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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Old geezer take: Did anybody except the techno-utopians, kids, and Marketing Dept. really imagine that a free service's public API was going to be free forever? Or that Twitter itself would just magically "always be there"?

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Yes, of course. Forcing monetization disincentivizes small developers from using it for vanity/fun non-profit or personal projects. Thing is, fun/personal projects are how people learn.

You mess around with the Twitter API just for kicks to build a bot tweeting every time someone orders a pineapple extra-cheese pizza as an in-joke with your friends, and then, hey, you know how to use Twitter's API, and building that expertise helps Twitter.

This is the same reason why Linux owns enterprise IT. Not because it was the best solution compared to commercial alternatives, certainly at least not 25 years ago. It's because everybody ran Linux at home, they messed around with it for fun, and they learned it. And when they develop software they'll build it on Linux and thus it's easiest to deploy on Linux too.

Breaking the free API was pretty stupid. Not an incomprehensibly huge self-own like breaking third-party clients (which triggered tons of people I follow to move to Mastodon) but in the same zipcode.

I mean, I think that assuming that Twitter's free API tier would always exist in some form would have generally been a safer assumption than many, in that the API is largely of benefit to Twitter (in particular, the novelty bot accounts drive engagement; look at Sam Pepys, or, as mentioned in the article, Pepito the cat), and there's no particularly obvious reason to shut it down entirely; the incentives were aligned.

And people were _largely_ assuming this for non-critical but fun/useful things, like the aforementioned bots, or Threadreader, and so on. So the stakes weren't _that_ high.

We're seeing that assumption fail now, of course, but arguably in a pretty weird difficult-to-predict way.

It was very reasonable to imagine that if the API ever stopped being free, that the logical next step would be "paid access" rather than "no access". And that if Twitter was going away, we'd have some warning in advance (as we do now - building a business that relies on Twitter is a much dumber move today than it would have been a year ago, obviously).

I think the businesses expecting Twitter to remain relatively stable for the next several years were the reasonable ones here, yes.

Why not? It can make sense in a lot of ways.

I think that without a free API the service will become far less relevant. Sure, you could monetize access to it, get a few cents here and there. But far fewer tools and sites will integrate with Twitter from now on.

Twitter needs money, yes, but I doubt they will grow again with decisions like this.

A platform having a free tier is important to the point of necessity for growth.

It seems like Twitter is already backtracking on this, but the damage is done. No one wants to build for a platform that doesn't understand the value of builders.

Twitter users see world governments and their favorite celebrities around them and assume they're using a well-funded, expertly-run platform. Even in the Dorsey days, that was comedically untrue - Twitter has always been an unbalanced equation, and paying the piper requires you to change the business model.

That's from the outside looking in, though. I never made a Twitter account, I don't know if their EULA promised free beer and cookies ad-infinitum.

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