The Twitter API is now effectively unmaintained
snarfed.org
snarfed.org
To offer another data point, some of the people I know have actually stopped using Twitter and started using other platforms more. Then again, none of them said the site’s uptime was the reason.
Now I'll head to Twitter a few times a week as a guilty pleasure to read the people left behind — comedians, political commentators, and journalists. But for stuff that's relevant to my job, Mastodon is great. And my Twitter usage has dropped by over 95%.
I feel sympathy for people who still love the blue bird and don't want anything to go wrong, but this right here is why the ongoing dumpster fire has been very good for me, personally.
I used to love Twitter. I used Twitter way too much. Now I don't post at all and only read a little. It can be hard to realize how bad something is for you when you are in the middle of pulling those sweet endorphins at a steady rate. My life is so much better since a certain someone decided the drug was so good that he should buy the pharmacy. Admittedly I got lucky: if he had valued it correctly or knew what he was doing, then my outcome could have been much different. Cheers to incompetence!
"SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale."
That’s disappointing for that community. They should just list their website, which should have an RSS (atom) feed.
Besides, most presenters will also list their personal URLs if they have sites they'd like to promote.
Do you need an always on machine to have a ‘server’?
The for dummies version is "just go sign up on a instance with open sign ups and reasonable moderation", I'd recommend hachyderm.io to the tech crowd. It doesn't matter that much what server you're on.
Which server you join doesn't particularly matter, but most of them offer some sort of "see all of the messages on this server" functionality, so if you pick one with a lot of people who have common interests, you'll have a better default experience.
It's where I go for access to global establishment personal. The CEO's, the Presidents of nations, the boards of banks, etc...
I don't find them anywhere else. Twitter is my only choice for world business.
A year ago this time, Mastodon was a curiosity. Today, it feels like Twitter circa 2010. That's something.
Which isn't a total failure, it can be a small self-sustaining network but it fails to have a broad appeal.
That competition feels/looks like early 00s blogging -- less mass, pre-eternal-September, Gibsonian ham-radio-postcards -- but then again that's what grew up into what we have now.
Mastodon will likely never get anyone but tech folks. And the era of tech folks being the trendsetter on the intarweb pipes is probably over.
This has never been adequate to explain how MS treated IE.
Microsoft also won the desktop decisively, arguably more decisively than the browser front. And yet far from abandoning windows, it pretty consistently iterated via major releases and service updates, even when competitors were almost rounding errors and when they had a business base that often valued backward compatibility as much or more than anything else.
Microsoft doesn't abandon things just because they achieved dominance.
IE was abandoned because MS of the early 00s still thought most computing would stay on the desktop, in network-aware applications, maybe even using different runtimes, but still desktop apps.
> It's ridiculous to say that in 2006/7 Microsoft thought web was a fad
It's ridiculous of you to choose 2006/2007 when you're responding to a comment that specifies "circa early 00s."
And yes, by 2006/2007, MS realized they'd made a mistake and the web was becoming something that could deliver experiences competitive with desktop apps.
Twitter had already become less enjoyable than it was back in the day, that started before Musk and isn't his fault. The underlying engagement was no longer there, only inertia. Inertia alone would have kept me there much longer, but without true engagement I wasn't going to start using their crappy official client/site, and the idea of paying for a subscription was laughable.
Twitter won't die like MySpace did, losing to a single party like Mastodon as MySpace did to Facebook. It will die like Craigslist. It will be very slow, still be around a decade from now, having lost its cultural relevance and having been supplanted by a number of different options rather than one. I'm seeing Twitter's niche get fragmented to different places, and everyone has one foot out the door and the engagement is dwindling slowly but intractably. The brand is poison, but people are taking their time to figure out how to deal with that. So I'm not expecting to see an abrupt exodus. Nor do I expect to see Mastodon become as big as Twitter was, or die out completely.
Disagree about Mastodon -- I think it or the protocols backing it, will be the glue that holds the rest of social media together. You may not be using something branded "Mastodon" in 2035, but it will probably be Mastodon underneath.
I'm not sure that's true. The site runs best when most employees are out of the office during the last week or two of December and when employees are busy writing peer reviews on the last day or two before that portion of the review cycle ends.
Craigslist without maintenance probably turns into just scams and spam.
For example, we have a process based on the idea of the downtime budget from the SRE book. If the downtime allowed by the SLA of our customers is spent halfway, all changes to the systems have to be approved by leadership. Cosmetic bugs can be tolerated for two weeks in order to not risk anything.
On the other hand, if the necessary maintenance of the supporting infrastructure of a system is stopped, the system is running towards a cliff. It certainly depends on how deep the stack goes and how many redundancies and self-healing ideas are built into a system. If you have redundant storage arrays with redundant drives, with redundant systems built on top of these, with smart failover strategies, the overall infrastructure can tolerate a terrifying amount of damage while still running reliably.
But once that redundancy degrades and rots away, and once that resulting final linchpin drive or system instance fails, it'll result in an unsalvageable clusterfuck very, very quickly. Especially if you fire important core SRE and ops staff.
When was Twitter profitable ?!
Probably for the better. I read more long form articles and don't get caught up in the outrage of the day. I feel happier too. Sometimes I miss it, go to the site to read, and then immediately close the tab when I can't actually use it because it's so bad.
If I'm reading my timeline and think "geez, this person sure does post a bunch of political stuff I don't want to see" I either mute specific keywords, or just unfollow the person. Back on Twitter I was aggressive with keyword muting - I don't care about Marvel or people having passionite topics about "MCU", so I muted those phrases and my timeline was free of them.
ehhh, sort of. i tried a few of these before the musk takeover, and it was pretty disappointing. it was essentially a way of opting into more of the trash algorithm-recommended tweets in your timeline. instead of just the normal "recommended for you" stuff, you'd also have "recommended for you because you follow X".
It would be nice if someone with minimal tech skills could just spin something similar up. Related forums could link to each other, like the webrings of the past lol. That would be the ideal structure of interactive communities on the web, at least to me.
Meanwhile, my wife is playing the long game on Twitter. She has a specific way of using it that just works for her. She follows a few hundred people, and she's followed by ~5k people, mostly "nobodies", but a handful are impressive: researchers, journalists, politicians, authors. She has conversations with "household names" daily. She even orchestrated an interview been a well known researcher and an ex NYT journalist on substack. Yet she's an be absolute nobody.
There is a rule of thumb about online services and software: Don't fight the developers, because they have more power than you. If your usage is no longer compatible with the vision of the developers, stop using it. You may find temporary workarounds that make the service useful with a lot of effort, but it won't last. The developers will eventually find new innovative ways of ruining your experience.
Science Twitter was already dying before the takeover, because it was not compatible with the increased focus on recommendations. Musk simply accelerated the process.
Neither of these feels like I'm "fighting with the developers". It's such a trivial thing to do. And almost all social media apps do this. Instagram does this[0], it looks like Tik Tok only allows an algorithmic feed[1], it seems like Reddit has recommendations on by default but I'm seeing mixed things[2], LinkedIn does this (not that linked in is a model to be followed in any regard). In fact, Facebook is the only major social media company I know of that doesn't spit out an algorithmic feed by default.
So, if having to go to a new tab is "fighting the developer", then I think we've failed extraordinarily in this regard on all fronts and Twitter isn't doing anything new here.
[0]: https://help.instagram.com/505299634436870
[1]: https://support.tiktok.com/en/getting-started/for-you
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/xhxkdc/how_do_i_only_...
Remember when Facebook was about staying in touch with the people you know? Then there was a huge controversy when they introduced the algorithmic feed, made it the default, and always reverted back to it despite user preferences. Today it's a wasteland full of recommendations, promoted content, influencers, silly videos, controversial topics, and other forms of spam, with some interesting content randomly sprinkled around.
Defaults are important, because they influence people's expectations. If algorithmic feed is the default, it encourages posting certain kinds of content and discourages others. Eventually even your manually curated feed will be full of content that would be successful in the algorithmic feed. That is what happened to the part of Science Twitter I was following. People started posting less and eventually left, because Twitter was discouraging the kind of content they were posting.
As for Reddit, I don't consider it a social media platform. It's more like a collection of unrelated message boards that share the same underlying technology. I'm vaguely aware that there is a front page, and I sometimes visit it accidentally, but I never go there on purpose.
Is it? That's not my experience at all; I'd say Facebook has mostly dropped out of the news because it's quietly kept chugging away at what it's good at.
If you care about science twitter, I wonder if that was the best criteria for filtering your content.
> And this is after aggressively curating my feed
If you're "aggressively curating [your] feed", just mute/block them
Musk has no real idea of the impacts of technical decisions on the platform, but he realized the tweet visibility threshold was too short bac when even his own tweets weren't seeing engagement.
Since then he's created a scheme to grant slightly better longevity to the visibility of tweets by "verified" accounts, but it's really smoke and mirrors... Tweets anyone makes (Except for Elon and his selected Twitter "buddies") only are visible for seconds and to small audiences of people... It kills interaction, growth, and engagement for everyone else, but gives the illusion that the site is still vibrant (because it makes everyone tweet more often).
Deception of this kind will just make everyone burn out and not come back... It defeats the very purpose of Twitter, as visibility of ideas is the only payment most people get on the platforms to begin with, the main problem is that most people on the platform don't know they're mostly invisible, and dropping their tweets into a waste bin.
And the platform is really showing its lack of moderation, even compared to how little it was moderated in the past. I don't really want to click on webdev tweets and find replies full of hate speech and weird pornography.
some are just rw who mingle with the openly nazi posters too though yeah.
Yes.
I get push notifications from people I don’t follow and my follow feed has people I unfollowed (though that’s not the nazis except for some that masked off)
Science Twitter in particular has mostly migrated to Mastodon (although it's split between a few different subgroups).
A number of other de facto Twitter communities have migrated to Mastodon. Some have stayed on Twitter. And some have basically died without moving anywhere else.
This is the big problem with Mastodon. Some people want highly curated communities on small instances, and it's great for that. But it's really bad for people who want to make us of network effects - as exemplified by the very phrase '______ Twitter'.
I hope you're enjoying inflation, then.
Genuinely asking because if I know my crypto history it basically says the opposite.
When the US was on the gold standard, the inflationary periods were during the California and Yukon gold rushes, which had the effect of "printing" more gold.
The inflation we see today in the US is due to massive deficit spending, which is enabled by fiat money. All countries today use fiat money, because then they can spend money without limit and without raising taxes. They always blame the resulting inflation on something else.
The value of crypto currency is based on supply & demand. To me it seems more like collecting Beanie Babies than being a substitute for money. We'll see how it fares in the next few years.
It's just like the government deficit printing fiat money.
Sounds like a particular advantage to me, unless you prefer your money to be worth about 3% of what it used to be.
Inflation hurts poor people, too.
Edit in response to your undeclared edit: inflation hurts those who hold cash, by its very nature; on average inflation is a transfer of real value from the rich to the poor, although of course there will be exceptions.
What horror stories?
The wages of the poor do not keep up with inflation.
> inflation is a transfer of real value from the rich to the poor
No, it isn't. It's a transfer from the rich and the poor to the government.
This whole 'pining for the gold standard' is ridiculous. Do you want to go back to zero-sum economics because you don't like the Fed? Everyone hates the Fed, but it happens to be the least bad option that we have come up with so far.
> If there is no 'extra' money when we need it, economies stagnate
The banks create money as needed through supply & demand. This is complex subject, but the fact that the US economy thrived from 1800 to 1914 shows your dire predictions to be simply lacking.
> class mobility
Was very robust in the 1800s. The US moved scores of millions of people from poverty into the middle class, and a lot into the wealthy class.
May I recommend reading some history books about 19th century America.
> it happens to be the least bad option that we have come up with so far.
Your dire predictions didn't happen in the 19th century, and we didn't have endemic inflation.
When you read history do you skip over the parts that don't agree with your philosophy, or do you just assume you would be one of the robber barons?
Also, our economy grew a lot in a large part because we expanded westward exterminating the people who lived on the land and taking it from them and all the resources underneath. We got a lot of that 'extra' money as gold from that expansion.
> You glorifying the gilded aged is quite alarming.
LOL. Read "Historical Statistics of the United States". You can download it for free from archive.org.
> our economy grew a lot in a large part because we expanded westward exterminating the people who lived on the land and taking it from them and all the resources underneath
So "we" stole railroads and steel mills and factories and shops and mills and textiles etc. from the Indians?
> We got a lot of that 'extra' money as gold from that expansion.
Spain looted enormous quantities of gold from S America and transported it to Spain. Did it turn Spain into a wealthy industrial powerhouse? Nope. Is Russia's oil extraction industry making Russia an economic powerhouse? Nope again. How about Saudi Arabia? Nope nope nope. Venezuela? Nopety nopety nope.
Your theory needs a lot of work.
The ability to control boom and bust cycles by messing with the money supply is the whole point. Of course the gold standard is awesome if we ignore the busts and only look at the booms.
Regarding the Spanish -- I fail to see how that refutes anything? They were a poorly run religious monarchy operating in the pre-industrial age. Cool. What's your point? Are you contending that vast amounts of free land are not conducive to rapid economic expansion under capitalism?
Except they're a failure at it. We have boom and bust cycles anyway. Remember 2000, 2008, 2022? Friedman also demonstrates in "Monetary History of the United States" that the hand of the Fed on the tiller results in less stability of the money supply.
The "whole point" of fiat money is to be able to spend money without having to tax it first. That's why the European powers adopted it in WW1 - to finance the war.
> I fail to see how that refutes anything?
It refutes the notion that the quantity of gold in an economy has anything to do with prosperity.
> free land
Why have Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S Korea, and New York City become economic powerhouses despite little or no land?
Those cycles weren't nearly as bad as the ones that came before it.
> The "whole point" of fiat money is to be able to spend money without having to tax it first. That's why the European powers adopted it in WW1 - to finance the war.
Sure. You haven't explained why this is bad except 'inflation'. I think inflation is a small price to pay for relative stability.
> It refutes the notion that the quantity of gold in an economy has anything to do with prosperity.
No it doesn't. It illustrates that idiotic people with a lot of resources can do stupid things with them.
> Why have Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S Korea, and New York City become economic powerhouses despite little or no land?
Poor people do become rich, but that doesn't refute that it is a lot easier to become rich(er) when you already have a lot of money.
Yes, and a lot haven’t gone to Mastodon. Where are they?
So basically it's the new Facebook
A lot of people like to hate on Musk and act like he is clueless yet they haven't build or done anything, let alone at the scale Elon has been able to run things at, yes he has a lot of people around him, yes he might get a lot of the credit when it belongs to them, but he is still the person that bought everything together.
There has got to be something that he is doing right and a lot of it to me seems to be getting rid of the nonsense that doesn't matter, not having much respect for norms or the way it is normally done, much like the first principles framework he has used successfully in many things he has done.
A lot of programers and startups love a huge amount of frameworks, processes and to be honest nonsense, because that is just how that industry works, musk tore up a lot of that and people then start calling him crazy, but as you point out, do people really care if Twitters uptime is 99% or 99.999999% engineers and people that are so stuck to industry standards do, the rest of the world and reality not so much.
People commenting on current affairs might when they can't comment on events.
Sports fans, etc.
Also, the article is about twitters api, not the availability of the site.
Edit: It's quite telling that the various personal stories and anecdotes are receiving upvotes, while my comment, which contains links to concrete data, is being downvoted.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-twitter-...
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump...
Revenue has tanked and other services are nibbling at their market. This should at least suggest to you that it's not growing .
I don’t want to support an owner who uses their platform in that way any more than I’d want to watch political opinion shows on TV or subscribe to a political opinion Substack.
And those assets even if they’re not all disposable at the market price can be used as collateral without liquidating them.
So I think it’s still fair to say that Musk, etc. still have the greatest personal financial leverage available to them in the world.
Just because that power can't always be converted to cash 100% in a second doesn't mean it doesn't exist
If someone owned thousands of very rare collectible beanie babies in the late 90s, on paper worth hundreds of millions, do they actually have hundreds of millions of dollars? Sure they could find one buyer, ten buyers, but thousands of buyers? What can such a bubble handle?
People hate Musk, I get it, but the guy is not the wealthiest in the world. He's sitting on a pile of rare collectible beanie babies.
Beanie babies are a novelty. Stock in market leading companies is not.
Gates, Bezos, etc. have handed over control of their companies to the extent that yes, they could liquidate without impacting the company’s ability to operate. Musk is not far from that if he chooses. Tesla and SpaceX have mature products that plenty of capable CEOs can manage.
I get what you’re saying that the act of mass selling on the open market decreases your net worth. But stock can be used to purchase companies, secure loans, etc., so it’s still a productive asset without needing to convert it to cash. And, if he chose to sell Tesla or SpaceX the acquiring company almost always pays a premium over the market price. It’s not like he would just dump his shares on the market without a strategy. Just like you wouldn’t list your house until it’s staged properly. But your house is still part of your personal wealth even if you couldn’t sell it for a fair price by midnight tonight.
Plus, it’s nearly impossible to rank wealth on any other metric like cash on hand as that information is not public.
So, yes, "richest in the world" is really a mapping of timespan (days given to liquidate) to people.
But if I look at that twitter account… it’s pretty dead. Most of the people I followed have either gone to mastodon (my choice) or instagram (which I could never get into) or just dialed back on social media. Just a wasteland of uninteresting stuff it thinks I might like and gambling ads, increasingly.
Mind you, to your point, I didn’t leave due to instability; my breaking point was the purge of the journalists, and if that hadn’t driven me away, the death of the third party apps certainly would have.
I (kind of, my profile timeline is now inconsisntent/corrupt) deleted all my tweets, locked my account, and changed password to something I don't know.
A few people seem to have just logged off completely.
I've also unfollowed many people, and they still show up in my feed.
Musk also said only paid accounts will show up in the For You feed, but then later said it will also include people you follow.
The only source I've been able to find is here https://app.upzilla.co/statistics/32, which shows something like 99.9% uptime since November '22.
Any simple "upstate" tacker won't notice those things. For me it is notable, though, while I use Twitter a lot less, which of course impacts perception.
See a lot of people saying they are presented with nazi posts, but I have not seen anything at all like that. I do see more right wing / conservative posters but they are very far from Nazis.
Switched to getting my news from RSS feeds instead.
Haven't really switched to Mastodon since there's no one to follow on Mastodon and the platform itself is rather bad.
I could even see it helping. When reddit was down everyone lost their shit and there would be posts "where were you during the outage of '21" and "today I actually went outside", etc.. Kinda adds to the hype.
I remember about 6-8 years ago fervently trying to get my friends and family off of FB and Twitter. It was completely useless. I even offered running my own Diaspora server with zero luck. I was constantly pushing decentralized platforms including Mastodon and others for years before finally giving up.
Its crazy what it takes nowadays to get someone to move off of a social media platform for good. I know many have left Twitter because of Musk, but many haven't stayed away and have come back. Its like a drug for some people, its incredibly hard to just walk away from.
The reason Twitter attracts its current audience is a) celebs & politicians, and b) Twitter-specific creators - think of all the thread writers and serial memers.
All of these people rely on third party tools to schedule their tweets. No one is going to manually craft 1/30 thread series or tweet 8 times a day.
If the cost of running third party tools goes up 10x, a lot of creators, especially on the lower-end, will leave. I can pay $10/month for a tweet scheduling app, but if I had to pay $100 (because the app has to now pay 20x), I won't bother.
https://www.neowin.net/news/major-media-outlets-wont-be-payi...
It really was just tech-oriented and tech-oriented-LGBTQ* groups that fully abandoned Twitter for Mastodon. Which has been frustrating, I want to support Mastodon but I'm also mostly on Twitter for a good time with a smattering of tech concerns, and it seems like people on Mastodon are generally only talking about tech, having a bad time in their lives, or they're simply bad at being funny.
The claim is that twitters api business had a revenue of $400m with ~$360m in profit, and that it is now effectively abondoned.
Also, seven nines of uptime allows for just over 3 seconds of downtime per year, they would never have had that.
Twitter doesn't make money primarily by someone continuing to 'use twitter'. They make money with ad impressions. If everyone who used twitter still continues to use twitter, but 10% of them end up using it 30% less because they get annoyed when the site isn't working, that still costs the company millions of dollars.
It seemed at the time that twitter was beginning to crumble already as they were unable to maintain such a simple feature, I couldn't imagine at the time that they would fail to even maintain the API.
My 'for you' feed is a mix of a sprinkling of the people I follow, with a hefty helping of 'entertainment', crazy people, politics (most of these accounts are still on my blocklist, which apparently doesn't function anymore) and a host of other stuff that do no interest me.
> complete incompetence over there
sounded to me as if it also includes the employees
If so, not wanting to maintain it would probably count as incompetent, yes.
If not, then it would be more profitable for them to heavily restrict API access, and kill off 3rd party clients, so that more people would use the official clients where ads are actually shown.
I.e. they don't care about heavy users if they can't make a profit from them.
He's not a good person.
Twitter is different because it's a real-time mass communication platform, so the hype is received and processed differently. And outside of his fanbase, few people seem impressed with the changes as manifested so far and this is reflected in the response of advertisers.
Long tweets seem to work OK and offer a clear, obvious user benefit. I'm having difficulty thinking of any other examples.
"Oh Tesla was hours away from going bankrupt" yada yada
Or the bizarre interview with him in the dark ...
I don't believe his bleatings for a minute ...
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/a/2012/changes-comi...
I shudder to think of badly coded consumers of that API sticking that text into a fixed-sized buffer (with the right scaling factor between whatever Twitter considers a character and the actual bytes) and Twitter just wants to avoid buffer overflows like that.
The point is that saying there's no API is wrong. There is an API. Elon has chosen not to let developers outside of Twitter use it. It's clearly a political choice rather than a technical competence problem.
It’s more a business competence than a technical competence issue, likely (unless he’s actually attempting to have a direct technical role, in which case it is Dunning-Kruger made manifest).
External 3rd parties are unknown in some cases, and may try to leverage you in others.
So you have a stable 3rd party api for some very large features, and we have a internal highly fluid api for our stuff. 3rd parties can totally use that api you use, and do. But why make any representations or tie your velocity to all those 3rd parties for your main app.
You want these companies to inovate and improve while also tying them to often unmonitized ecosystems of 3rd parties you can't communicate with or priroitize well.
It's generally unsurprising to me that the api support breaks down this way. I actually think it's pretty disiungenuine to make a sold 3rd party api without it being monetized. That encourages people to build ecosystems on other peoples good will which. We've seen how that works time and again. Even worse when 3rd parties try and compete partly with the bread and butter of the api they're using.
The death of the Twitter API is long, long overdue. Bad for us consumers? Sure. But these companies are not charities, they exist to make money.
They have a hell of a lot to do with each other beyond that too.
(Led the search API team at Twitter and worked on both API platforms)
https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/24/how-the-recently-shuttered...
Why couldn't they just add ads within the API instead of alienating the community which is responsible for its success?
Aka, name another major social network around today which has been as influenced by third party clients as Twitter has
Because the first thing every 3rd party client will do is ignore the ads and not show them to users.
Are you sure? That would require a centralized review and distribution process for all 3rd party clients, like the App Store for Twitter. It's not outside the realm of possibility, but there's very little incentive for them.
Realistically, how much of the "content" is already ads? Ie corporate announcements, brand building, or political astroturfing, etc. It's almost like twitter is double dipping.
WeChat is pretty lit and contains a whole internet, sort of akin to how Facebook Pages might contain the only information or updates about many businesses and municipalities.
Yes, a state agency will censor some things, just like a corporation will censor some things. Yes, they collect your data and share it with third parties including the government, just like a series of corporation do on every other network. You're not Chinese, you're not going to disappear, its rare they experience anything more than a message disappearing too, its the same user experience. I don't find the reality to be different enough to warrant the perception of reality.
From the article: > Twitter already had a $400m paid API business
If this is true, the API would be generating almost 10% of Twitter's revenue. This is a serious business unit for Twitter.
[1] https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1641222782594990080
That's a huge chasm to cross. A moat, if you will.
Anyone who starts out small and grows organically is just going to get choked out, like planting an acorn in a bucket. So why even try?
Maybe that's the intent?
Sometimes I really wonder about this new CEO guy.
The problem with Twitter was that it had no legitimate monetization for the app itself. It was a zero-interest, investor/vc money fueled growth machine. And even for that purpose, it used that api to great extent to bring a lot of users into the platform and integrate a vast swath of internet to Twitter - from Twitter logins to automatic embeds to entire 3rd party applications that served different subsets of users.
But now that the investors who dumped cash on something that does not have a level of monetization and revenue compared to its over-inflated valuation want something for their money, suddenly growth is not that important anymore and problems ensue.
Even in this particular situation, its a dumb idea to restrict or close down an api. If you do that, another service that doesnt do it will get an ecosystem built around it and it will eventually eat your lunch. A fixed set of people working on a singular app in a company can never produce as much features as an entire ecosystem with its large community can produce through an api. The Open Source movement and its successes follow the same pattern: Centralized, large corporations cannot compete with the development speed and breadth of communities of millions of people, even if those corporations employ tens of thousands of engineers.
On your point: In my opinion 3rd party clients expand services, are a new place of innovation and a place accompanying different usage patterns. The trick is not to kill them; the trick is, to make it work. I would have accepted a Tweetbot with ads. But without Tweetbot I mostly stopped visiting Twitter.
for sure. and, as we all know, society only exists so that companies can make money. where would we be without bezos, musk, gates, et al.
I've used a third-party client for years and I don't miss any features. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing but, like, I can read, comment, and post and that's enough for me.
- Instagram (finally opened in the last two years)
- Youtube
Perhaps I'm not getting your point, but... most of the major social platforms in the US are still open, except for Twitter.
Working API → users
Therefor:
Working API → revenue
Thank you for applying for access to the Twitter API. We’re working on exciting updates including new access types and will have more to share soon. Please stay tuned to @TwitterDev and resubmit your application as soon as we launch our new API.
In the meantime, you can learn more about the Twitter API v2 and find resources on developer.twitter.com. We appreciate your continued interest in developing on the Twitter API.
Thanks,
I’d be completely unsurprised if they amended it to not say that anymore after realizing how ridiculously silly it sounds.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230330000515/https://twitterco...
on one hand you've got a knee-jerk answer: "absolutely! how could it not?!"
on the other... maybe he's getting rid of it for a reason? sucks for people who integrated against it but is it is "right" to effectively screw these people over who aren't paying for (but are benefitting from) the API?
maybe give them the option to pay?
Probably, but is it a good reason? IMO, he lost the benefit of doubt many decisions ago.
Also there is a small community of researchers out there that use the api to detect botnets, follow networks, etc. Can't have that with musk around.
People doing that are probably why they're deprecating the API.
- Elon has stated that bots are a problem for Twitter
- Bots were most likely largely operated via the API. Or at a minimum, used the API as a data source for targeting and crafting of tweets.
- If not the API, then using web based automation tools
Therefore, if you want to drastically reduce the number of bots you should:
1. Remove the API free tier and/or drastically reduce the feature set of the paid tier
2. Raise the cost of tweet creation e.g. Twitter Blue and paid verification
I didn't think "I'm going to fix bots" meant "I'm going to really limit free access" but it's a coherent approach, at least.
I just don't think a paid Twitter will be as valuable as it was. Competing with free is really hard; I'm not sure Mastodon is that competitor, but I bet there will be something.
This strikes me as extremely unlikely. The bots being discussed were attempting to pretend not to be bots, and there were active attempts to detect and remove them. Using the API would have made it trivial to detect them.
This means the free API is only useful for people who want to post Tweets automatically (e.g. bots) and not people who just want read-only access and do not contribute to spam. These users will now have to resort to web scraping, which is much more expensive for Twitter to serve than basic JSON API responses.
Endpoints meant for web browsers are about to get a whole lot more (fake) traffic which will throw off their metrics and mess with ad algorithms and by extension, ad revenue.
Everything since has been one train wreck after another. I have no breath left to take. :)
Given how easy it is to make/purchase Twitter accounts, this works just fine for spammers, people running influence operations etc. Sure you won't be able to tweet 10 times/minute like some spammers do, but those people are usually doing it manually or puppeteering via headless browsers rather than operating developer accounts.
You also don't need Twitter Blue unless your output depends on cold views. In reality, nearly all spam/scam/influence campaigning relies on follower/retweet networks to do amplification. Commoditized verification is meaningless, it's like paying for a t-shirt that says 'I'm famous.'
So Musk has destroyed Advertising Revenue, and now Twitter API revenue. Is he really trying to make money from just blue check marks alone?
Edit: And the sole active Ads developer who was still actively responding when the blog post was written, was apparently laid off a week after the article was posted. Ouch.
My post is one of the "12 [...] about Twitter not responding to the standard API access request process".
It's easy to keep an API running if you reject access to it, no? Due to a delightful quirk of how the Twitter Ads API review process works, our entire application no longer works, even for non-Ads API use. Genius way to manage the load.
which describes probably 90% of web apis out there
imho, unless a company is dogfooding its own api, I assume it is broken/bitrotted/owner-left-the-company etc
twitter is by no means alone
> Today we are launching new Twitter API access tiers! We’re excited to share more details about our new plans and what you should expect in terms of next steps and timeline.
> Free: For write-only use cases and testing the Twitter API (1,500 Tweets per month)
> $100: For hobbyists or students learning code (50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level)
> Current access plans including Standard (v1.1), Essential (v2), Elevated (v2), and Premium will be deprecated over the next 30 days, so we recommend that you migrate to the new tiers as soon as possible for a smooth transition. Any non-migrated developer accounts will be impacted by April 29th, 2023 at the latest.
It's not unmaintained. They were just putting it behind a pay wall.
Students being famously known for spending three figures a month on hobby API access. /s
This is super simple - no server required, and all free. I think the work here would be to come up with good sets of quotes. For example, I found a list of idioms in the Telugu proverbs. The book would require some sort of image processing to find quote boundaries, and to cut those out. I'd have to learn how to upload images via the API as well.
That pricing has real "I mean what could a banana cost, $10?" energy. What student or hobbyist is going to pay $100/month for fucking twitter access?
A collegue of mine is writing his Masters thesis part time on deep learning, and he's paying around $30-$50/month for cloud computing
Absurd that these platforms have no scruples about gathering data from users, but if you try doing the opposite, they’ll block you at every turn.
Most people have no problem getting paid too much for something they're selling, but they'll try to block you at every turn if you want them to overpay.
[1] https://twitter.com/feedliness/status/1638580147304505349?s=...
This is _basic_ functionality.
As it turns out Musk mostly didn't need them, and firing them didn't harm his interests to any tangible degree.
The ones who are most upset about this have an ideology that is a house of cards that has to be shielded from all interrogation, mocking and critique, lest it implode under the weight of its own internal inconsistencies.
These people know very well how to distinguish friend and enemy, and Elon is decidedly not a friend.
To lose this castle to an enemy like Musk is a huge problem for them because of its strategic importance, hence the fire-storm of consternation.
In the wider world, the ones who are upset about this are vastly outnumbered by those who just want to have fun and express themselves on the Internet, so if Twitter can become that kind of a place it will do very well.
For example, a common trolling tactic is to block someone, unblock them and post a mean or disagreeable comment, and then immediately block them again, and to do this repeatedly. The target can't see who is clogging up the conversation with BS, while the unblock-tweet-block cycle is very little extra work for the troll.
I'm not a Musk fan but if this play is in the cards, his actions could be rational.
Otherwise poeple would just
- buy 51 % stake - run the company into the ground - announce its bankrupt - at the auction buy back IP for pennies on the dollar - start new company with previous IP, same domain name, same servers etc
Also if there was an auction, what prevents Google, Meta, MS, Amazon, etc from buying the IP instead.
Just a clusterfuck of an omnishambles.
[1] https://openviewpartners.com/blog/state-of-usage-based-prici...
it's busted
And now w/ the new twitter API pricing, I will have to shut down my open source ChatGPTBot which has over 100k followers.
Sad.
I am curious because I have never used the API, and I can see Mastodon taking over if they have an API that let's 3rd parties interact and download content.
In the beginning, their API was a joy to use and a lot of neat software popped up around it. There was some drama around them making changes internally (API changes) which put some of these companies out of business. People became weary of their API since. That said, I would love to see a completely revamped API with great documentation.
I said that it's been in decline. If its unusable now, I'm not shocked because of the way it was headed even a few years ago. Musk very well might have realized the dumpster fire that is their API and shelved it for the time being.
> why is your take more credible than theirs?
What can I say, I'm just a simple user? Whether you find my "take" credible or not is purely up to you. ymmv
I’ve always found it kind of strange that they have one.
Then came the bots and bot farms. They started polluting Twitter and manipulating the masses.
Elon Musk is right in some of his observations. But he did not have the right action plan. He started doing things haphazardly, and many were saying: This is the way he approaches projects, too hastily, apparently very chaotic, but in the end he succeeds. The thing is: This time his ego got in his way. The platform he tries to redefine and reinvent is also his mirror, for polishing his own ego by chasing likes.
Musk is killing Twitter, and Jack Dorsey was complicit in this.
Now, people say the previous entry-level, elevated, and academic tiers were all free and provided a lot more functionality leading to lots of utility for twitter users, social science etc., but most of those same people balk when asked to affirm that 'Elon Musk is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.'
Not the kind of announcement you typically expect from an unmaintained API!
Source: led the search API at Twitter until last year.
No comment on the other half.
Just reading Trump and Musk's tweets will tell you plenty with zero bias. And indeed, this is how you can tell that Trump is legitimately a fool and Musk is simultaneously whimsical and stubborn.
This does not mean there isn't also an extra bit of anti-Musk/Trump stuff piled on top (in Musk's case the stuff about him inheriting an Emerald mine and lying about his child dying in his arms and in Trump's case the stuff about him being a big anti-LGBT guy).
> This does not mean there isn't also an extra bit of anti-Musk/Trump stuff piled on top (in Musk's case the stuff about him inheriting an Emerald mine and lying about his child dying in his arms
I guess you're implying the emerald mine stuff is false? Or are you saying it's not a big deal? And re: the child dying in his arms, the media is quoting his wife, who said he's lying. Are they to just ignore a story like that?
On the rest:
He did not inherit an Emerald mine and no reliable source has alleged he did, nor that his father even owned any part in the mine after the 90s, nor are there any reliable sources stating that Musk's father monetarily helped him in business other than a $28k loan he paid back. Heck, they even failed at doing a quick Google to figure out how much a pocket full of uncut emeralds actually goes for (a few hundred dollaras). And yet he's often portrayed as a trust fund kid who was given millions and never worked a day in his life.
On the child dying, neither his wife nor he lied: https://twitter.com/justinemusk/status/1595539044217552896
The baby death rattled in her arms but he felt the last heartbeat.
When journalists dislike you they will knowingly propagate misleading distortions and myths and will never correct inaccuracies that went against you or promote facts that are in your favour.
[1] https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/08/coinin...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NOK/nokia/market-c...
Or worse, imagine if Twitter continues to plummet as we currently see it, then business schools decide to write history as if it were a success story anyways.
[edit] he actually said ‘total crap’ and lost £500m.
I wonder how he rates his own perfomance.
Twitter on the other hand, is a company dealing with sociological/societal challenges, being that it's a social network. That takes an entirely different kind of skill set to do well as a CEO for.
Either way, he's essentially abdicated his CEO role at both companies, and his chaotic management style is on full display now, which confirms the Tesla and SpaceX reports. But why did Tesla and SpaceX thrive where Twitter is failing? Because the former companies grew up to create processes that contain Musk; whereas Twitter was bought outright, so his blast radius is unlimited there. Twitter has no Musk immune response.
At SpaceX when Musk suggests X, where X is... I dunno, an really dumb idea that no one would ever want, the people at SpaceX know how to redirect Musk until he drops it, or they know how to shape it into a good idea. At Twitter, they have no idea how to do this, and so Musk always gets his way, every time. All the people with the skills to turn bad ideas into good ones have left, all the people who tried to manage Musk were fired, so now he's left to his whims. And it shows.
If anything, Musk has proven how ceremonial the CEO role is. He has the title CEO of at least 4 companies, and claims 80 hours per week is a full time role. So at best CEO is a part time job.
I think the thing about CEO is that you can delegate not just the things you probably shouldn't personally be doing, but also the things you should.
I'd believe that some CEOs have a real job, but it's pretty clear that a lot have delegated it away to nearly nothing.
Also, he can't be effective at 3 of the companies since he's not physically in the office at each. It's impossible to do a good job while remote, as we all know.
That's supposedly what tech people root for, but because its Elon Musk, who eschews many of the shibboleths of the Left, people criticise Twitter as a proxy for his political views.
... if he didn't start by putting $12.5 billions of debt on the balance sheet after the buyout.
Which means that Twitter has to pay $1 billion of interest each year which it didn't have to do before that hostile takeover.
How many people would need to buy Twitter Blue to offset the interest alone? ~~125 million users which is about a third of its whole active user base~~ 10 million which is about 3% of their active user base (I can't do maths, thanks supermatt, luckily I'm good looking and can program).
In a way, this is Elon buying a newspaper like rich people always did to influence politics, except that he is buying a modern version of a newspaper.
Musk bought twitter because it is and was an integral part in social media campaigns for the last few elections. Targeted ads on twitter can reach journalists and politicians, their timelines "for you" controlled by Elon's and they might not even understand that they are being nudged by the content shown in the app. Heck, just by unbanning Trump and allowing MFA Russia on the app, he is moving the Overton window a bit.
The proof is in the pudding as they say. How many million people now see Elon Musks personal twitter posts, that did not see them before he bought twitter?
I say that in the most polite way possible: you Americans have a lot of internal issues you need to sort out, and quickly. You're polluting the rest of the world with your party politics.
I sometimes hear people conflating "the left" and "liberals" when... the left is here opposed to liberalism. Because liberalism means economic liberalism. And the local economic liberals are socially conservative. While the left is economically illiberal, and socially progressive. And our centrists are probably the closest thing we have to the US left, but since they are mostly allied with the right opposing them makes no sense.
But the actual, real reality is that 80%+ of people can't be measured in such a one-dimensional way. People have more nuance than that, and to get even a remotely accurate sense of where someone is politically requires a multipolar yardstick.
We see this from all sides from the liberals and the conservatives. What's ironic is both sides see the other side as doing it not them!
Originally from 1964 https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24964931
e.g Applied selectively to 2022: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2022/01/26/how-the-paranoi...
This has been a thing in the US since before we were the US. The south vs. north and urban vs. rural divide has deeply affected the entire fabric of the US down to the 3/5ths compromise in the Constitution to placate the southern states to ratify the Constitution in the first place.
Don't forget that time in the 1860's when literally half the country tried to leave as well. This is nothing new, it's just that the rest of the world can see it in real time nowadays (and much more of them speak English) when that was not possible previously unless you were a real international policy wonk.
I'd argue Musk himself has fallen prey to this partisan politics - it is really hard to support a large part of his tweets these days. He seems to have fallen into some strange mental quagmire with the failure of his twitter buyout, and his ego is not letting him accept any other reason for it than partisan sabotage.
But the way he is portrayed in the aggregate here and on reddit is even worse. He is either a genius beyond any criticism, or a complete fool, was always a fool and twitter is now exposing that.
We can't simply accept any middle ground, which is that he is likely a flawed human being who did some pretty amazing things once upon a time. If anything I hope we can steer him back to moonshot ideas, because he had a talent for it.
TBH it seems clear to me that he is a closeted libertarian who can't safely express his views in full without alienating huge segments of his mostly-red autoworker base or his mostly-blue techworker base.
It's a difficult tightrope to walk in the current ongoing partisan culture brawl.
However, it's important to note that there has been a genuine and very significant polarization of actual American politics over the past ~30-40 years—the seeds were planted with the Reagan presidency, and then Newt Gingrich in the early '90s started pushing the idea that political wins were more important than governing.
It's also important to note that this has been driven primarily by the rapid rush of the Republican Party to the right, from a conservative party with some fairly serious problems with racism, but a willingness to compromise and an understanding of governance, to a radical reactionary party refusing to censure or otherwise rein in the parts of it that are, in some cases, openly and explicitly embracing (christo-)fascism and Nazism, and advocating for outright violence against marginalized people.
I could not agree more. It's just hard to see how to move toward this goal.
First? No. There have been many attempts at this. The ActivityPub fediverse is the first with any prospect of competing with the VC-funded model. Thousands of servers, all but a few funded entirely by the millions of people who use them.
It's already self-sustaining. Twitter's new era is starting out billions in debt with its advertising base gone and flailing attempts to find some way to even cover the debt service.
Won't be first. There was app.net [1]. Gained traction at first and i had nice dialogues with good people, but died out pretty fast.
If I pay for a social network, I want quality content and API access. Twitter wouldn't be the first platform I would pay for.
Some probably do, but a whole lot don't. Musk was heavily criticized well before people were aware of his political views, for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with his political views.
Twitter is unique in that it was acquired for US$ 44B when it was a business that lost huge amounts of money consistently for years, and the owner intended it to have it run old school style, as in making a profit, but also doing so in such short notice that he dismantled entire branches of the company wholesale.
Obviously for people relying on pre-existing services and rates from Twitter, it sucks.
But the root problem is that Twitter had not been a sustainable business for a long, long time. One has to wonder how did they even subsist for so long and how much institutional money, not just VC/investor money, and who knows what sort of government/agencies pay-to-play deals made it even possible because the sort of money they cashed in during the only few years they've even been profitable seems absurdly high and they have never replicated that under normal circumstances.
With the ad model struggling and institutional ads sort of in retreat, the entire sector is struggling.
You are also 100% correct. As revenues fell at snap just like twitter, and easy money has dried up at all VCs creating a completely different market environment. Just look at stocks of small cap tech companies too, which Twitter was.
The only extra nuance to add is that without fines Twitter was actually profitable before musk bought it, but in the current market environment it certainly wouldn’t be even without musks leadership.
But of course blaming musk is what gets upvotes.
Twitter generated $5 billion revenue in 2021, a 35% increase on 2020 figures and a significant improvement on the 8% and 13% increase the two years before.
Cut backs were needed, as advertising revenue would have been significantly down this year, given the economic down turn. However, there was no need to gut the company to make it profitable.
I mean, you are both claiming cuts were needed and they’re too much. So how much was right? How do you know? You’d do a better job than the people who have access to the numbers? That’s a fairly arrogant position
Twitter seems to have a serious cultural problem at the moment, and that is generally a lot harder to fix than to rehire when the growth curve inverses.
I am sure Musk had to cut by 50%, if only because Twitter's interest payments are now significant. However, that does bring significant challenges.
Edit: my suspicion is that Elon expected the Twitter board to rebuff him, and he'd walk away calling them names for the rest of his days - and then the market dropped, removing resistance from the board (if any existed). This was capped off with Delaware courts showing every sign of muscular oversight of contract law, with Twitter reveling at the chance of embarrassing Musk and people in his orbit and getting bought off at a now-overpriced amount. It was a perfect storm.
The GP misspelt “bought” as “bough.” I thought a pun would be a fun way to point that out. I was wrong.
FYI: I chuckled a after reading your follow-up comment.
https://i.imgur.com/Gea8HRr.png
clearly Twitter was way, way too fat when it managed to lose US$1B with record revenue
which I'm not saying it means you should just close down core branches of the service, of course
perhaps Musk wasn't ready for the amounts of money Twitter required to be made profitable under a reasonable timeline
Twitter could have easily be turned into a profitable business by cutting 15%, rather than 50% of staff.
There was a need and it was going to happen anyway. Clearly slashing headcount earlier even without Elon, would have easily made it even more profitable.
Their mistake was that they didn't do it earlier enough. It just took Elon to do it for them. 7K headcount wasn't sustainable regardless and a 50% - 60% cut in staff makes sense for Twitter.
In any case, from my perspective Twitter didn't really make serious mistakes. They got $44B for the company despite its issues.
The value in Twitter is its network effect, social inertia and integrations in hundreds of thousands of websites, blogs, apps and APIs with 220M+ daily active users still using it every day.
Recreating that from scratch makes absolutely no sense. There is no serious alternative to Twitter and it is better to buy it instead of building it all over again.
> In any case, from my perspective Twitter didn't really make serious mistakes.
Twitter clearly over-hired like the rest of the tech companies and was wasting millions a day. It is either the mounting costs would get them in the end or someone else would reverse that downward trend to insolvency.
Drastic action was the appropriate method to stem the losses.
Twitter has only made a profit in 2 out of the last 11 years
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=twitter+profits+per+yea...
Musk has been very upfront that Twitter is bleeding money (hence why he is firing so many people), it's not simply that a healthy profit margin is being reinvested.
That means that Elon Musk's Twitter Buyout costs $1.3 Billion/year _ON TOP_ of all the other costs of Twitter.
If Twitter was "barely profitable" in 2021, they're now $Billion+ short / year. That has nothing to do with "old Twitter" decisions, and 100% to do with how Elon Musk structured the buyout.
Presumably, you're supposed to assume that Musk knows what he's doing and that he has a plan to make $1.3 Billion in profits (to break even on the loan) and then go beyond (to make profit on his $44 Billion investment). But... I'm honestly not seeing it.
The downturn in early 2022 hit them badly. They were losing money again when Elon bought them (one of the reasons he tried to pull out of the deal)
Admittedly the way he structured his buy out made it worse by adding more debt.
[1] https://www.consultantsmind.com/2018/03/04/choosing-stocks/
---
I'm not saying Elon is doing a good job, all signs point to the opposite. He probably though so too when he announced to step down from CEO (though that has yet to happen). But if he was doing a good job, it would also be really hard to tell in this phase. I don't think we are far enough into this to draw any good conclusions.
Losing nearly half of revenue in only a few months, adding crippling debt payments, stiffing employees on their severance, refusing to pay rent and other services, plus countless other debacles make it clear this is a dysfunctional company. Network effects and resilient architecture can keep a company humming along for some time despite incompetent management, but those resources will get depleted and they are hard to regain.
[0] https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1641222782594990080
As for brand-focused advertisers, I can see parallels to 2017's "YouTube Adpocalypse" in which advertisers paused their spending due to their ads being displayed before videos containing offensive content. They recovered from it by demonitizing offensive content. Twitter will have to address "brand safety" concerns, however,
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/have-the-ads-in-your-twitter-fe...
Could it happen? Certainly. Will it happen the way he says it will? Probably not.
My company advertises on Twitter, because they gave us an 80% discount to keep advertising on Twitter after we started shifting more spend to other sites last fall. We haven't actually paid Twitter yet; they keep sending emails but we figured we'd just pull an Elon and wait until they actually got serious about collecting. It helps that our account reps keep getting laid off.
Notably, Elon Musk contradicted that interview a number of times internally, noting that Twitter is still deeply in the red. So he was either lying in that interview or he was lying to his minority investors.
Elon basically started with the Private Equity leveraged buyout playbook - borrow money to buy a business, then assign that business the debt used to buy it.
But it’s unclear how he’s going to do part 2, which is to either suck enough value out of it to recoup the purchase price before it fails completely, or turn it around and make it more valuable than when he bought it.
Right now Twitter needs to drastically increase its revenue and decrease its expenses just to service the new debt load. Hence Elon firing everyone and trying to charge more for every little thing.
It’s amazing that Twitter was more or less self-sustaining prior to this, and now it’s not.
He's proven himself thin skinned, egotistical, and capricious, and is easy to provoke into vindictive & retributive actions even if not in his best interests.
I think a big part of why he bought twitter was a sense of grievance, basically that the wrong people were getting positive attention, that people were being mean to and making fun of him and his friends & allies. He wanted to restructure the mechanics and incentives of the platform to better support the people and outcomes he values.
I'm not sure whether he succeeded by these terms either, it's still too early to tell I think. But I do think it's an important factor in evaluating whether he succeeded in what he set out to do when buying twitter.
And from that perspective "make it good or (let it) die trying" may be an acceptable compromise. He doesn't get the musk-adoration platform he wants, but at least there is no longer the musk-ridicule platform he perceived it to be.
The board called his bluff and said "sold!", then Musk spent a great deal of time and effort trying to wiggle out of the deal. He failed, and now he's stuck with it.
Everything he's doing now is trying to minimize the amount of financial damage this debacle will cause him.
It's true though that if it loses a bucket of money and he never wanted it in the first place he might not consider it as successful as I'm guessing. We can't know his mind, but thinking of it in this way explains a lot of his behavior around twitter that is difficult or impossible to explain from a pure financial standpoint, so I'm going to stick with it for now.
In any case, I suspect that the GP comment by giraffe_lady, explains why he was interested in Twitter at all -- why bothering trying to get leverage over the board.
Or, if he wants to eventually become the President of the US, then that's an alternative explanation (of why he cared)?
That would require a constitutional amendment in order for him to be eligible. He’s revealed himself to be pretty dumb, but even I give him enough credit to not be so stupid as to think he will one day he President.
There's very little doubt in my mind. The bot thing was always just rhetorical. he didn't suddenly "discover" something he wasn't already well aware of.
Yes. This has been covered widely and was a key reason he had to follow through with the purchase. The bot thing was an attempt to get out of buying Twitter, not something he actually believed. You need to realize that he's like Trump: lying is kind of beside the point. He'll say whatever he thinks will get him what he wants, which ultimately public adulation, however hollow that is.
He didn't just "pitch" it, he made a buyout offer with all the attendant SEC filings. Not the sort of thing you can accidentally do with a slip of the tongue!
Is this really a good assumption for a guy who has started so many successful companies?
The only companies he actually founded was SpaceX, and Boring if that even counts.
Plus it's not at all clear how much credit he should get for the companies he invested in, aside from being a good fundraiser and hype man. There are plenty of stories about employees having to manage him to avoid him stepping on critical work.
And you don't have to understand contract law to start a company (or in the majority of Musk's cases, invest in an existing company), that's what lawyers are for.
If your name is Elon Musk, you may convince yourself you can walk away unscathed, or with only a slap on the wrist (see the many SEC encounters).
He's got a business idea for Twitter, which is to turn it into "X", the everything app he originally wanted Paypal to be 20yrs ago. Basically a US version of WeChat.
But it will be a steep climb from here, with a skeleton engineering crew that needs to both maintain current Twitter and build new X, and the debt service draining money and constraining hiring.
I do think there are long term-issues with laying off that many employees, but clearly the "if you fire all these engineers the service is going to collapse and stop working" doomsaying was unfounded.
[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/big-tech-layoffs-202...
The way this pans out is that in the short term, nothing much happens except deadlines start to get pushed out. As time goes on everything becomes more and more dysfunctional. All progress grinds to a halt; simply treading water created by ongoing churn and operational needs ends up becoming impossible. Next the business tries to get more and more out of the remaining staff until they get fed up with it and leave. Shortly before the wheels really come off, legal and compliance issues will suddenly start ballooning. That's where we are now. Nobody wants to work on these kind of projects -- they do nothing for your career and nobody will celebrate your work -- but they are not optional. Elon seems to have decided simply not to comply with laws he dislikes in regulatory environments where he thinks he can get away with it. This can work for a while, but companies with no internal governance and that regularly flout laws can don't tend to last for too long without making painful changes. Let's see how it turns out. Given the reported state of the company it sounds like he has about a year to figure it out.
Despite all the firings, Twitter's financials are worst than pre-acquisition. How comes? Advertisers pulling out. Why? Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. Remember the Twitter Blue two days of spam?
Not only that, but it's been leaked that Twitter is trying hard to recruit some laid-off employees with huge comp packages. Without a lot of success.
Advertising revenue for Meta and Google has also tanked to the tune of 30-50% of their stock value, so it's disingenuous to link Twitter's ad revenue woes directly to any increase in spam (which is in and of itself an unsourced claim).
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert...
[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/4/23438917/twitter-verifi...
Unless targeting has wildly changed, that doesn’t seem to be the case (have things “settled down”, even?) None of the major brands that I used to get ads from regularly are hitting me with ads at all now, and most of the ads I see are for the same type of places I was seeing just after the major backouts.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-offers-new-equity-grant...
The company has lost over half its value in just 5 months.
Even as bad as the stock market was last year, very few companies lost 50%+ of their value.
--------
There's a lot of other decisions that are very strange coming out of Tesla, such as the removal of RADAR and Ultrasonic Sensors. Does Elon Musk really believe he can compete against next-generation companies when he's removing sensors from his cars?
Radar is back by the way, with an increased resolution that makes it more useful in highways where overhead signs false positive as a collision risk on the old sensor.
The ultrasonic sensors IMO were basically worthless. Initial analysis of the new v4 FSD hardware indicates they are adding more cameras - including bumper cameras to cover blind spots that previously would have relied on ultrasonics.
It doesn’t seem like HW4 can be retrofit like HW3 was, so it will be very interesting how that all plays out!
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-hardware-4-hd-radar-first-lo...
https://mobile.twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1625905220432...
There is a huge difference between 55% drop that Mr Musk has experienced with Twitter, and the 30% drop you're talking about.
EDIT: > from March to June of last year
That seems like a weird comparison? An apples-to-apples benchmark would be the Nasdaq 100 from November last year (when Musk finished buying Twitter) to March this year.
Note that Twitter has a $13 Billion loan with $1.3 Billion/year in interest payments in a rising interest rate economy while VC banks like SIVB are failing. That means to buy Twitter at $20B valuation, the VC firm would need to spend $33 Billion. ($20 B valuation + $13 Billion loan)
I honestly don't see this company having enough runway to even reach the $1.3 Billion/year interest payment, let alone the rest of it's liabilities or costs.
This Twitter saga is more like his PayPal days when he sent the company into a nosedive with bad management.
Hardly golden examples of how to run business.
Non-responsiveness is pretty normal for large corporations. Try to send email to Google or Facebook. Calling their products "unsupported" and "unmaintained" may actually fit dictionary definition!
Maintaining a good API for an ever changing product is VERY non-trivial. Designing easy to consume APIs and writing good documentation requires some specialized skills. Internal APIs are often very different than external ones. Some times APIs need to be duplicated which can make breaking changes of the underlying systems more complex.
I can see the value of APIs for a growing company that is trying to establish itself, but there must be a line somewhere.
I suspect a large amount of API support over the last decade has been driven by brand development and recruiting.
It brought INSANE value to Twitter in it's early days.
The API allowed a client to be written for every platform around by domain experts way before the Twitter team could get to them. They got Apple to integrate it natively on iOS 5. That's right, the OS had built-in support for Twitter. You didn't need to install an app.
It's one of the things that cemented Twitter's presence in the social media's landscape.
Contrary to this complaint post, the API is still up and far from 'unmaintained' or its 'immediate death' as incorrectly predicted 5 months ago with still 200M - 220M daily active users continuing to use the platform, even after all the chaos and nonsense articles.
Free APIs forever is unsustainable for a business and eventually price increases will happen. Believing otherwise is essentially wishful thinking, just like basing an entire business on someone else's API and not paying for it. There is always a cost.
Once again, my point still stands. Unchallenged.
The article has nothing to do with business users. The team responsible for maintaining the Twitter API is down to zero engineers. This is the product that brought in $400M ARR.