Twitter TOS Change

> Goodbye, nitter(?)

That would be devastating for me. Not only it's the only way of looking at anything on Twitter (I invite you to open a thread on mobile. I get 3 modals covering 95% of a screen) but it's also how I follow some accounts via RSS.

Goodbye Nitter indeed. Also, goodbye Twitterific. Goodbye Tweetbot.

Goodbye all methods of accessing Twitter outside of their apps. They took down their API and bypassing this move via internal API's or scraping output via a headless client (thinking of ways forward for Nitter) will surely be seen as intentional to violate this. So, I guess this is the end then.

https://twitterrific.com/beyond

https://twitter.com/tapbots/status/1614041474567372804

Ex post facto, as usual.

What are the odds that this whole imbroglio happened because their third-party APIs broke and they can't figure out how to fix them?

And Tweetbot, and Twitterific, and every other 3rd party app for using Twitter.

If the developer even cares what twitter says. Piped exists even though YouTube has the same clause.

I'd love to see a website that keeps track of ToS over time for multiple companies.

That's a fundamentally different situations. YouTube clients are for consumption only, meaning there's no value to YouTube in them and only revenue loss in terms of adverts not being shown. YouTube however does nothing to prevent content creators from using third party tools for creating, editing, uploading, and organising their videos. They'd be crazy too.

Twitter users are a mix of passive consumers and active content creators and the most prolific and high value content creators tend to use third party clients and platforms. Seeing as though those people are the entire reason you have all those returning eyeballs on Twitter for advertisers to monetise in the first place you really want to do everything you can to make their experience as best as it can be.

On top of that, the proportion of Twitter's user base that were using apps like Tweetbot or Twitterrific is by all accounts minuscule, so the impact on overall advertising revenue can't be huge. And given how many of those users appear to have been prolific tweeters whose content attracts others to the platform I'd say it's more than offset. There are also media reports that Tweetbot and Twitterrific had to pay for some API V2.0 features.

There's no way this decision went through a proper business case analysis and was modelled for its impact on revenues. I'm guessing it's just Musk being capricious as usual and having nobody able to push back.

The big affected third-party clients would gladly have incorporated the ads into the timeline, if only twitter actually included them in the api response.

Or they could have made a promoted tweets api and mandated in their terms of service that third party clients showing a timeline must include promoted tweets every now and then.

> As much as it sucks, YouTube has the same clause and it makes a lot of sense for companies who monetize on ads.

I wonder why we couldn't just get something like: "If you create a third party UI, you must include the following ad web component in the interface: https://github.com/... and the supporting mechanisms for that (user ID/cookies/whatever)"

But instead, many companies attempt to disallow third party clients and any reverse engineering in general, whereas the few that do allow it don't think about the possibility of monetization in third party clients (legally enforced), or just have to deal with such configurations not being supported.

And if the current ad technology doesn't work that way, then what prevent us from making it work that way? Why should the party that displays an ad always be the same one that's benefiting from it financially? Why couldn't I have some third party UI for a popular site that solves my personal gripes with the UI, while still showing ads on the behalf of that company that owns the original platform, so I don't get my socks sued off of me?

Twitter never included ads in the feed api, so the clients where just showing the data twitter fed them.

You could expose the apis (or embed the ads into the feed api) that fill the ad spots and report back engagements with those ads, then state in TOS that clients not allowed to remove the ads from the feed and impose design rules on how they are presented to users.

You could do what Adsense does and create a library for clients to embed into their applications.

However I can see client devs wanting a slice of the adrev pie or a discount on their api charges if they were forced to included ads.

Imo it’s just easier to forbid 3rd party clients, that you get to control the experience (including ads) however you want / move fast changing things up, without having to go though the process of making sure 3rd party clients are on bored with the changes

You can't run an advertising business period. Advertising is always on borrowed time. Even if you have some sort of magical solution that will literally force people to watch ads, their effectiveness will still fade over time as people develop resistance to them (see "banner blindness" for prior art), so in the short term you can compensate by including more ads but there's only so much ads you can include before users leave completely because the ads-to-content ratio is too high.

It's time we have less toxic and actually sustainable business models.

Even then, the order in which it was communicated is wrong.

1st you change your ToS

2nd you communicate the change

3rd you block third party apps

This is just a shitty move.

Being pessimistic, I say Reddit will do this eventually. Either on the eve of finally following through an IPO, or a few years post-IPO as the stock price languishes while activist investors angrily shake their fists. Reddit has increasingly rolled out more features that are only accessible through their official app and new mobile/desktop web UI. That makes 3rd party app users more of a liability even though these users are often the main content creators on Reddit that drives traffic. Reddit rode on the mobile network growth in its early years without having to commit a full team on mobile dev, and now the time for payback has come.

It's very unfortunate their business models forbid this. The third party client I use for Reddit is great! (redditisfun)

It'd be so much better if we just paid a small sum to own our accounts on those platforms. How much would it cost? Like a Netflix subscription? That'd be worth it.

I guess one reason why that isn't possible is that the platforms only work if everyone* is there, irregardless of income. If there's a subscription fee not everyone will afford it, especially young people who are (arguably) culturally more influential.

I think the real problem here is the way it happened. Apps just stopped working about a week ago. There was no communication from Twitter whatsoever until this TOS change, and I wouldn't really call this "communication either"

It might make sense to stop supporting third party clients, but announce that something like that will happen instead of doing it unannounced and then ignoring all questions about it. It's their API, so they can do with it whatever they want, but this is really a dick move.

> Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok all forbid third party clients.

Exactly. Clubhouse also has a total ban on third-party apps.

Discord only allows bots to live on it's platform and has a ban on direct third-party apps.

Reddit isn't profitable because that's not their focus. It's pretty clear that they're focusing on growth over profits at the moment.

Reddit without the power users and moderators choosing 3rd party apps to manage their accounts would be a wasteland.

Kompare is much better. <https://apps.kde.org/kompare/>