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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.