From the comments that Musk has made over the last few months, this appears to be as intended. He doesn't seem to view the API as a benefit to the company nor a fit for his plans on where he wants to go with it.
- Elon has stated that bots are a problem for Twitter
- Bots were most likely largely operated via the API. Or at a minimum, used the API as a data source for targeting and crafting of tweets.
- If not the API, then using web based automation tools
Therefore, if you want to drastically reduce the number of bots you should:
1. Remove the API free tier and/or drastically reduce the feature set of the paid tier
2. Raise the cost of tweet creation e.g. Twitter Blue and paid verification
I didn't think "I'm going to fix bots" meant "I'm going to really limit free access" but it's a coherent approach, at least.
I just don't think a paid Twitter will be as valuable as it was. Competing with free is really hard; I'm not sure Mastodon is that competitor, but I bet there will be something.
This strikes me as extremely unlikely. The bots being discussed were attempting to pretend not to be bots, and there were active attempts to detect and remove them. Using the API would have made it trivial to detect them.
This means the free API is only useful for people who want to post Tweets automatically (e.g. bots) and not people who just want read-only access and do not contribute to spam. These users will now have to resort to web scraping, which is much more expensive for Twitter to serve than basic JSON API responses.
Endpoints meant for web browsers are about to get a whole lot more (fake) traffic which will throw off their metrics and mess with ad algorithms and by extension, ad revenue.
Everything since has been one train wreck after another. I have no breath left to take. :)
Given how easy it is to make/purchase Twitter accounts, this works just fine for spammers, people running influence operations etc. Sure you won't be able to tweet 10 times/minute like some spammers do, but those people are usually doing it manually or puppeteering via headless browsers rather than operating developer accounts.
You also don't need Twitter Blue unless your output depends on cold views. In reality, nearly all spam/scam/influence campaigning relies on follower/retweet networks to do amplification. Commoditized verification is meaningless, it's like paying for a t-shirt that says 'I'm famous.'
So Musk has destroyed Advertising Revenue, and now Twitter API revenue. Is he really trying to make money from just blue check marks alone?
on one hand you've got a knee-jerk answer: "absolutely! how could it not?!"
on the other... maybe he's getting rid of it for a reason? sucks for people who integrated against it but is it is "right" to effectively screw these people over who aren't paying for (but are benefitting from) the API?
maybe give them the option to pay?
Probably, but is it a good reason? IMO, he lost the benefit of doubt many decisions ago.
Also there is a small community of researchers out there that use the api to detect botnets, follow networks, etc. Can't have that with musk around.
People doing that are probably why they're deprecating the API.