The question I have with this move is why didn't Twitter just force advertising as part of their API for third party clients? Just change the TOS for using the API so if they didn't show advertising they would be cut off. What am I missing?
That’s all it would have taken. Probably would have made a huge increase in subscribers too.
This is 100% a control move. He wants full control over how everyone experiences Twitter (not sure why). So this was pulled.
Of course you can NEVER go back from this move.
That's the route Reddit has taken. There are several features that only work through the official app or website. It can be frustrating as a user of a third party client but it's a much better alternative to cutting everybody off.
With feature iteration at Reddit accelerating since 2019, they may opt to do the same eventually should a desperate squeeze of user metrics/ad revenue becomes necessary down the road. Public APIs helped Reddit rapidly grow its userbase on a lean crew. It'd be a shame to see that goodwill being burned in the never-ending chase for quarterly performance results.
The biggest issue isn’t what they’ve done but how they did it: dismissively, without warning, justified days later with a flimsy provably false excuse.
> A public API radically slows down product iteration since each feature needs to be considered in terms of its blast radius to third party clients.
Twitter’s public API was already lacking. There are several features, like polls, third-party clients never had access to. No one would be surprised if the API remained static forever.
> killing the API to speed up product velocity isn’t an insane move if you value that more than the existing 3rd party ecosystem.
The API wasn’t completely disabled, it’s still working for smaller clients.
Still, a very shortsighted move.
It never had feature parity with the site, but it did get better over time.
Yet instead of supporting the strong ecosystem they already have and nurturing a symbiotic relationship with it, they burn it all?
The only thing I can think of is Musk was concerned the two largest 3rd parties would create their own network seeded with something like 66% of the most influential users.
Of course, Blue is essentially a bandaid of $8/mo/user over the gaping chest would that is the cost of the leveraged buyout ($13B) so I doubt Musk would consider tearing of pieces of that bandaid for goodwill or lead gen.
The whole thing was truly beautiful. Overall, Musk's acquisition has provided some excellent entertainment.
That said, I bet that the real thing they want is the control to be able to push the Twitter Blue premium features, which I'm sure third-party apps would just sideline as much as possible even if they made them all available through the API.
Until you get caught, and Apple/Google decide to boot the official app from the stores (if) you broke the respective agreements.
There was a big fuss over third-party clients being limited to 100k users. Twitter fairly quickly walked back that limit (with additional verification and rules specific to clients reaching that size being required).