[amatecha]

Uhhh... I mean, the events that came before are what led to where we are today, so it's pretty worthwhile to understand the history of software, tech, and humanity for that matter. This colossal breadth of tech we're using every day has been a development of centuries, and Twitter and its development is a piece of that. Dismissing that history is a disservice to our community and to our future. Yeah, where a feature came from is not of news-headline importance, but it's relevant to us and our understanding of how software and services evolve over time, with involvement from their community of users and fellow industry members.

[shawn-butler]

The people in these comments espousing "history"and want to blame every bad behaviour on the new owner seem to have a very short memory.

Twitter has always given a proud middle finger to third party clients to suit its own strategy. Firehose access terminated to analytics companies after it acquired Gnip:

"...After acquiring Gnip in May of 2014, we decided to bring all data licensing activity in-house in order to better serve our customers and partners..."

When they acquired Tweetdeck in 2011, they started cutting off apps who "'mimic' products, services and experiences that Twitter itself offers"

They banned apps like UberMedia (UberTwitter), twidroyd and UberCurrent over trademarks and having the audacity to offer DM longer than 140 chars. There are dozens of more instances. They have literally never been a platform or ecosystem friendly company. Ever. They used 3rd party apps to gain traction than killed them.

How is this recent behavior any different?

[ceejayoz]

> How is this recent behavior any different?

None of the situations you highlight involved a) zero advance warning b) a week of radio silence from Twitter c) lies from Twitter about the behavior of those banned and d) an after-the-fact change to the rules.

[shawn-butler]

a) false, b) irrelevant, c) false, and d) false

[amatecha]

I think my thread was probably not the relevant one to ask this question in? I was contradicting buddy's claim that history doesn't matter. I believe it does. I wasn't saying anything about the new ownership or actions thereof.

[dmix]

I'm also not convinced that Twitter (and it's community/prior management which yes already neutered the API) was some holy thing that needed to be protected and we should all care if it destroys itself. Twitter getting a fire under its ass to become better or die off is not the worst case scenario in my mind.

At least as far as I can tell everyone is still using it with rare exceptions. The people most likely to post alarmist and FUDy stuff also tends to be the people least likely to abandon social media for some higher social/moral purposes.

Once enough time passes and we have enough inside information (and less current day emotion) we'll be able to better analyze these decisions and trends from a macro perspective. Twitter encourages debating things immediately with limited information on overall strategy and actual outcomes/consequences, so ironically I'm also critiquing the very thing Twitter morphed the Zeitgeist into, but oh well.

[bee_rider]

Musk is definitely making Twitter worse. The only hope might actually make it much better by killing it off for good.

[lmm]

The actual regular Twitter experience is better than it's ever been. All the easily-outraged people leaving is a feature not a bug.

[wyclif]

I agree; the haters have politically-motivated brainworms. The actual user experience is a lot better now than when Dorsey was in charge, especially if you live outside of North America.

[renewiltord]

Musk is actually making HN and Reddit worse because people cannot stop talking about him.

At some point, you have to ask yourself if it's worth typing out and posting something that would be ChatGPT's response to "write a Hacker News comment decrying Elon Musk".

As a pretty avid Twitter user, I'm still enjoying it.

[bee_rider]

The article is about another part of the twitter ecosystem shutting down. If talk of twitter’s decline annoys you, maybe there are better places to spend your time?

[renewiltord]

It doesn't take an IQ 3 standard deviations beyond the mean to figure out I was talking about the websites in general

[dmix]

> Musk is definitely making Twitter worse.

In terms of actual content it's a very marginal difference for the vast majority of people I'm sure.

Slightly more people posting angry outraged tweets != twitter content being significantly worse.

The technical failure complaints/predictions will probably find more purchase on HN, despite the feeds being much of the same.

I'm very skeptical Entertainment Tonight style negative PR for Twitter's business ops is what is bad for Twitter as a product for normal day-to-day users. Note: I'm not talking about what's bad for society, if that's what mattered The National Enquirer wouldn't have topped newspaper sales long ago.