by making it cost money, with the (perhaps desired) side effect of crippling academic/analytic research.
As an amateur network science researcher, I'm pretty steamed. I enjoy doing my own network analyses using tools like Gephi and have monitored probably a hundred breaking news or trending issues, as well as amassing a great collection of academic papers by smarter folk than me. I don't run any kind of app or service that sits on top of Twitter, but those who do run legitimate services are now being held hostage because of the unchecked abuse. Ant the failure to deal with botspam is lamentable. Twitter has refused for years to implement even the simplest things like hashing tweets and looking for collisions, or considering the count of edges to the hashtag graph, or even looking at tweet frequency. Many of their abuse problems will continue unabated; the sellers in the market for bogus twitter accounts are likely delighted because they now have a great excuse to raise prices, even though most of their 'product' is produced by hand with cheap labor in poor countries.
This is a good point about what might happen, but it seems worthwhile to address and fix directly. Personally I don't see why adversarial scraping of a publicly published website should require any more ethical consideration/review than using the suggested API would. Ethical concerns should revolve around humans, not the business desires of non-human entities.
Of course this used to have the side effect of breaking significant swathes of basic browser UX, especially in areas of accessibility. I assume they’re better now than they once were, but given musk’s historical behavior I assume he won’t consider breaking something like accessibility to be bad or problematic.
I don't see why would he spend more to make website less accessible. Not fixing bugs - yes, just about everyone does so. But breaking it intentionally costs money.
Tesla's aren't THE most accessible (by cost) EV out there, but SpaceX def is.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-layoffs-accessibility/
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-sent-musk-risks-paid...
SpaceX is... an accessible EV? What?
No, I don't. It obviously is trying to say something about accessibility and SpaceX, but I don't see how the sense of accessbility being discussed in the thread even applies to SpaceX, much less what claim is being made.
Just because it’s the same word does not mean it’s the same meaning.
This is a comment thread discussing accessibility at Twitter, in a post about Twitter discontinuing part of its platform. It’s not a place to circlejerk Musk’s achievements, regardless how much you would want that to be so.
Explain, in exact words, what about SpaceX in any way shape or form would indicate that they know how to handle user a11y and how that would transfer over to Twitter— you know, the thing we’re actually discussing here.
Usage for reading is something like (but not identical to)
1.sh screen_name > 1.json
yy059 < 1.json|grep full_text > 1.txt
less 1.txt
unset connection
export Connection=keep-alive
yy059 < 1.json|grep full_text \
|yy030 \
|grep "https://t.co/.{10}$" \
|uniq \
|yy025 \
|nc -vv h1b 80 \
|sed -n '/location: /s///p' \
|ahref > 1.htm
links -no-connect 1.htm
Alternatively if I do not trust the URLs I might use a script called "www" instead of ahref. It takes URLs on stdin and fetches archive.org URLs wrapped in simple HTML to stdout, using the IA's cdx API.
#!/bin/sh
SCREEN_NAME=$1
COUNT=500
PUBLIC_TOKEN="Bearer AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANRILgAAAAAAnNwIzUejRCOuH5E6I8xnZz4puTs%3D1Zv7ttfk8LF81IUq16cHjhLTvJu4FA33AGWWjCpTnA"
GT=$(exec curl -A "" -s https://twitter.com/$SCREEN_NAME|sed -n '/gt=/{s/.*gt=//;s/;.*//p;}');
echo "x-guest-token: $GT" >&2;
REST_ID=$(exec curl -A "" -H "authorization: $PUBLIC_TOKEN" -H "content-type: application/json" -H "x-guest-token: $GT" -s "https://twitter.com/i/api/graphql/mCbpQvZAw6zu_4PvuAUVVQ/UserByScreenName?variables=%7B%22screen_name%22%3A%22$SCREEN_NAME%22%2C%22withSafetyModeUserFields%22%3Atrue%2C%22withSuperFollowsUserFields%22%3Atrue%7D"|sed 's/\(rest_id\":\"[0-9]*\)\(.*\)/\1/;s/.*\"//');
echo "rest_id: $REST_ID" >&2;
curl -A "" -H "authorization: $PUBLIC_TOKEN" -H "content-type: application/json" -H "x-guest-token: $GT" -s "https://twitter.com/i/api/graphql/3ywp9kIIW-VQOssauKmLiQ/UserTweets?variables=%7B%22userId%22%3A%22${REST_ID}%22%2C%22count%22%3A$COUNT%2C%22includePromotedContent%22%3Atrue%2C%22withQuickPromoteEligibilityTweetFields%22%3Atrue%2C%22withSuperFollowsUserFields%22%3Atrue%2C%22withDownvotePerspective%22%3Afalse%2C%22withReactionsMetadata%22%3Afalse%2C%22withReactionsPerspective%22%3Afalse%2C%22withSuperFollowsTweetFields%22%3Atrue%2C%22withVoice%22%3Atrue%2C%22withV2Timeline%22%3Atrue%7D&features=%7B%22dont_mention_me_view_api_enabled%22%3Atrue%2C%22interactive_text_enabled%22%3Atrue%2C%22responsive_web_uc_gql_enabled%22%3Afalse%2C%22vibe_tweet_context_enabled%22%3Afalse%2C%22responsive_web_edit_tweet_api_enabled%22%3Afalse%2C%22standardized_nudges_misinfo%22%3Afalse%2C%22responsive_web_enhance_cards_enabled%22%3Afalse%2C%22include_rts%22%3Atrue%7D"
This solution isn't pretty but I can easily keep tabs on Twitter feeds without any need for a Twitter account, a Twitter "API key" or a so-called "modern" browser.
Every person visiting twitter.com is using this same token. The token is neither personal nor private.
What would be the point of changing or blocking it.
Be interesting to see if that stays the same when they're charging for the API but leaving a huge loophole with this token.
Using GraphQL like this can be an effective dark pattern because to anyone using a "modern" browser that "tech" commpanies control it makes it seem like the text of the website cannot be retrieved without Javascript enabled. That's false, but nonetheless it gets people to enable Javascript because the website explicitly asks them to enable it. Then the website, i.e., "tech" company, can perform telemetry, data collection, surveillance, and other shenanigans.
Sometimes this practice might not be a deliberate dark pattern, it might just be developers who are using Javascript gratuitously. For example, HN search provided by Algolia uses GraphQL. HN puts URLs with pre-selected query terms and a public token ("API key") on the HN website. Everyone that uses those URLs uses the same key.
Unlike Twitter, HN istelf does not ask anyone to enable Javascript. The website works fine without it, including the Algolia search, as shown below.
Usage is
1.sh query > 1.json
#!/bin/sh
curl -A "" -d '{"query":"$@","analyticsTags":["web"],"page":0,"hitsPerPage":30,"minWordSizefor1Typo":4,"minWordSizefor2Typos":8,"advancedSyntax":true,"ignorePlurals":false,"clickAnalytics":true,"minProximity":7,"numericFilters":[],"tagFilters":["story",[]],"typoTolerance":"min","queryType":"prefixNone","restrictSearchableAttributes":["title","comment_text","url","story_text","author"],"getRankingInfo":true}' "https://uj5wyc0l7x-3.algolianet.com/1/indexes/Item_production_sort_date/query?x-algolia-agent=Algolia%20for%20JavaScript%20(4.0.2)%3B%20Browser%20(lite)&x-algolia-api-key=8ece23f8eb07cd25d40262a1764599b1&x-algolia-application-id=UJ5WYC0L7X" #!/bin/sh
export Connection=close;
export Content_Type=x-www-form-urlencoded;
export httpMethod=POST;
x=$(echo '{"query":"'$@'","analyticsTags":["web"],"page":0,"hitsPerPage":30,"minWordSizefor1Typo":4,"minWordSizefor2Typos":8,"advancedSyntax":true,"ignorePlurals":false,"clickAnalytics":true,"minProximity":7,"numericFilters":[],"tagFilters":["story",[]],"typoTolerance":"min","queryType":"prefixNone","restrictSearchableAttributes":["title","comment_text","url","story_text","author"],"getRankingInfo":true}');
export Content_Length=${#x};
echo "https://uj5wyc0l7x-3.algolianet.com/1/indexes/Item_production_sort_date/query?x-algolia-agent=Algolia%20for%20JavaScript%20(4.0.2)%3B%20Browser%20(lite)&x-algolia-api-key=8ece23f8eb07cd25d40262a1764599b1&x-algolia-application-id=UJ5WYC0L7X"|(yy025;echo "$x") \
|nc -vv h1b 80Two important take-aways from that:
1) The attackers just pulled the old "Hey, I'm from IT service desk and need your password."
2) Apparently every engineer had god mode in production
I can't imagine what scary monsters are in that codebase.
Scraping web pages is a last resort for when proper APIs are not available.
No attempt at making this seem like reasonable behavior and communication with developers can succeed here.
And by the way if you expect reasonable cost, you're in for a surprise. Twitter is DESPERATE for cash.
It was useful to check to see if someone else decided to softblock me/deactivated their account (and in at least one case, has helped me to reach out to someone in need). That's not "making money from the dataset", it was a hobby project and I imagine the overwhelming majority of Twitter bots are that. (Most of the ones I used to follow generally just scraped various subreddits to tweet out/source fun art to look at).
I'm not gonna pay money to access my own data, Musk can sink in his own shit for that and I don't blame any of those other hobby bot devs for not wanting to do that either.
From a pure business perspective it's either Twitter dies or Elon pays the bills.
> Daily Revenue Has Dropped 40%, 500 Top Advertisers Have Left
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twitter-manager-dail...
It's not only the code base. It's employees, servers, processes, data...
Even if you get twitter for free, you still need to pay to run it.
One reason Mastodon and others have trouble is that people don't want to follow random people, they want to follow the same people they did on Twitter. It's their community.
Certain communities did make a successful switch, like Apple and Tech journalist communities, but not a lot of other communities.
This seems to be taken as given, but how specifically would you expect someone to simply monetize the social graph? Just because data exists doesn't mean that anyone wants to pay for it.
As for the value of the brand itself, we could say the same thing about Yahoo in 2010.
You can really pull a lot of useful data on someone by just looking at their follow choices, self-identification, and reply/retweeting behavior. And that's before you add all the information Twitter maintains on things like profile views or video plays, or the consistency of entity identification in tweet content etc. I can give you very specific kinds of demographics like 'people who enjoy tweets about dogs and football but not cats or politics.'
Augmenting these lists with Twitter's data might improve/expand the lists bur won't create much extra value imo, because the demand side won't change.
A more sane way to do this would have been with a public tweet explaining why they were doing it (ad revenue), a 3 month lead time, and an API for helping apps get users to "upgrade" their account.
Frankly, I don't think Musk much cares for the developers. From a business perspective, he might be right here - developers aren't the ones watching ads or paying for microtransactions, users are. The developers, at his scale, are a liability. Restricting their capabilities and profiting from their struggle is just part of the modern tech stack. I hate it as much as you do, but calling it "insane" is a hysterical double-standard that crops up just too often on HN.
Nobody is making enough profit via the Twitter API to make it worth staying on. Twitter is a distant #3 social network that itself has never really made money.
This is being too generous. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are all far larger than Twitter. Reddit is also just barely larger than Twitter, though at that scale you have to consider who has more bots. Twitter claims slightly more MAUs than Snapchat, but since Snapchat isn't a viral network it probably has no bots to speak of, making it larger than Twitter in terms of real users.
It's a hard comparison because the value of the Apple ecosystem is so obvious and mutual. Twitter is junk on both sides; unless as a third party dev you just happened to find value in it, in which case you should pay for it.
I understand this is hurting peoples feelings, but it makes complete sense to me from all angles.
I used to use Tweetbot which has now stopped working, as a result I don't use Twitter any more, the advertisers have lost one extra person to sell to.
Which is aligned with Musk's strategy thus far, but there's also a good argument to be made that that product should have never been needed if twitter was providing a decent first party client. They should have wanted to provide that to control the advertising. Letting the third parties take that up was a poor strategy -- business-wise that is, I get that people may have liked it and have used it for a long time and are probably sad to lose it.
They bring the content users want to consume.
Then you're not in the community in which the third party elements(e.g. tweet aggregation, SSO login, fine grained access control) are vital part of. Which may be substantial, or not, and we as the sheep don't know.
When did you start using Twitter? Twitter as we know it today is largely a product of the community and third party developers. Retweets, hashtags, quote tweets, the use of a blue bird symbol; all came from either the community at large or specific third party devs. The fun bots also drive a lot of twitter engagement; honestly they're the only real thing I miss on Mastodon (while some of the most important ones did come across, a lot didn't). Third party software also makes Twitter a support system, a status reporting system... The list goes on.
However, beyond all that, even if there was a good argument for killing the API free tier (there is not), no-one sensible would do it with _one week's notice_. This will alienate even commercial users who would be willing to pay. If you're using your CRM's twitter integration to track customer complaints, say, unless you're huge the free API is probably sufficient today. With one week's notice, even assuming you hear about it the first day (most will not) good look getting a purchase order for the API within a week if your company is even remotely bureaucratic (most are).
The patron saint of Dunning-Kruger presumably thinks it's a good idea, but can't imagine anyone else does.
You don't absolutely need to have your code signed, I can give apps to my friends, they just get a warning about it not being signed and potentially unsafe when it's first installed.
Musk is trying to monetize every last aspect of current Twitter possible while cutting costs to stave off bankruptcy that his acquisition made imminent long enough to pivot Twitter into a completely different business model centering on being a payment intermediary, apparently to relitigate his firing twice from X.com before it became PayPal.
He doesn't care about the ecosystem, because its an ecosystem for a completely different busoness than the one he wants Twitter to be. He cares that use of Twitter outside of the 1st party frontends bypasses monetization, so he wants it monetized or gone.
Which is odd, because Elon is someone that definitely will remember AOL, MSN messenger and MySpace being things...
This does not follow, in Twitter's case. If Twitter's API made them money, they wouldn't have shut it down, but it's the exact opposite, it costs them money while providing no monetary benefit. So in this case, from the business perspective, it is correct to start charging for it.
Now they could spend 3 months but with debt service payments of a billion dollars a year, I highly doubt that they have the patience to wait that long.
But it provide monetary benefits by attracting and keeping users, which encourages ad spend.
Or at least it used to, until the big advertisers were driven away.
If someone is trying to run a business and doesn't understand how indirect income works they might want to consider something less challenging.
What this actually does is remove API access from small startups, solo developers, and other innovators, and reserves it for corporations.
He might not be great at decisions where people and politics are involved, but this isn’t one of those decisions. But some people here on HN really want to believe he’s an idiot, which he’s not.
Musk is the chief engineer of spacex rockets. He's not just a CEO.
Do a little research before making comments like this.
Will be interesting to observe ... will publishers pay? Will users enjoy without those?
I'd love to have free API access to all kinds of companies.
Think how much easier and faster it would be booking your travel if all airlines and hotels let you straight in to the raw pricing and availability data from their reservation systems.
Think how much money you could save if retailers exposed all their product availability and pricing data, live.
They don't, because they all regard this stuff as "commercially sensitive".
Why should Twitter be any different?
Twitter data is rarely anything to do with pricing, so that's why it's different.
I'm not after internal pricing/B2B pricing/discounting, in my thought experiment I "just" want free API access to information that's already on public websites (eg end-user/retail pricing for rooms/flights/widgets). I'm not aware of any airlines/hotels/retailers that allow even that. In bulk, it's commercially sensitive too.
But yeah, it would be great if we didn't have to use their websites to navigate the data.
Right.
So back to where we started: what's actually wrong with Twitter deciding to insist on eyeballs on twitter.com instead of scripts pointing at their free API?
In some ways it reminds me of the Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast licensing shenanigans where the business is annoying people building an ecosystem around their products which arguably adds a lot of value.
Yup, although we all know that Twitter just the latest example in a loooong line of companies to have pulled this stunt since, well, what feels like forever.
> and generate bad will towards Twitter
I'm fairly ambivalent about this aspect, and I doubt Musk cares much, it's not as though the haters weren't already hating before this latest incident.
To an extent I think this is political theater, as opposed to ineptitude, petulance, or poor financial decision-making. Twitter is an important piece of virtual territory because it's still the platform for breaking news and pretty much every media outlet publishes and promotes stories there, as well as most politicians, govt agencies and so on. Like it or not it is the most 'realtime' mass market platform.
That gives Twitter tremendous strategic importance, even though its social graph is smaller and more ephemeral than Facebook's. Size is not everything; reach matters too. That strategic importance makes it interesting to state and non-state actors, because capture of that territory is loosely equivalent to control of radio broadcasting capacity or printing presses in earlier eras. If you think of Twitter as a magically effective print and distribution store for pamphleteers with a huge secondary ecosystem around it, the shutdown of free API access is essentially a market takeover. Musk was spitballing yesterday and suggesting that from now on API access would cost $100/month and require ID to use.
(It's interesting to me that Google could have owned that space with their News product, although it has always been a one-way thing rather than socially driven. Their failure to own that space is a direct result of their aversion to user configurability and selection.)
If I woke up feeling evil (really money seeking) I might add some clause to the terms and conditions that you need to prominently display "Powered by Twitter" if you use the API and aggressively check all websites using Twitter API, one way or another.
But I guess my perspective would be considered more long term while Musks management of Twitter seems to be heavily focused on short term.
the real problem from a business standpoint is less people trying stuff out and figuring hey maybe I could actually build a business on this, time to move up to the paid tier.
Also no devs at companies have played with twitter api because devs not going to spend money to play, so never say in meeting actually we can solve this with Twitter's api, we just have pay for a licence and I can write the solution! So maybe business look for other ways to solve problems.
This. I had a brief flirtation with working with people using the Twitter API for research purposes. A very large majority of them didn't care about having the latest tweets coming off the firehose, but instead getting access to all the old data. At least at the time, the latter was much more difficult to do.
Things like using Twitter for real time sentiment analysis does require realtime data, but those applications are more likely to be for-profit, and thus could afford to pay.
I used to lead the search and historical API team at Twitter.
Probably shouldn't have landed it with $1bn/year debt payments then, eh.
It's worth remembering the market setting was very different when he made the offer. It's also worth remembering the offer was refused at the time it was made. It was only after the tech market saw a downturn, turning a good offer into an incredible one, was the offer pursued. Around that time, it also looks like he attempted to renegotiate the offer, but that was also refused.
Poor timing of the offer (only knowable in retrospect!) and shareholder obligations more or less forced this situation into existence. Musk made a good offer with a terrible contract; time, shareholders, the board, the legal system, and the stock market turned that terrible contract into a huge payout for shareholders and a signed a death warrant for Twitter.
Musk made a mistake in the way he made the offer for Twitter--but let's not pretend that the legal system isn't equally responsible for forcing the current situation. Even if the previous leadership were open to negotiating a lower buyout (and thus lower debt burden), they would have just opened themselves up to endless shareholder lawsuits had they done so. Their hands were effectively tied once the rest of the tech stock market started going down.
Might have been smart to not make it unprofitable in the first place.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...
However pretty much the entirety of their revenue stream was ads, and Musk started taking a big dump on that early 2022.
Without Musk, Twitter would likely have been profitable in 2022. No extra debt, no fleeing advertisers, no massive cuts. Some layoffs like everyone else is doing would probably have been enough.
Please back this up with an actual projection that says anything close to this. Twitter was not on track to ever be profitable before Musk bought it.
At first I assumed this was only impacting read access (apps that mimic the twitter app), but now I’m not so sure.
@isjesusreturned @badassnames @pinballmapcom etc.
Bummer.
I'll especially miss the Earthquake bots :(
This announcement and today's ban-wave that followed seemed like someone not accustomed to Twitter just knew there are bots, and thought it to be workable idea to sample global timeline and script ban duplicates, which of course is not workable at all and only maximize harm on real users.
If I looked hard enough I could probably buy 10000 verified twitter accounts with API access right now, aged 1 year or older.
I would think mobile carriers keep that in their own house
How A Twitter Fight Over Bernie Sanders Revealed A Network Of Fake Accounts
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democratic-bot-network-sally-...
Besides, even if 90% of the API usage is for scraping and does not impact the bottomline, it's still a smart business decision to leave the API open if the remaining 10% are for posting content that brings in views and thus ad impressions that generate more money than the API costs to run.
Twitter may be heading closer towards becoming a ghost town.
Whether it’s Elon or someone else, this shows a total lack of understanding of what made Twitter ubiquitous.
What's with these cell phone people calling everything APPS? Hi. They're WEBSITES. Just because you might use a stupid cell phone app to access the stupid website doesn't mean it's no longer a website.
Use the right words and stop recording video vertically. I hate all of you cell phone people.
Wouldn't the right words be "smartphone people?"
Notes
Also named cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone.
Man this generation blows. No wonder you're fine with 10 different game publisher clients, 10 different movie publisher clients, and 500 different "apps" to access websites. Keep recording vertically dude. (GEEZUS)
Lots of stuff in this thread from myself and multiple other people.
Even less for some. It seems further apps are being shut down in the run up because they have "violated Twitter Rules and policies”.
Such as movetodon [0] - locked out today - a service which helps you connect to the fediverse accounts of twitter users you follow. And reports that debirdify is closed out too.
End of an era; Twitter is dead. Whatever is left, it's not Twitter.
Am-I the only one surprised the site still hasn't had a major (multi-hour) outage at this point?
Considering the waves of resignations that hit the automated content filtering and bot mitigation teams, it's no wonder they are getting desperate.
> getting fired means getting deported
Twitter has had at least one multi-hour global outage since Musk took over. This is in addition to at least one outage in Australia, plus outages of other critical services. The API outage happened before the after-the-fact announcement, login and 2FA outages kept people out of the app, etc.
For what it's worth, I cannot access Twitter right now, and DownDetector suggests I'm not alone, so we might be having another outage starting just now.
It didn’t even require doing anything to/on the page with Puppeteer. Merely using it to open a browser window and then waiting, and using that browser window by hand during the wait to go visit the site that was using Cloudflare anti-bot protection ran into the problem.
It's going to take a few scandals for this to sink in, but it's such a recipe for disaster.
On Twitter, you at least know that it's only three letter agencies reading your DMs. On Mastodon, it could be some Reddit moderator type that makes it their life mission to destroy you.
And because this must be true for every admin on every server on the internet... thank you dang (when you read this)!
Whaaaaaa but Elon is the god king who will deliver us from evil tech giants!! Are you saying he might be a greater conman then PT Barnum?
You have good points and can probably make them without resorting to insults.
While I certainly don't want to import the combative and shallow standards of Twitter 'debate' to HN, I do think we have a right tp be opinionated, and that my the term 'manchild' labels a specific sort of behavior rather than some petty or crude dig at his appearance or personal life.
Indeed, I'd wish that the HN community was more hostile to Musk's bulldozer approach, seeing what it did to both the company, and the engineers. The whole affair has been needlessly destructive -- obnoxiously so -- and his getting away with it harms the profession.
OK. I thought that was funny personally.
> While I could take a Ghandian approach of not reciprocating such negative behavior
I didn't think it was comparable to the British treatment of India under the raj, but OK.
"Manchilds" track record in this Game of Life is by and large a testament to how well he understands its rules. And, maybe, how silly they are.
I believe it's an intentional and strategic move to have every API client to start paying right away.
He probably started to realize that other people began to realize just how many Tesla bots there are.
With this new policy that practically becomes impossible (the costs would be outrageous for a researcher, much less an individual).
This will have the effect of essentially destroying 15 years worth of social science work that was based on Twitter data, it's all gone.
If you're a researcher who has published a data set with only IDs but have a private version with all tweet data I highly encourage you to publish that internal dataset. I'm putting together some hosting for anyone that needs it, feel free to get in touch and we can take it from there.
How? I am not a full-fledged network scientist, but I know a whole lot of academics in this space and am good enough to swap tips/find minor math errors. I know quite a lot of people staring down the exact problem you describe.
In the pumped-up investment environment of 2021, that kind of relatively small loss was an acceptable trade-off for such high growth.
The revenue collapse of 2022 is clearly almost entirely due to the new ownership who did their best to destroy advertiser trust, first by spending six months disparaging the company, then by indiscriminately firing moderation and ad sales teams.
Due to an $800M lawsuit settlement - without that, they'd have been on $580M profit. Which isn't terrible on $5B revenue.
Twitter has $13bn in debt on its balance sheet thanks to the ridiculous purchase price. Last week's bond payment of $300m is on its own, half of what their total net debt was pre-Musk ($600m)[0].
Twitter's revenue last year was $5bn. In a year's time it will probably be a fraction of even that; Twitter's user base isn't growing and isn't going to magically become more valuable in an economy where advertisers are cutting back on spending.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-elon-musks-twitter-faces-mo...
Previously, my response has been to send over the Tweet IDs, but now I have a dilemma because I understand the privacy concerns that resulted in the ID only policy but also think that Twitter data offers quite a lot of value to researchers. Interestingly, one of Twitter's policies around this also requires researchers to regularly remove tweets that have been deleted on Twitter from the local copies of their datasets, which of course requires checking each Tweet individually using the API...
Would anyone have been able to do that without paying? Years ago, someone told me you could get at most 1% of the "firehose" without paying, and if you paid you could get ~10% (however the free sample wasn't a subset of the paid sample, so they still grabbed both and de-duped).
There's an argument to be had whether it makes sense for Twitter to have a free API tier. I personally think that it's obvious it should:
- A lot of Twitter content/engagement is created by bots, and people quote-tweeting said bots. Fun bots are actually probably the biggest thing I miss after having moved to Mastodon (fortunately, the all-important Samuel Pepys bot has come across).
- Use of paid-only APIs virtually always stagnates. If there's a free tier, hobbyists and students can do interesting things with them, and this drives innovation. Most of Twitter's important features (retweets, quote tweets, hashtags, etc etc) ultimately originated in third party clients, not from Twitter itself.
- A free API makes it less frictionful for companies to try twitter out for things. If you want to maybe try showing your website status automatically or auto-track customer tweets at you in your support system or whatever, it's easier if you just hook up the app vs if you have to fill out a purchase order for the API access first.
However, whatever about whether a free API is a good idea, it is clearly a _terrible_ idea to kill it on a week's notice. Even for users who _want_ to pay, with only a week's notice many will never hear about it, if their organisation is remotely bureaucratic it's probably not long enough to get the purchase order approved, etc. There's just no possible reasoning to do it this quickly.
It will be sad, but not unexpected if the courts let him get away with it. I wish I could buy a house with a mortgage in the house's name, make the house declare bankruptcy, and then keep ownership of it.
Replace "house" with "Twitter", and that's the gambit. Although, the amount of debt that he'll be discharging would be about enough to buy a house for every chronically homeless person in the US.
And that theory is incorrect. If Twitter goes into bankruptcy, the shareholders are wiped out. Ownership goes to the banks. He could be trying to drive the cost of the debt down (supposedly already down 40% on the open market), so he can buy it. But, the banks aren't stupid. He will absolutely have to pay a premium to buy it back.
There is another card Elon could play - which is not pay the loan and force the banks to declare bankruptcy. Do the banks really want to own Twitter? Can they kick out Elon, get competent management and somehow make themselves whole on the loaned money? That's certainly a scenario, but one that can't look appealing to the banks.
ML also mentioned he hoped Twitter would stiff the banks on the first interest payment like they have been doing all their other creditors. It would have been an entertaining game of chicken. The other unknown is if Elon really wants to dump more money into this, though he may feel pot committed. But what if he realizes there is no winning option?
Then there’s the challenge of transporting homeless individuals to other areas where supply is higher.
Furthermore, many homeless people aren’t homeless because the want to be. Many are afflicted with mental and health problems, that quite frankly, a house wouldn’t solve.
I fully agree that there’s an issue, and we need to do something about it, but these oversimplified ways of looking at economics is detrimental to the real discussions we should be having.
Not sure about the others, but RTs did not originate with 3rd party clients, but simply organically with users. Back then we did RT @author OriginalText, third party client support for automating this came after it was established and displaying them differently much later.
You should add the keyword: expensive APIs.
Nobody cares about pay $10 a month to experiment and use the API, especially if it makes things easier to get and not have to explain to some Twitter service why you need access.
It's when they make it expensive that nobody will use it.
Are these innovations in the room right now?
Twitter's own app is a third-party acquisition.
What are some examples of innovative things that hobbyist and students have done with Twitter?
You experience obviously varies, but I suspect most people are there to follow people.
Edit: typo "bag" => "bad"
Talking in pure financial terms.
Up to 500 requests PER MONTH: $149.00 Up to 1000: $289.00 Up to 2,500: $699.00 Up to 5,000: $1,299.00 Up to 10,000: $2,499.00
That page mention a free tier of up to 250 requests, it only mentions search, and even though we can't see the content easily, Web Archive is saying that page has been there for the past 5 years... so is that really the future price? Or is it for a Search API that has been priced like that for a long time?
That's the problem GP means. It's less than a week until it happens, and nobody knows how much it's going to cost, how you convert your free account to a paying account, whether auth is also going to be paid, etc etc
I'm not that anonymous but I can't say I like the idea of having to provide a copy of my legal identification just to make an API call. Especially considering Twitter's less-than-perfect record on securing PII. What if your published research shows something unfavorable to Twitter (eg a long-term decline in engagement across the platform0 and you start receiving hate mail at your home address?
He started a fire in a movie theater and now wants to lock the doors and raise the price on whatever water and extinguishers are on hand.
Some are speculating that some apps that had regular auto-tweets configured to be the culprit, which was later backed with some data, some are making up theories and rituals to protect accounts, some others are making backup accounts on Twitter itself, on Mastodon, or yet another platforms.
This seems like another round of Twitter's footgun towards tumblr, with some users making it out, and bulk of values and the community burning to the ground.
These events where Twitter does something like this trigger visible migration waves, observable from the FediVerse and elsewhere. There are several spikes in graphs over the past few months, that correlate with things like disabling TweetBot et al..
People are giving out advice to those who migrate away from Twitter to unfollow everyone that they were following, but leave the account undeleted to prevent impersonation in the future of a long-standing identity. The unfollowing is in order to not accrue stuff with a zombie account and in order to let the people still sticking with Twitter know that their followers are gone.
This fits with your observations: real followers gone, in a distinct wave, and robot accounts blithely continuing on.
But it means that it isn't banning at all. The people seeing this from the Twitter side and thinking that it's down to some mysterious "ban wave" aren't realizing that people are simply leaving them; voting with their feet. Account figures won't show it, but dropping follower figures and massively curtailed engagement with real people do.
The people who didn't like the politics have gone, or have been ejected. The people who were left exposed to unmoderated attacks have gone. The people who provided or who used the 3rd-party apps have gone. The people who relied upon a free-of-charge API to do all sorts of fun hobbyist and one-person-band things, from pictures of possums every hour to automated posts by artists and content creators, have stated that they're going, and have actually found themselves gone already in some cases within the past 30 hours, well before 2023-02-09.
Your boss messed up again, not knowing the community norms and thinking it won’t be a big deal, and it was, and his subordinates are running around rolling it back.
And you’re trying to set a new narrative for damage control. STFU and go away.
Example https://replayweb.page/?source=https%3A%2F%2Freplayweb.page%...
Incidentally they started sending out emails yesterday offering gold organization checkmarks for $1000/month + $50 per public-facing seat. I'm not sure how many businesses will want this, but I bet a lot of political nonprofits and media outlets will leap at the opportunity to boost their visibility (more boosting available for more $, kinda like promoted tweets).
The linked announcement says they use a pinning service “web3.storage”. Web3.storage says it stores data on FileCoin. Neither website tells me how and where the actual data is stored, except “IPFS”.
From reading the IPFS docs, a pinning service is akin to a node that has a copy of the files and is always online. If your decentralized network relies on a central node(s), how is this decentralized?
I've used the API since then for on-off things, but the one I'm sore about now is a little Python script I've had running in a nightly cronjob for years that I've used to make local copies of images/videos from tweets I starred (now heart'd). It's a simple bit of code to get all my favorites and download any new ones. (If I recall correctly you need to get all of them, because the response doesn't necessarily give them to you in the order you liked them, so if today you like an old tweet from say 2012 you might have to paginate a while to get it in the response.) Looks like the json of all ~9800 liked tweets I build up to parse for new URLs is 1.5 MB gzipped, it's true their API returns a lot of unnecessary extra data. Currently debating with myself whether to cobble together a new script from one of the existing scrapers (gallery-dl might be easiest), or say screw it and write some Lisp code (more stable than Python) to fire up Selenium and waste more of twitter's bandwidth pretending to be a full browser.
I remember. We shelved the product idea we had because of that.
There were a couple API changes that disrupted development and it became clear that betting the company on someone else's API was a terrible idea.
Extending the idea of sharecropping again to digital services is just a way of describing a service or business that existentially depends on some other service (or platform or API) not just for survival (so mere dependence on e.g. legitimate payment processors doesn't make one a cropper) but also for the source of most of the value it hopes to expand upon and capture a part of. If that dependency is broken it wouldn't make sense or be feasible to have the service standalone. Social media integration startups are quintessential examples, the corpses are many. What's the point of some random startup that crawls twitter data to e.g. present rich marketing analytics data to its customers if twitter shuts down, or loses almost all its users except for like 1000 randos, or cripples its APIs among other things to make such mass data ingestion infeasible, or directly goes after the startup with lawsuits, or acquires a competitor and integrates equivalent-or-better analytics natively?
Sharecropping isn't necessarily a bad arrangement for either party (and there are cases it can be bad to be the owner). Some companies (e.g. Salesforce with its AppExchange marketplace) thread the needle a lot better when it comes to having a useful platform/pool of existing value for third parties to make useful extensions to and not scaring off new croppers or killing off many existing ones. And some croppers are more careful in selecting whose land to crop on or making their cropper status less of an immediate danger by being able to crop on multiple owners' land at once.
You do the labour to create the app, you do the labour of finding the right product-market fit, you take all the risks, and the landlord takes 30% or whatever for themselves, in exchange for ostensibly providing you with a platform you could not build and popularize yourself.
Everyone complains heartily about the 30%, but for a lot of sharecroppers, that's just the cost of doing business and they do fine. The bigger problem is when the landlord crunches some numbers and decides that their platform would benefit from commoditizing your app.
When that happens, they do things like buy your competitor, rebrand it as their own app, and give it away preinstalled. For example...
"The True Story of Audion:" https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
Or they just use all the market data they have thanks to your app to build their own app and use their brand and muscle to squeeze you into irrelevance. Microsoft in its heyday was famous for this. Just ask Lotus about Excel, or ask WordPerfect about Word.
A nice thought, but once OpenAI decides to pull the rug out from under you, it won’t matter what you built.
In the distant future, OpenAI can copy and vertically integrate features their API users have created or they can simply pull the plug on them.
https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1621204449959231493
People who build on top of them will have stacked cash in the meantime, even if the API does eventually get pulled.
In the context of Twitter, think about free analogy being newsgroups (if you are young enough not to have witnessed it, in the early days of Internet, your ISP would provide you with email box with some space attached to it and a newsgroup access). Newsgroups were functionally very similar to what Twitter does, i.e. they were designed to share news between multiple subscribers of those news.
So, newsgroups weren't free in the sense that you had to pay your ISP to access them (not necessarily billed separately though, typically just a part of a package deal). But they were free in the sense that it was a distributed service provided by multiple (and by that I mean, hundreds) of independent providers, and it was an open standard: if you wanted to become a provider of the service, you wouldn't have to invest a lot into that, just set up yet another server with some freely available software and you are good to go. So, if for some reason your ISP wouldn't connect you to the newsgroups, you'd just go to another one who would (it didn't really matter back in the days and the feature didn't have as wide of an outreach as social networks have today, but, in principle, it would've worked that way).
So, this kind of freedom would've offered better protections against single company deciding the fate of the important part of yours.
The problem with building a business around a free API from a for-profit company is the rugpull. As a sibling comment mentions, even a paid API can get rugpulled. But I think that what the OP was trying to contrast a free API from a for-profit company with was actually an API from a non-profit company. A non-profit can run forever if it's just breaking even, and is sharing IP, so other people can jump up and replace it if they fail, and you might even be able to install it on your own servers.
edit: I'm not a big Mastodon booster (or even liker), but if you build your business around it, it would be nuts because the customer base is of course tiny at this point, but you run very little management risk from the Mastodon project itself. Whereas your relationship with twitter can be changed on a day to day basis, unilaterally.
There's not much incentive to jack prices up 10x, it's their revenue, by doing so they will probably lose some. There's incentive though to not offer something for free, as this is literally losing you cash. You never know all the facts though, Google Maps did increase the API cost quite a bit, so it can always happen, but when it's free, you do know some of the facts... and it's not in your favor.
So yes, still some risk, but not at all the same amount of risk.
If there is room to jack up the price 10x, then the current price is tantamount to free. If the deal is too good to be true, don't build your company on it.
Luckily the company I worked for was pretty diversified.
So we enter Business Continuity Plans. The businesses either had that, or they were diverse enough so that one leg failing doesn't mean end of the business.
You should never build a company around electricity, because one day your electricity might get cut off.
J Twitter is frantically telling all the people to use non Twitter accounts before they lose access.
That's all I mean. I don't use Twitter on ID on mobile apps and I don't think this is common at all in the US, but it's not uncommon for random gacha games to tie player ID by Twitter accounts in Japan. From what I can tell nobody is sure what the consequences of the change will be, like maybe auth only uses are fine. But since nobody knows, all the big games are playing it safe and telling everyone to move their player IDs away from Twitter.
Edit: Seems the SSO stuff is unaffected.
Exactly this, it would be a huge loss if those creators ran away to various obscure Japanese social sites. NicoNico's interface is simply inferior to YouTube's for consuming (they still gate now-ubiquitous UI niceties like thumbnail previews behind a monthly subscription) and it's a huge drag to have to use multiple sites to check everyone's feed for updates. And JP creators frequently have stipulations that their content can't be rehosted anywhere, so you have to fight the bad UX of those obscure sites just to find what you're looking for. It was a coincidental blessing that sites like YouTube Twitter that have (or used to have) a good API and discovery interface saw mass adoption by JP users.
(I know this sounds like an argument against decentralized social networking, because it is.)
Not to mention that JP Twitter really does feel like it has way less drama than the English-speaking side. For me it's just a constant feed of art updates and the occasional meme. Maybe it's because it's impossible for Anglosphere politics to catch on to the same degree over there. It would be a huge loss if a good portion of them moved away.
This will probably destroy a whole bunch of use-cases and motivations for people and organizations to use twitter, but might retain enough of a core (mostly low-information) user base to seed what will practically be an entirely new venture but one with a recognizable name. There might, for example, be new API's, for corporates to push product algorithmically and embed instant, buy now - pay later, buttons.
Many APIs do have price tiers but it depends upon the business model, if the API is the product, or the app is the product and the API drives traffic and use cases. For a super-app, arguably the app is the product & profit generator and an open, free API would support usage of that.
In fact the EU recently passed laws to nip budding "market dominant companies" before they take out all of the competition and bundle lots of unrelated services.
The political climate soured with regards to Big Tech and that's happening across party lines.
In either case this story will definitely increase popcorn consumption.
Now that the deals i done he needs to make the best of it (for his ego but also for Tesla control reasons).
What will come of it remains to be seen. It could still end in a number of ways
I'm still figuring out how the "no due diligence, no exit hatch - final offer" figures into this. Why no not do it like you usually approach a takeover of this scale.
He did try to wiggle out of it almost instantly and found himself locked into the contract by "himself".
To me this feels like he made a fairly emotional decision, used his influential network and personal assets to setup the deal but was afraid to "chicken out"/face reality when given the chance.
What do you think WeChat is if not integration of hundreds of external apps and developers?
If you were really serious about turning Twitter into WeChat, you would:
- have an actual plan how to do it
- have this plan publicly available
- explain the changes to the APIs beforehand
- have the pricing info for the changes beforehand
- give developers a clear path of moving to this new wechat thingie
- give developers plenty of time to move to this new wechat thingie, work closely with them and figure out and iron out any issues
What Elon did:
- killed third-party ecosystem (Twitter wouldn't be twitter without third-party apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34640515) with no warning and no path forward
- killed a huge third-party ecosystem [1] with a week's warning and no path forward
[1] Of course it's not just bots. Does he really think that news outlets, media outlets, celebrities etc. post to Twitter manually by hand?
I've been using a Jekyll plugin for like 4 years to embed tweets on my site. Nothing crazy, just using: https://github.com/rob-murray/jekyll-twitter-plugin
Since it uses the API I guess that's going to go away. Sounds like I'll never link another tweet on my site again.
"If Musk wants to know about money, I’ll tell him. She launched into a technical explanation of the company’s data-center efficiency, curious to see if he would follow along. Instead, he interrupted. “I was writing C programs in the ’90s,” he said dismissively. “I understand how computers work.”
https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover...
But in this case it does seem like copy/pasting the text may be better as it implicitly archives the content.
The sooner accounts like celebs, governments, etc realize it and move on - the better
What's the handle? Sounds interesting :)
>So you may have noticed that the Twitter login of https://movetodon.org/ is not working at the moment.
>According to twitter, the app “has violated Twitter Rules and policies”. I can’t tell much more at the moment since the email they mention never arrived in my inbox.
I have a Twitter bot with a couple thousand followers using Ifttt free plan :/
Looking for an announcement from Ifttt...
If it's something daft like $100/month for 1000 calls a day, we may well see integrations like IFTTT go down. Which will suck because I have A Lot of them right now.
Fortunately only 1% of my users depends on Twitter API, so I just let them know I might just shutdown Twitter integration by 2/8 and suggest them all move off Twitter to other platforms.
Sure, they're probably using the public API right now, but that's just for convenience. Bad actors will ways find a way, this only hurts legit bot owners.
I swear to god replace meth with twitter and it’s sad how many addicts there are.
Academic research? Research something else that’s actually novel.
Making bots? Try building something new in the AI space.
Need to reach your customers in case your service is down? Just use a different host for ur status.whatever.com and email/sms/whatever else them.
Conversations on twitter are awful especially interesting ones in tech or science with the noise and chaos that always ensues.
Personally I’ve been enjoying using my browsers bookmark manager. I’ve added maybe a hundred bookmarks last year of blogs and whatnot and it’s cool to organize my links and my home tab shows me them easily.
Being able to map the social communication activities of millions of people with well-defined data formats, fine-grained temporal resolution, and in something close to real time is absolutely novel. This jsut says to me you haven't read any serious work in this area.
Feel free to take me not seriously. I don’t particularly care that much about this or that. I said what I wanted.
Use that for research x 7 billion people.
Then you make people choose: Twitter or "them".
> Uses Twitter's unofficial API (no rate limits or developer account required)[0]
Not sure what that means
They use a leaked token from one of the mobile clients that twitter can't/won't revoke.
"tax what you want less of"
However, this company is close to bankruptcy and is sitting on a wealth of interesting data. Ads can provide revenue only up to a certain point, after which UX will be affected. If I were Twitter’s CEO, I would’ve done the same.
Not a good way to go about it in order to engender good will, but I would never recommend building something that you expect to last forever around a free API by a for-profit company (which could be cut at any time). We've seen this movie before.
As for Twitter's demise, I wouldn't count on it. I noticed a toot on Mastodon from someone I used to follow on Twitter mentioning they had 150K followers on Twitter and 1/10th of that on Mastodon. This person is a very harsh Elon (and Tesla) critic, so if anyone were to leave Twitter in protest it would be them. But that would mean losing a 150K audience, so not gonna happen (it's an influence, not money question).
I myself did drop Twitter (though I didn't delete my account mostly in case I want to look someone up there) for Mastodon, but find that I go very little to Mastodon anyway (doesn't have anywhere near Twitter's breadth of content). So basically I've dropped Twitter-like engagement altogether, which is a ReallyGoodThingTM because it was a time sync that added very little value to my life. But I think I'm in a very small minority; most people want to stay connected. I'm still on IG (family/friends photos), and HN (interesting content), but that's it.
The unfortunate bit though is I started using this in college when I had very little money. College students aren't going to cough up money each month to make a meme bot, and this might change the culture of twitter in a negative way
Will be interesting to see if it works in a week
That said, I’m pissed off at Musk for giving so little time, and so little information.
I realise he needs to sort out the bot problem, and needs to diversify Twitter’s revenue streams, but developers have helped create legitimate content on the network, and helped invent a useful ecosystem around it, which in turn has helped Twitter grow its native user base and brand.
Ugh
I don't think it's a problem to charge a basic fee for these things, but the inscrutability, randomness, and untrustworthiness of Twitter policies and products may reduce the adoption rate for these changes - even if the fee was only $5/mo.
Anyway, almost nothing Elon Musk has said about Twitter seems plausible and this also doesn't.
I'm on the fence if he's trying to just generate as much cash flow as possible (after driving away so much ads money) or if he's actively trying to run Twitter into the ground.
https://www.afr.com/technology/looming-twitter-interest-paym....
But, he's got $26b in it. He won't retain control unless he stands by the debts of the others, he'll be last in line for repayment if he wants to own it according to the AFR write up.
The point is, as with everything musk, EVERYTHING IS POORLY THOUGHT THROUGH!
If you like the service, just pay for it. I pay for a lot of services already and I do not see why Twitter must absolutely be free. Honestly, I prefer a world where people charge for their products because it will make it easier for everyone when people stop expecting great stuff to be free.
I also love how the people who mainly hate on Twitter now is roughly the same people that constantly said "If you don't like how it's being rung, build your own" etc. Now when Musk bought Twitter and thus got ownership fair and square, it does no longer apply?
That’s a false equivalency. We agree that he’s allowed to run twitter however he wants to (barring deliberately running into the ground, which is probably illegal).
We just think he’s an idiot in how he goes about it.
The notion that this could just have gone on as is was never a plan. Musk is applying shock therapy to maybe nudge it in the direction of resembling a healthy company again. Maybe he'll kill the company. Maybe it will work. But this is better than the failed social experiment it had turned into. The API of course had some valid uses but it was also the tool of choice for bots, advertisers, marketing bureaus, etc. The message is very clear for those: you are welcome to stay but expect to pay for the privilege. I think this probably gets rid of a lot of crap.
You can either use Twitter's official clients (and get served the ads from which they profit) or you can use a third party tool that uses the ad-less API but for which the developers must pay for each API call in your place.
I'm sure that research bodies and other particular institutions could strike up a deal with Twitter to get access to special keys at a much reduced price or even for free, but this concept of Twitter making avaiable themselves a way to bypass the only way they make money has always seemed crazy to me. Glad they monetized the API.
Right now it looks as if they're proposing to start the pricing at $149/month which allows up to 100 search requests a month, going rapidly into the thousands for any sort of volume.
Musk is such a looser.
Or simply blocking them.
News orgs dependent on people seeing ads, so they benefit from their story going viral on twitter more than I think twitter benefits from people posting them.
At the other end you have the conservative news channels that aggressively push bigot nonsense, and short as hell wouldn’t drop the opportunity to continue twitters conversion to parler.
Many are still using it. If they weren't this story wouldn't have ranked so high on HN
Users flagging the post
Domain-based downweight (dang has mentioned it exists for Wikipedia for example, no idea if it’s automated or manual)
Posts with bad comments:upvote ratio get downweighted (IIRC dang calls them overheated discursions?)
And FWIW it’s on the front page now
[EDIT] no it’s not. I was on the new page not front haha. Probably people sick of hearing about Twitter and flagging then.
p.s. @dang doesn't do anything - I only saw your comment by accident. If anyone wants to ask or tell us something, the reliable way is hn@ycombinator.com.
Steam killed big half-life mods. Essentially, by keeping all the clients up-to-date (by force) with no way to go back, they forced all the clients past where they'd released the SDKs for...