[h11h]

One data point is that there is no way to get the full text of long tweets from the API. Twitter Blue subscribers have been able to post tweets longer than 280 characters since early February but the API only returns the first 280 or so characters.

[titaniumtown]

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

[nonethewiser]

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

[Quarrelsome]

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.

[toast0]

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...

[Quarrelsome]

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.

[ALittleLight]

In what sense is Twitter a platform?

[Quarrelsome]

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.

[organsnyder]

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

[skipants]

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

[raverbashing]

Commercial awareness is also competence

[kccqzy]

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.

[JustSomeNobody]

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

[phowat]

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

[LightBug1]

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 ...

[olalonde]

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.

[samtp]

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.

[olalonde]

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.

[anigbrowl]

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.

[scottyah]

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

[samtp]

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

[JustSomeNobody]

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

[stainablesteel]

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

[marcellus23]

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

[yamtaddle]

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.

[imiric]

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.

[yamtaddle]

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.

[addisonl]

It's incompetent to not want to maintain it.

[100721]

* without taking it offline

[pcthrowaway]

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

[dev_daftly]

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

[cutemonster]

Yes, at the same time, this:

> complete incompetence over there

sounded to me as if it also includes the employees

[nonethewiser]

Nope

[onion2k]

There clearly is an API that returns the full text of a tweet or the official app and website wouldn't be able to display it. They must be maintaining and building an API. The only thing that's not being maintained or updated are the public facing endpoints. That doesn't mean much.

[h11h]

Yes, there is a GraphQL API that Twitter's web interface uses, but developers who use the publicly available API can't use that.

[grogenaut]

This is how many websites work. A public api requires done right means you are spending effort maintaining it but worse, if your apps use it as well, it means you have to wait not only for your apps to update (maybe 11+ for different platforms), you have to wait for independent third parties to also update. With internal platforms, you can generally priortize changes if you need to with your coworkers, and you know the time frame for platforms like Samsung tvs and Playstations, and can plan for it.

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.

[BulgarianIdiot]

So it can only be used secretly by bots. Good job.

[onion2k]

developers who use the publicly available API can't use 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.

[anigbrowl]

That's like saying that my front door isn't shut because the doors to rooms inside are open. When people say 'API' they mean the public-facing endpoints, not the internal ones that are only accessible to Twitter's developers.

[ncallaway]

It doesn’t have to be a technical competence problem. It could easily be a business competence problem.

[rsynnott]

I mean ultimately it’s all semantics, but the idea that a private API is not an API proper is not exactly unusual.

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).