Elon Musk deliberately turned off access of outside apps to Twitter

Henceforth known as Netsharc’s Razor

:D

I think he learned a sort-of lesson last time, and is now hoping not confirming it will dodge the worst of the uproar.

Thanks! I can't see beyond the introductory paragraph, which makes it sound like all third-party access has been intentionally suspended.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Twitter went down a list of the most active API keys and deactivated all of the third-party clients they saw -- so some of the less popular clients might have avoided the cut by being less popular. They wouldn't want to disable all API keys, since that would mean losing a lot of automated accounts which drive engagement, like blogs and news agencies.

The sad thing is there’s tons of people who use those apps who still like Twitter. And if they had announced that it was being cut off on February 1 for anyone who wasn’t a Twitter blue subscriber, they probably could’ve gotten a ton more subscribers. I’ve had for years I would be happy to subscribe if that was what it would take to be able to keep using a third-party client, and the third party client could actually do all the features like editing and polls.

Instead they just massively pissed off every single person who used one of those apps. And it’s going to be real hard to get them back, if at all possible.

> Shoot first, talk later.

That's been the pattern; ban @elonjet, come up with a policy that justifies it after.

Musk on chess:

"I did as a child, but found it to be too simple to be useful in real life: a mere 8 by 8 grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map or spawn position, only 2 players, both sides exact same pieces, etc."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1584537377837490177

This guy just loves being in over his head, doesn't he?

He may have "stolen" the beginnings of Tesla, but he still ran it for a long time (like he runs twitter now). Somehow he didn't ruin it and instead built a lot of cars and a few big factories. Disregarding all the marketing fluff, I still find the result to be pretty impressive.

Not going to disagree that his behavior at twitter is erratic at best.

> SpaceX is arguably the only thing he’s done himself that is successful

Not even that. Musk’s initial plan for SpaceX was to buy a couple of Dnepr rockets, so he went to Russia in 2001 with Jim Cantrell, Adeo Ressi, and Mike Griffin.

The trip was a failure. But Griffin, who was running In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm, and had attempted something similar around private launches when running Orbital Sciences in the 1990s, convinced Musk to build his own rockets.

It was a time when a number of space engineering projects were winding down and lots of talented people becoming available. Griffin knew this better than Musk would have and introduced him to the right people and companies.

SpaceX still moved fairly slowly after that, without any launch attempts until Griffin, then the newly appointed NASA Administrator, created the COTS programme and awarded a $400 million contract to SpaceX despite it being unproven.

In 2008, when SpaceX was near bankruptcy, NASA under Griffin again awarded it a huge $1.6 billion dollar contract that both saved it and provided the needed funding for further rocket designs and bets like reusability.

Musk has done a lot with SpaceX, and deserves some credit, but the general view about it being all him and all self funded is inaccurate.

Iirc none of those libraries allowed you to build alternative facebook clients, whereas iirc the twitter apis did.

I remember playing with the twitter apis many years ago, and effectively you could do most things without any official client side and without displaying any advertising.

So yeah.

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