[brunes]

Name a single other major social network around today that has an API and allows third-party clients. The only one I can think of is Reddit - and even in that case, there are numerous features already being locked out of third-party clients. They are on the same path as Twitter, and at some point they will realize that maintaining a gigantic cost center that provides no revenue (since they don't control ads) and does not allow them to rapidly innovate or build a brand (since they don't control the app) does not make a lot of business sense.

The death of the Twitter API is long, long overdue. Bad for us consumers? Sure. But these companies are not charities, they exist to make money.

[johnm212]

> maintaining a gigantic cost center that provides no revenue > these companies are not charities, they exist to make money.

From the article: > Twitter already had a $400m paid API business

If this is true, the API would be generating almost 10% of Twitter's revenue. This is a serious business unit for Twitter.

[brunes]

The commercial API has nothing at all to do with the third-party client API.

[veeti]

What makes you think this post is about the third party client API? The commercial API tiers have also been nerfed [1] to a level where you need Enterprise to do almost anything useful.

[1] https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1641222782594990080

[nwienert]

Sounds like they're focusing on the profitable part.

[marshray]

The obvious problem is that there's nothing between $100/month and $42,000/month.

That's a huge chasm to cross. A moat, if you will.

Anyone who starts out small and grows organically is just going to get choked out, like planting an acorn in a bucket. So why even try?

Maybe that's the intent?

Sometimes I really wonder about this new CEO guy.

[nexuist]

I think the enterprise plan is probably intended for established corporations that already pay out hundreds of thousands per month. As developers we're looking at it from the perspective of like "I want to build X on top of the twitter platform" but from their perspective it's more like "I want to sell access to my database to Pepsi and ESPN."

[4rb1t]

makes you wonder did the commenter read the article at all?

[pazimzadeh]

Wouldn't twitter not have many of its current features and conventions if it wasn't for third parties?

https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/24/how-the-recently-shuttered...

Why couldn't they just add ads within the API instead of alienating the community which is responsible for its success?

Aka, name another major social network around today which has been as influenced by third party clients as Twitter has

[vlunkr]

> Why couldn't they just add ads within the API

Because the first thing every 3rd party client will do is ignore the ads and not show them to users.

[kadoban]

And 2 seconds after that, it'll be in the ToS that you can't do that. It's not like it will be hard for Twitter to check.

[vlunkr]

> It's not like it will be hard for Twitter to check.

Are you sure? That would require a centralized review and distribution process for all 3rd party clients, like the App Store for Twitter. It's not outside the realm of possibility, but there's very little incentive for them.

[kadoban]

It barely needs to be more than a line in the ToS for the API. I'm sure Twitter already had a list of terms, and a way to ban people who misbehave. This is one more way to misbehave and get banned. Going right to an App Store would be insanity.

[saryant]

Showing ads isn’t enough. You need to count as impressions to bill advertisers and convince them to trust the impression data coming from third party clients.

[manmal]

They could just tell Apple & Google that your app doesn’t conform to their TOS, and poof, it’s gone. Especially PlayStore is really careful around 3rd party content.

[imglorp]

> add ads within the API

Realistically, how much of the "content" is already ads? Ie corporate announcements, brand building, or political astroturfing, etc. It's almost like twitter is double dipping.

[jahewson]

Without all the integrated tracking the ads would be basically worthless.

[unity1001]

The public apis are what you use to get other people to build stuff that you dont want to build and increase the usage of your application by creating an ecosystem around it. Through the api, you draw in users, partners, entire use cases that are not provided for by your app directly and your app becomes something that is much bigger than what could it have been without an api.

The problem with Twitter was that it had no legitimate monetization for the app itself. It was a zero-interest, investor/vc money fueled growth machine. And even for that purpose, it used that api to great extent to bring a lot of users into the platform and integrate a vast swath of internet to Twitter - from Twitter logins to automatic embeds to entire 3rd party applications that served different subsets of users.

But now that the investors who dumped cash on something that does not have a level of monetization and revenue compared to its over-inflated valuation want something for their money, suddenly growth is not that important anymore and problems ensue.

Even in this particular situation, its a dumb idea to restrict or close down an api. If you do that, another service that doesnt do it will get an ecosystem built around it and it will eventually eat your lunch. A fixed set of people working on a singular app in a company can never produce as much features as an entire ecosystem with its large community can produce through an api. The Open Source movement and its successes follow the same pattern: Centralized, large corporations cannot compete with the development speed and breadth of communities of millions of people, even if those corporations employ tens of thousands of engineers.

[segasaturn]

The open API access is a very large differentiator for Twitter and Reddit because of the presence of novelty accounts/bots, automatic moderation tools etc. Twitter can follow along with Facebook wrt APIs, but then there's less of a reason to use Twitter instead of Facebook.

[santoshalper]

According to the post, the Twitter API was already generating $400M/year in revenue. Not sure what it cost, but that doesn't sound like a charity to me.

[brunes]

That is the commercial API. People keep treating these the same, when they have nothing to do with eachother.

[saryant]

You need both. Without the free API you don’t have a funnel of new customers who can grow into the enterprise tiers.

They have a hell of a lot to do with each other beyond that too.

(Led the search API team at Twitter and worked on both API platforms)

[foxhill]

> But these companies are not charities, they exist to make money.

for sure. and, as we all know, society only exists so that companies can make money. where would we be without bezos, musk, gates, et al.

[ttepasse]

Social media giant Pinboard. People are warned not to compete with Pinboard but they still make 3rd party clients which seem to work.

On your point: In my opinion 3rd party clients expand services, are a new place of innovation and a place accompanying different usage patterns. The trick is not to kill them; the trick is, to make it work. I would have accepted a Tweetbot with ads. But without Tweetbot I mostly stopped visiting Twitter.

[courseofaction]

Yes, we're at the stage of enshittification where twitter turns ejects anything inessential, and the only value is for the investor.

[mongol]

I don't know if Flickr counts any more but I think they were up there at least in the past.

[newaccount74]

The API is not just about 3rd party clients. The API is about integrating all kinds of stuff from 3rd parties, and it's absolutely required if Elon Musk wants to make Twitter an "everything app" like WeChat.

[wankle]

Twitter I used for several years and may go back now that someone with common sense is at the helm but only ever heard of WeChat and what I heard was mostly negative.

[yieldcrv]

> only ever heard of WeChat and what I heard was mostly negative

WeChat is pretty lit and contains a whole internet, sort of akin to how Facebook Pages might contain the only information or updates about many businesses and municipalities.

Yes, a state agency will censor some things, just like a corporation will censor some things. Yes, they collect your data and share it with third parties including the government, just like a series of corporation do on every other network. You're not Chinese, you're not going to disappear, its rare they experience anything more than a message disappearing too, its the same user experience. I don't find the reality to be different enough to warrant the perception of reality.

[n1c00o]

Discord currently provides to the public almost-stable and maintained parts of its API, it allows the network to gain some attractions

[xcdzvyn]

He said an API that "allows third-party clients". Discord is perhaps the least kind to third-party clients of any major social media right now.

[tyrust]

> Reddit - and even in that case, there are numerous features already being locked out of third-party clients

I've used a third-party client for years and I don't miss any features. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing but, like, I can read, comment, and post and that's enough for me.

[secos]

The ones I use today:

- Facebook

- Instagram (finally opened in the last two years)

- Youtube

- Linkedin

Perhaps I'm not getting your point, but... most of the major social platforms in the US are still open, except for Twitter.

[anigbrowl]

Telegram

[leokennis]

Users → revenue

Working API → users

Therefor:

Working API → revenue