[chimeracoder]

> Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.

You seem to have a really skewed sense of how Twitter's API actually works, and you also seem to be under the incredibly incorrect impression that the API has no rate limiting.

Like most services, Twitter actually saved money by offering a free API with OAuth, because the alternative is for people to use web scrapers and direct access by password, which is orders of magnitude more expensive both due to direct network traffic costs and due to the security costs of people/apps doing insecure things to get around the lack of an API.

> Yeah, but if the bulk of the world's population is slamming an api that's free...there's no more api or platform at that point, since it's not going to generate enough revenue anymore.

This is literally an argument for requiring all Twitter users to pay to use the service, since the official apps all use the same API.