[ceejayoz]

> your bio says 'fuck elon musk.'

My Twitter bio does. Added shortly after he banned links to Mastodon, broke Tweetbot (and lied about them breaking the rules), and announced breaking changes to the Twitter APIs I use extensively at work with a few days warning.

[00F_]

you seem passionate and knowlegable about this so i will ask you. i want to know more about the API changes. detractors say that it was at best an irresponsible change to the API that inconvenienced companies that use it. proponents say that musk simply stopped making the API free which was always unsustainable and people should have known better. what was really going on?

[ceejayoz]

Entire businesses had their products cease to function, with no warning, and no explanation from Twitter, until a couple of days later they got vaguely libeled by Twitter's developer account. (https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1615405842735714304)

They then announced the free API would go away entirely with a week's notice and pricing details "next week". (https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1621026986784337922) That change got delayed several times.

Absolute clown show. If they'd said "in 90 days we're shutting down third-party clients and implementing a paid tier", people would've grumbled but seen it as fairly reasonable. Kneecapping devs who've been building Twitter apps and integrations for a decade was cruel and unnecessary.