[doomlaser]

The thing that bugs me about Twitter is how locked down the API is. You can't do much with it before you have to start paying them (a lot).

In the early days of the Facebook API, I made a cool little MacOS screen saver / visualizer with its data (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZnB14BVjlE). I'd love to build some similar tech experiments with Twitter, but their API "Sandbox" allows only 250 API requests per month before you have to start paying them hundreds to thousands of dollars for just a few hundred more. https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing/search-30day

I feel this seriously limits what developers can do with Twitter. It's such a rich source of data that could be explored in so many interesting ways, but it's all locked away. It's not worth even building a cool little thing to share on Twitter as just showing it on the Internet anywhere will use up all the API requests immediately. Hurts potential innovations built off the platform.

[alangibson]

Let's just be glad they still have an API. I think the days of brand name social media services providing any useful free API are numbered. They've already gotten the growth boost they wanted out of it, so now it's just an expensive liability.

I just killed a side project that would have depended on social network APIs because they all lose functionality with every release. The trend couldn't be clearer.

[jlokier]

> I feel this seriously limits what developers can do with Twitter.

As much as I agree with you that it's a great shame the limits are so tight and fees so high, I think their API price model suggests some developers are doing things with the API - and paying Twitter for it.

Maybe not fun, interesting hacks, but something of value to someone.