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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
Right...and I'm saying that if he tweeted less and delivered more, he'd be taken more seriously than he is. Hype/salesmanship is part of business, but in the case of SpaceX and Tesla, they're delivering bespoke and high-end manufactured products. People are willing to wait for infrequent product delivery while tolerating sometimes-fanciful claims of great potential.
Twitter is different because it's a real-time mass communication platform, so the hype is received and processed differently. And outside of his fanbase, few people seem impressed with the changes as manifested so far and this is reflected in the response of advertisers.
Long tweets seem to work OK and offer a clear, obvious user benefit. I'm having difficulty thinking of any other examples.
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.
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.
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.
