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It was announced as an anti scraping "feature" but the reality is it's about encouraging signups, tracking for ads and starting the sales funnel for upgrading to Twitter blue. Every other social media site has done the same at some point to increase logged in users.

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It's probably also about getting people to use the API.

With Twitter's data being public, bots and data analyzers can just scrape the site instead of paying for the now extremely expensive API. Not only does this mean Twitter isn't getting paid, but scraping puts a lot more load on Twitter servers than equivalent API usage.

Anyone doing industrial scraping already knows all the tricks for user agent swapping and making headers, including their order, look like "real" browsers or bots. It's not about pushing people to the API.

Combined with the other changes that were also hastily and sloppily implemented and are now getting slowly rolled back, I think that strengthens the theory that Twitter was facing extreme capacity crunch and threw a whole bunch of slapstick measures to reduce traffic at the wall to keep their remaining servers from toppling over.

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