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Comment by titaniumtown | Hacker News Reader

That's hilarious. The complete incompetence over there lol.

It seems like they don’t care about the API. That makes it a matter of values rather than competence.

They certainly don't seem to be valuing it enough to assign the quality/quantity of engineering necessary to maintain it.

I mean you're a platform company in 2023 and you don't want an API? Idk that sounds like competence to me in failing to appreciate its value. Sure, I appreciate it follows a strategy but I worry that the strategy will not help twitter in the long term.

In what sense is Twitter a platform?

it hosts a communication service for organisations and individuals to build followings and broadcast messages. I guess its about whether you see Twitter as more than its user interface or not.

Twitter was a platform company in 2011, but after they started limiting the api in 2012[1], I'm not sure that they wanted to be a platform anymore.

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/a/2012/changes-comi...

I think you need to rate limit and auth most free consumer-facing end points, given the maliciousness of public traffic. Limiting it is just protecting yourself from its worst excesses, that doesn't necessarily mean you don't want to be a platform.

Commercial awareness is also competence

So what you're saying is we have an inverse Hanlon's Razor, here?

That sounds like a deliberate decision to maintain backwards compatibility.

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.

Make it awful for long enough so that when you make it better, you're a genius who saved Twitter.

Or so that when you finally pull the plug, people don't complain too much.

The mental gymnastics of Musk haters are next level. If Twitter dies, he is dumb and incompetent. If he saves it, it was all just part of his evil plan. You got all outcomes covered, great.

I can't help it if he's very obvious.

Either way he is still the guy who publicly mocked his own employee for having muscular dystrophy, offered another employee a horse if they gave him a handjob, called a cave diver who saved a bunch of children a pedo, spread conspiracy theories about an elderly man who was beaten by an intruder with a hammer....

He's not a good person.

I didn't say he was a good person. But it's obvious that he's not incompetent and that he's just trying his best to salvage his investment. The idea that he is intentionally driving Twitter into the ground is beyond ridiculous.

According to himself it has fallen 50% in value since he bought it. If he just wanted to salvage his investment he'd tweet once a week about about features or metrics. As it is he spends a lot of his time shitposting and making facially absurd claims.

But he does tweet multiple times per week about Twitter features. I can count at least 7 such tweets in the past week.

Right...and I'm saying that if he tweeted less and delivered more, he'd be taken more seriously than he is. Hype/salesmanship is part of business, but in the case of SpaceX and Tesla, they're delivering bespoke and high-end manufactured products. People are willing to wait for infrequent product delivery while tolerating sometimes-fanciful claims of great potential.

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.

I don't think I've seen Elon mentioned that twitter is an investment to him.

Do you believe him to be less "good" than the average person? What's the scale here?

If you think the average person engages in all of the behaviors listed above, you should start hanging around different people.

Yeah, Musk does have that ridiculous saviour complex ...

"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 ...

is it incompetent to not maintain something you don't want to maintain?

It's incompetent to not want to maintain it.

* without taking it offline

The incompetence is at the very top, choosing not to maintain something that they were apparently making $400m/year from paid subscribers for

Yes, at the same time, this:

> complete incompetence over there

sounded to me as if it also includes the employees

The post seems to talk about 2 different APIs, a public one they are not continuing to work on and a commercial one that makes $400mm/year

The API's the thing that makes Twitter tolerably-usable to heavy users—the ones who draw eyeballs to the site so the ads are worth more than $0.00—right?

If so, not wanting to maintain it would probably count as incompetent, yes.

I'm not familiar with Twitter or its API, but are ads also returned via the API?

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.

Heavy users are the ones who generate the content that gives the site value in the first place, though. Advertisers aren't there to sell products to the 1% of users who make most of the posts, they're there to sell to the 99% reading those posts. Making posting on twitter a bigger pain for the people who do most of the posting—and especially for celebrity and brand accounts that get tons of "engagement" they want/need to keep track of—is probably not a great move.

Yes, without either taking the API down or publishing a disclaimer that it's deprecated.

Nope

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