The question I have with this move is why didn't Twitter just force advertising as part of their API for third party clients? Just change the TOS for using the API so if they didn't show advertising they would be cut off. What am I missing?
I think that is right. A public API radically slows down product iteration since each feature needs to be considered in terms of its blast radius to third party clients. It probably burned the bridge for good this time, but killing the API to speed up product velocity isn’t an insane move if you value that more than the existing 3rd party ecosystem.
That's not really true. Many websites version their API and/or release new features without providing support (at least initially) via the API.
That's the route Reddit has taken. There are several features that only work through the official app or website. It can be frustrating as a user of a third party client but it's a much better alternative to cutting everybody off.
What I said is definitely true - supporting that old version isn’t free - it needs to be maintained and all new features need to not inadvertently break it. I’m not saying this was necessarily a good move, but the upside to killing an API is you are able to cut any need to support any of it, including old versions.
With feature iteration at Reddit accelerating since 2019, they may opt to do the same eventually should a desperate squeeze of user metrics/ad revenue becomes necessary down the road. Public APIs helped Reddit rapidly grow its userbase on a lean crew. It'd be a shame to see that goodwill being burned in the never-ending chase for quarterly performance results.
How many people use third-party Reddit clients versus using third-party Twitter clients as a percentage of total users on each site? (I don't know—not a rhetorical)
3rd party clients were the only usable mobile clients for quite a while. Reddit acquired one of them and has been pushing it but AFAICT as a Reddit Sync user nothing has changed. I imagine they are still pretty popular.
While in general that may make sense, in the specifics of Twitter it’s just another unnecessary bad decision in a chain of unnecessary bad decisions.
The biggest issue isn’t what they’ve done but how they did it: dismissively, without warning, justified days later with a flimsy provably false excuse.
> A public API radically slows down product iteration since each feature needs to be considered in terms of its blast radius to third party clients.
Twitter’s public API was already lacking. There are several features, like polls, third-party clients never had access to. No one would be surprised if the API remained static forever.
> killing the API to speed up product velocity isn’t an insane move if you value that more than the existing 3rd party ecosystem.
The API wasn’t completely disabled, it’s still working for smaller clients.
In the last seven years Twitter already did not expose features like polls with their public API. Still, even with a less capable API many preferred the experience of 3rd party clients.
I can't say I totally saw this coming, but when Elon started talking about the WeChat/Everything App/X, the writing was on the all for 3rd party clients.
That's what I thought as well. They need money badly, and they have an obvious way to get it - monetize the API so that third party clients can continue using Twitter while building a business on top of it.
Yet instead of supporting the strong ecosystem they already have and nurturing a symbiotic relationship with it, they burn it all?
What are these 3 star comments I keep seeing? Bots? Is it the same kind of thing as when redditors comment "this" instead of just upvoting? It keeps cropping up with no explanation or context.
>This is 100% a control move. He wants full control over how everyone experiences Twitter (not sure why).
The only thing I can think of is Musk was concerned the two largest 3rd parties would create their own network seeded with something like 66% of the most influential users.
As has been pointed out many times, Twitter Blue will never be able to replace Twitter ad revenue, which was at > 1B per quarter at the time of the acquisition. I think this move is a reflection of someone at Twitter realizing that.
If they did some kind of revenue share (from Twitter Blue) with the third party clients their users are using, it might even provide useful funding for some of the otherwise non-commercial ones.
Twitter could think of this as a kind of lead-generation / user retention system.
Of course, Blue is essentially a bandaid of $8/mo/user over the gaping chest would that is the cost of the leveraged buyout ($13B) so I doubt Musk would consider tearing of pieces of that bandaid for goodwill or lead gen.
I followed some of that and it was especially funny that he had just been defending Musk and posting some "well he's a super-genius—you know, like all us rich SV types—so we should give him the benefit of the doubt" sort of stuff, right before that happened.
The whole thing was truly beautiful. Overall, Musk's acquisition has provided some excellent entertainment.
"It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX." - Paul Graham https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961
His quick turn around (there was some, "oh, huh, when you put it that way, perhaps he is making some questionable choices" interaction with another poster) right before the ban was maybe the most perfect example of "I never thought the face-eating leopard would eat my face!" I've ever seen. A moment of dawning realization an instant before the face gets eaten. It was perfect.
This was probably easier and the decision was probably made on a whim - no time plan and execute a transition like you're suggesting. I think this theory is supported by the fact that API access was cut with no notice, the ToS was only changed after-the-fact, and some smaller apps - like Twitterific for MacOS - were initially missed.
The absence of ad-tweets inserted into the API feed with an API term of "you must display these or we'll ban your app" was always weird.
That said, I bet that the real thing they want is the control to be able to push the Twitter Blue premium features, which I'm sure third-party apps would just sideline as much as possible even if they made them all available through the API.
Twitter had a decade to implement something simple like this and didn't. I assume that there are technical reasons that it's hard to do with their codebase and it's simply not worth the time and money to do so.
Ads come with tracking, so there's probably an issue of trusting all the data that apps would have to send back. Twitter would have to document just how much tracking their ads require, and 3rd party developers could balk at it and cause a stink. OTOH the first party app can track as much as it wants and it'll fly under the radar.
I think there’s a pretty wide delta between tracking that is against App Store rules and tracking that would be controversial when written up on the Twitterific/Tweetbot blogs.
They could change the TOS, but actually enforcing would be difficult. You'd have to have something like the app store review process. And another goal here is probably to get everyone using the same clients so they have more control over the experience.
(speculation) they want to push everyone to use the official app so they can get as much user info as possible to sell. They want persistent location and all the other juicy stuff you can't get if a third party is standing in the way.
No, that was for firehose access when Twitter bought Gnip.
There was a big fuss over third-party clients being limited to 100k users. Twitter fairly quickly walked back that limit (with additional verification and rules specific to clients reaching that size being required).
