Something I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues. Because none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk. It could be that Elon is perfectly OK with letting the site go from 99.99999% uptime to just 99% because he knows nobody will leave, and the engineers behind those extra five 9's were being paid hundreds of thousands.
I stopped using it, mainly because of an “inverse network effect”. Twitter used to be a useful place to keep up on scientific papers. Science Twitter is dead. Now my feed is like 10 percent science, 10 mildly racist / inflammatory content, 10 percent miscellaneous, and 70 percent a certain VC constantly shaking his fist, yelling about crypto, and shitting on fiat currency. And this is after aggressively curating my feed by unfollowing anybody who cheered on Musk’s takeover of Twitter. No thanks.
I think the inherent design of Twitter has a bit of a flaw in that you're friends with people instead of joining communities. So if you think "geez, I have a lot of political content on my feed I don't want to read," you can't just unfollow all the politics topics/forums/subreddits/whatever you are subscribed to, you have to "unfriend" people, which is socially difficult if you're both small enough to follow/recognize each other. On top of that the "for you" page and trending topics seem to be injecting more stuff I don't want to read into my feed than before, which exacerbates the problem.
The public API used to help tweets persist beyond normal (on platform) visibility thresholds. Before it was ruined, people could embed tweets in their own sites, and tweets were more persistent on platforms like tweet deck.
Musk has no real idea of the impacts of technical decisions on the platform, but he realized the tweet visibility threshold was too short bac when even his own tweets weren't seeing engagement.
Since then he's created a scheme to grant slightly better longevity to the visibility of tweets by "verified" accounts, but it's really smoke and mirrors... Tweets anyone makes (Except for Elon and his selected Twitter "buddies") only are visible for seconds and to small audiences of people... It kills interaction, growth, and engagement for everyone else, but gives the illusion that the site is still vibrant (because it makes everyone tweet more often).
Deception of this kind will just make everyone burn out and not come back... It defeats the very purpose of Twitter, as visibility of ideas is the only payment most people get on the platforms to begin with, the main problem is that most people on the platform don't know they're mostly invisible, and dropping their tweets into a waste bin.
And the platform is really showing its lack of moderation, even compared to how little it was moderated in the past. I don't really want to click on webdev tweets and find replies full of hate speech and weird pornography.
It's just so much more noisy and garbage filled. Maybe I was in the minority, but I used it mostly to follow some bands/artists/game designers and keep up with their projects - I rarely engaged with the twitter userbase in general and it feels like that's what is being amplified and it's a lot of noise, toxic speculation, and useless opinions.
Science today is exactly like the Catholic Church 500 years ago. We are supposed to worship the Gods of science and listen to everything the priests have to say. I have given up on any reformation coming from the West though because I think it is too corrupt and too powerful and don't see how it can change in the near future. I am hoping it will be from India and/or China when they catch up.
My Twitter feed started showing hot takes from more and more right-wing nutjobs, probably because I am naturally slightly conservative (small-c) in my views. Eventually I got fed up with seeing so many posts from Lotus Eaters / Alex Jones / Katie Hopkins / <insert fascist>, was thinking of leaving, then Musk took over, fired everyone and tried to charge me $8, so a good opportunity to go. Account deleted and I haven't been back since.
Where do you go for AI news? I haven't found anywhere close to as good as Twitter for AI stuff (admittedly I didn't unfollow anyone because I just ignore political tweets)
I left the day my client stopped working. Broke a decade-long daily habit.
Twitter had already become less enjoyable than it was back in the day, that started before Musk and isn't his fault. The underlying engagement was no longer there, only inertia. Inertia alone would have kept me there much longer, but without true engagement I wasn't going to start using their crappy official client/site, and the idea of paying for a subscription was laughable.
Twitter won't die like MySpace did, losing to a single party like Mastodon as MySpace did to Facebook. It will die like Craigslist. It will be very slow, still be around a decade from now, having lost its cultural relevance and having been supplanted by a number of different options rather than one. I'm seeing Twitter's niche get fragmented to different places, and everyone has one foot out the door and the engagement is dwindling slowly but intractably. The brand is poison, but people are taking their time to figure out how to deal with that. So I'm not expecting to see an abrupt exodus. Nor do I expect to see Mastodon become as big as Twitter was, or die out completely.
Craigslist has had the benefit that its infrastructure is very simple, and takes almost no maintenance to run. Something at the complexity level of Facebook would probably die in weeks if the servers were left to run unmaintained. That may happen to Twitter if the slow bleed continues and the service becomes unprofitable to run.
Maybe. That depends entirely on the extent to which Musk can keep it together -- past Mastodon growth spurts correlate with his erratic and sometimes unhinged policy changes and outbursts. But I don't know what will make comedians and polticos move out; I suspect it'll be individuals coming over to Mastodon here and there and then suddenly it'll reach critical mass.
Disagree about Mastodon -- I think it or the protocols backing it, will be the glue that holds the rest of social media together. You may not be using something branded "Mastodon" in 2035, but it will probably be Mastodon underneath.
Same here. I thought Musk would bring some good change to the site, but stopping third party client access was my limit on bad changes. No way I was going to use their terrible official client or website - they are so bad to be unusable. So I stopped two months ago.
Probably for the better. I read more long form articles and don't get caught up in the outrage of the day. I feel happier too. Sometimes I miss it, go to the site to read, and then immediately close the tab when I can't actually use it because it's so bad.
I was struck by how many presenters at SRECon last week listed Mastadon handles instead of Twitter ones: well over half were on Mastadon, and I'd say around half didn't even list a Twitter username. Of course, that's a highly specific population.
Yes, a large chunk of engineers & computer scientists have shifted to Mastodon, which makes it great if you follow that crowd. It's the largest collective action I've seen in that cohort since people stopped using IE6 in favour of Firefox.
Now I'll head to Twitter a few times a week as a guilty pleasure to read the people left behind — comedians, political commentators, and journalists. But for stuff that's relevant to my job, Mastodon is great. And my Twitter usage has dropped by over 95%.
"SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale."
I bailed. The richest person on the planet (at the time), buying up a premier media platform and then actively posting political content like how to vote in an election was the nail in the coffin for me.
I don’t want to support an owner who uses their platform in that way any more than I’d want to watch political opinion shows on TV or subscribe to a political opinion Substack.
If Musk was the richest person on the planet, then FTX actually had billions in assets holding onto their FTT tokens or whatever made up tokens they had. Is a person actually "the richest person in the world" if there's not enough liquidity in the world to realize their holdings? If Musk sells his Tesla / SpaceX shares, can he really do it at CurrentSpotPrice x NumberOfSharesHeOwns?
It probably depends on a lot on your social group. I maintain a twitter account because, damnit, I’ve had it since 2007, back when they had visible numeric ids it was in the six figures, and I don’t want someone to squat it; everything changes and twitter may once more have competent leadership.
But if I look at that twitter account… it’s pretty dead. Most of the people I followed have either gone to mastodon (my choice) or instagram (which I could never get into) or just dialed back on social media. Just a wasteland of uninteresting stuff it thinks I might like and gambling ads, increasingly.
Mind you, to your point, I didn’t leave due to instability; my breaking point was the purge of the journalists, and if that hadn’t driven me away, the death of the third party apps certainly would have.
You don't have to maintain your twitter account just to have someone to not take your username.
I (kind of, my profile timeline is now inconsisntent/corrupt) deleted all my tweets, locked my account, and changed password to something I don't know.
Do you have a source for the actual reliability of the site going down since Musk took over? All I have ever seen is these general claims without substantiation. What's especially funny is that the fail whale was a common theme for much of Twitter's early years, so even if the reliability was lower, it's less of a change and more of a return to those early days.
The only source I've been able to find is here https://app.upzilla.co/statistics/32, which shows something like 99.9% uptime since November '22.
Being up unfortunately isn't enough. Failures are in different components (Microservices?) Today for example I was greeted by "Internal server errors" when attempting to login to my tweetdeck. A few days bay I hit a bug, where I clicked a link to a Twitter message and was redirected to my home (apparently to refresh my session as I didn't use Twitter in that. Browser for a while and second attempt worked)
Any simple "upstate" tacker won't notice those things. For me it is notable, though, while I use Twitter a lot less, which of course impacts perception.
There is an article on here every other week about twitter being down for hours at a time. Plus you can't even tell anymore given how many features are cut.
Mentions have been reduced to zero for any mid-size Twitter account since the culling started. That's a silent failure that led to a lot of tech people leaving.
That competition feels/looks like early 00s blogging -- less mass, pre-eternal-September, Gibsonian ham-radio-postcards -- but then again that's what grew up into what we have now.
It's obvious that none of the non-tech elite/journalist/media types were able to wean themselves off Twitter, and the bulk of the normie population barely registered it.
It really was just tech-oriented and tech-oriented-LGBTQ* groups that fully abandoned Twitter for Mastodon. Which has been frustrating, I want to support Mastodon but I'm also mostly on Twitter for a good time with a smattering of tech concerns, and it seems like people on Mastodon are generally only talking about tech, having a bad time in their lives, or they're simply bad at being funny.
I closed my 13-year-old account last Fall, when the new management explicitly welcomed US-based domestic terrorists onto the platform. I've moved on to a couple of Discords where people I used to follow on Twitter hang out, and Cohost. It's been a positive change for me, Twitter was quite a drag for the past couple years even before Musk, and it's good to change things up now and then anyway.
I have reactivated my Mastodon server this week, and unlike when I last attempted in mid-2020, there are actually people I want to follow on there now.
>> I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues.
I remember about 6-8 years ago fervently trying to get my friends and family off of FB and Twitter. It was completely useless. I even offered running my own Diaspora server with zero luck. I was constantly pushing decentralized platforms including Mastodon and others for years before finally giving up.
Its crazy what it takes nowadays to get someone to move off of a social media platform for good. I know many have left Twitter because of Musk, but many haven't stayed away and have come back. Its like a drug for some people, its incredibly hard to just walk away from.
I left because the official twitter client is garbage and all the third party clients were killed off by Musk. If someone links a Tweet I'll still look at it, but I haven't logged in since Tweetbot stopped working.
I stopped using it not long after he took over, not because of any principled objection just because how much crap I had to sort through to get to anything worthwhile had greatly increased.
None of this really has any impact because of social stickiness. Unless Twitter has repeated multi-hour outages preventing people performing basic actions, like reading their main feeds or replies or posting tweets, the continued service degradation metrics will not be acknowledged.
> none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk
To offer another data point, some of the people I know have actually stopped using Twitter and started using other platforms more. Then again, none of them said the site’s uptime was the reason.
imo, this particular move will likely hurt Twitter more.
The reason Twitter attracts its current audience is a) celebs & politicians, and b) Twitter-specific creators - think of all the thread writers and serial memers.
All of these people rely on third party tools to schedule their tweets. No one is going to manually craft 1/30 thread series or tweet 8 times a day.
If the cost of running third party tools goes up 10x, a lot of creators, especially on the lower-end, will leave. I can pay $10/month for a tweet scheduling app, but if I had to pay $100 (because the app has to now pay 20x), I won't bother.
I've checked in on people who supposedly fled to mastadon, and at least in my network they've basically stopped posting there, and have come back to twitter.
A few people seem to have just logged off completely.
>Something I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues.
Twitter doesn't make money primarily by someone continuing to 'use twitter'. They make money with ad impressions. If everyone who used twitter still continues to use twitter, but 10% of them end up using it 30% less because they get annoyed when the site isn't working, that still costs the company millions of dollars.
It's not just uptime. They are making weird changes like making it so that replies show up in the Following feed as if it were a regular tweet without context.
I've also unfollowed many people, and they still show up in my feed.
Musk also said only paid accounts will show up in the For You feed, but then later said it will also include people you follow.
Just checked in again after 2 months and noticed that roughly half of the people I follow have reduced posting or stopped posting altogether. I'm also not seeing a lot of posts from people that I follow until I go to their profile page.
My 'for you' feed is a mix of a sprinkling of the people I follow, with a hefty helping of 'entertainment', crazy people, politics (most of these accounts are still on my blocklist, which apparently doesn't function anymore) and a host of other stuff that do no interest me.
I still enjoy it. There is the occasional minor bug for example lately I have noticed that the image carousel acts as if you double clicked the next button on the 2nd or 3rd image and skips it. I also get followed by a new asian woman (bot) every day. Other than that, not really too bad. I like the lists feature for following news.
See a lot of people saying they are presented with nazi posts, but I have not seen anything at all like that. I do see more right wing / conservative posters but they are very far from Nazis.
I mean, back when it first became a thing it was down frequently (fail whale), but people kept coming back anyway. Downtimes have never been a deterrent for Twitter.
Reddit survived a long time with absolutely horrendous stability. They still have pretty bad uptime: 99.72 % uptime (web). Their community was very vocal about it, but they continued to grow.
I could even see it helping. When reddit was down everyone lost their shit and there would be posts "where were you during the outage of '21" and "today I actually went outside", etc.. Kinda adds to the hype.
I entirely left twitter, and 15k+ followers account, when they deprecated the html version and never went back.
It seemed at the time that twitter was beginning to crumble already as they were unable to maintain such a simple feature, I couldn't imagine at the time that they would fail to even maintain the API.
You may be right but it sets a terrible precedent if anyone other than social media tries this. If your probability of a service working is only 99% the probability of an overall failure is .99 to the power of the number of services you depend on, which could be a lot.
he still has to figure out some way to make money and apparently most major news outlets will not be paying for Twitter Blue because they rightly realize it means nothing. The "status symbol" that was the blue checkmark is over and only an idiot would pay for it, Twitter has a lot of idiots but it seems likely the vast majority of them will also figure this out
Interesting--I think a large chunk of my friends have stopped using twitter. Certainly anyone I had on my main list has moved to mastodon or just stopped posting.
My guess is not much at all. It was even independently reported that Twitter was growing under Elon Musk[0]. Also, "Mastodon's users have dropped significantly" according to a report by Wire[1].
Edit: It's quite telling that the various personal stories and anecdotes are receiving upvotes, while my comment, which contains links to concrete data, is being downvoted.
Upvoted. There is a significant HN backlash against Twitter - where any data even remotely positive for Twitter or even mentioning the stuff in the Twitter files that contradict known "facts" about Twitter's previous "fairness" will get you downvoted by the dozen.
A lot of people like to hate on Musk and act like he is clueless yet they haven't build or done anything, let alone at the scale Elon has been able to run things at, yes he has a lot of people around him, yes he might get a lot of the credit when it belongs to them, but he is still the person that bought everything together.
There has got to be something that he is doing right and a lot of it to me seems to be getting rid of the nonsense that doesn't matter, not having much respect for norms or the way it is normally done, much like the first principles framework he has used successfully in many things he has done.
A lot of programers and startups love a huge amount of frameworks, processes and to be honest nonsense, because that is just how that industry works, musk tore up a lot of that and people then start calling him crazy, but as you point out, do people really care if Twitters uptime is 99% or 99.999999% engineers and people that are so stuck to industry standards do, the rest of the world and reality not so much.
One data point is that there is no way to get the full text of long tweets from the API. Twitter Blue subscribers have been able to post tweets longer than 280 characters since early February but the API only returns the first 280 or so characters.
That sounds like a deliberate decision to maintain backwards compatibility.
I shudder to think of badly coded consumers of that API sticking that text into a fixed-sized buffer (with the right scaling factor between whatever Twitter considers a character and the actual bytes) and Twitter just wants to avoid buffer overflows like that.
There clearly is an API that returns the full text of a tweet or the official app and website wouldn't be able to display it. They must be maintaining and building an API. The only thing that's not being maintained or updated are the public facing endpoints. That doesn't mean much.
Name a single other major social network around today that has an API and allows third-party clients. The only one I can think of is Reddit - and even in that case, there are numerous features already being locked out of third-party clients. They are on the same path as Twitter, and at some point they will realize that maintaining a gigantic cost center that provides no revenue (since they don't control ads) and does not allow them to rapidly innovate or build a brand (since they don't control the app) does not make a lot of business sense.
The death of the Twitter API is long, long overdue. Bad for us consumers? Sure. But these companies are not charities, they exist to make money.
Realistically, how much of the "content" is already ads? Ie corporate announcements, brand building, or political astroturfing, etc. It's almost like twitter is double dipping.
The public apis are what you use to get other people to build stuff that you dont want to build and increase the usage of your application by creating an ecosystem around it. Through the api, you draw in users, partners, entire use cases that are not provided for by your app directly and your app becomes something that is much bigger than what could it have been without an api.
The problem with Twitter was that it had no legitimate monetization for the app itself. It was a zero-interest, investor/vc money fueled growth machine. And even for that purpose, it used that api to great extent to bring a lot of users into the platform and integrate a vast swath of internet to Twitter - from Twitter logins to automatic embeds to entire 3rd party applications that served different subsets of users.
But now that the investors who dumped cash on something that does not have a level of monetization and revenue compared to its over-inflated valuation want something for their money, suddenly growth is not that important anymore and problems ensue.
Even in this particular situation, its a dumb idea to restrict or close down an api. If you do that, another service that doesnt do it will get an ecosystem built around it and it will eventually eat your lunch. A fixed set of people working on a singular app in a company can never produce as much features as an entire ecosystem with its large community can produce through an api. The Open Source movement and its successes follow the same pattern: Centralized, large corporations cannot compete with the development speed and breadth of communities of millions of people, even if those corporations employ tens of thousands of engineers.
The open API access is a very large differentiator for Twitter and Reddit because of the presence of novelty accounts/bots, automatic moderation tools etc. Twitter can follow along with Facebook wrt APIs, but then there's less of a reason to use Twitter instead of Facebook.
According to the post, the Twitter API was already generating $400M/year in revenue. Not sure what it cost, but that doesn't sound like a charity to me.
Social media giant Pinboard. People are warned not to compete with Pinboard but they still make 3rd party clients which seem to work.
On your point: In my opinion 3rd party clients expand services, are a new place of innovation and a place accompanying different usage patterns. The trick is not to kill them; the trick is, to make it work. I would have accepted a Tweetbot with ads. But without Tweetbot I mostly stopped visiting Twitter.
The API is not just about 3rd party clients. The API is about integrating all kinds of stuff from 3rd parties, and it's absolutely required if Elon Musk wants to make Twitter an "everything app" like WeChat.
Twitter I used for several years and may go back now that someone with common sense is at the helm but only ever heard of WeChat and what I heard was mostly negative.
> Reddit - and even in that case, there are numerous features already being locked out of third-party clients
I've used a third-party client for years and I don't miss any features. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing but, like, I can read, comment, and post and that's enough for me.
I applied for Twitter API access for a small personal app a few weeks ago. I receive the following response yesterday:
Thank you for applying for access to the Twitter API. We’re working on exciting updates including new access types and will have more to share soon. Please stay tuned to @TwitterDev and resubmit your application as soon as we launch our new API.
In the meantime, you can learn more about the Twitter API v2 and find resources on developer.twitter.com. We appreciate your continued interest in developing on the Twitter API.
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.
The plan doesn’t make much sense because the free tier is write-only. Bots can post 1,500 Tweets per API token per month, but free users can no longer make simple read-only queries about Tweets or users.
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.
The lack of foresight (and/or experience) by Musk here is breathtaking. The Internet collectively learned (I thought) a long time ago that if you don't provide a public API (that you can control/track) you're just going to wind up with end users and bots using your regular web endpoints to perform the same actions which is inefficient and slow; for both the clients and the service itself.
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.
> - Bots were most likely largely operated via the AP
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.
It really doesn't. Under the new plan, you won't be able to read out anything from query/streaming endpoints unless you pat least $100/month. But you'll still be able to post 1500 tweets/mo (about 50/day) for free.
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.'
Yeah, operating a free service and "limiting bots and fake accounts" are pretty incompatible.
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.
sounds like a hard job to quantify "can/does maintaining the API make the company money"
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?
If there is an api someone can, and has, written a client that makes twitter work better. You can subvert most the dumb shit they keep trying to throw into the experience that ruin the user experience. Ad's... don't show them, timeline... put it in order, etc.
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.
For being unmaintained for months it's holding up remarkably well.
Edit: And the sole active Ads developer who was still actively responding when the blog post was written, was apparently laid off a week after the article was posted. Ouch.
My post is one of the "12 [...] about Twitter not responding to the standard API access request process".
It's easy to keep an API running if you reject access to it, no? Due to a delightful quirk of how the Twitter Ads API review process works, our entire application no longer works, even for non-Ads API use. Genius way to manage the load.
This post is more than a month old. Twitter announced pricing tiers yesterday
(March 29). From the first link on the blog post:
> Today we are launching new Twitter API access tiers! We’re excited to share more details about our new plans and what you should expect in terms of next steps and timeline.
> Free: For write-only use cases and testing the Twitter API (1,500 Tweets per month)
> $100: For hobbyists or students learning code (50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level)
> Current access plans including Standard (v1.1), Essential (v2), Elevated (v2), and Premium will be deprecated over the next 30 days, so we recommend that you migrate to the new tiers as soon as possible for a smooth transition. Any non-migrated developer accounts will be impacted by April 29th, 2023 at the latest.
It's not unmaintained. They were just putting it behind a pay wall.
Not to defend twitter here, but it's not that far out if you're a grad or Ph.D student working on some project for your thesis or whatever - especially if you can get the money refunded.
A collegue of mine is writing his Masters thesis part time on deep learning, and he's paying around $30-$50/month for cloud computing
Unmaintained and putting up a pay-wall are not mutually exclusive. Sounds like they are going to layer a new pricing model on-top and leave it at that.
OP here. Sure, they finally anounced the new pricing, months late, but all of the evidence in the post that it's effectively unmaintained still stands. The hostile new pricing just adds to the lack of support in convincing me not to waste any more of my time developing for it.
> Absurd that these platforms have no scruples about gathering data from users, but if you try doing the opposite, they’ll block you at every turn.
Most people have no problem getting paid too much for something they're selling, but they'll try to block you at every turn if you want them to overpay.
Readit News
Musk has no real idea of the impacts of technical decisions on the platform, but he realized the tweet visibility threshold was too short bac when even his own tweets weren't seeing engagement.
Since then he's created a scheme to grant slightly better longevity to the visibility of tweets by "verified" accounts, but it's really smoke and mirrors... Tweets anyone makes (Except for Elon and his selected Twitter "buddies") only are visible for seconds and to small audiences of people... It kills interaction, growth, and engagement for everyone else, but gives the illusion that the site is still vibrant (because it makes everyone tweet more often).
Deception of this kind will just make everyone burn out and not come back... It defeats the very purpose of Twitter, as visibility of ideas is the only payment most people get on the platforms to begin with, the main problem is that most people on the platform don't know they're mostly invisible, and dropping their tweets into a waste bin.
And the platform is really showing its lack of moderation, even compared to how little it was moderated in the past. I don't really want to click on webdev tweets and find replies full of hate speech and weird pornography.
If you care about science twitter, I wonder if that was the best criteria for filtering your content.
So basically it's the new Facebook
Yes, and a lot haven’t gone to Mastodon. Where are they?
> And this is after aggressively curating my feed
If you're "aggressively curating [your] feed", just mute/block them
Dead Comment
I hope you're enjoying inflation, then.
Twitter had already become less enjoyable than it was back in the day, that started before Musk and isn't his fault. The underlying engagement was no longer there, only inertia. Inertia alone would have kept me there much longer, but without true engagement I wasn't going to start using their crappy official client/site, and the idea of paying for a subscription was laughable.
Twitter won't die like MySpace did, losing to a single party like Mastodon as MySpace did to Facebook. It will die like Craigslist. It will be very slow, still be around a decade from now, having lost its cultural relevance and having been supplanted by a number of different options rather than one. I'm seeing Twitter's niche get fragmented to different places, and everyone has one foot out the door and the engagement is dwindling slowly but intractably. The brand is poison, but people are taking their time to figure out how to deal with that. So I'm not expecting to see an abrupt exodus. Nor do I expect to see Mastodon become as big as Twitter was, or die out completely.
Disagree about Mastodon -- I think it or the protocols backing it, will be the glue that holds the rest of social media together. You may not be using something branded "Mastodon" in 2035, but it will probably be Mastodon underneath.
Probably for the better. I read more long form articles and don't get caught up in the outrage of the day. I feel happier too. Sometimes I miss it, go to the site to read, and then immediately close the tab when I can't actually use it because it's so bad.
Now I'll head to Twitter a few times a week as a guilty pleasure to read the people left behind — comedians, political commentators, and journalists. But for stuff that's relevant to my job, Mastodon is great. And my Twitter usage has dropped by over 95%.
"SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale."
That’s disappointing for that community. They should just list their website, which should have an RSS (atom) feed.
I don’t want to support an owner who uses their platform in that way any more than I’d want to watch political opinion shows on TV or subscribe to a political opinion Substack.
But if I look at that twitter account… it’s pretty dead. Most of the people I followed have either gone to mastodon (my choice) or instagram (which I could never get into) or just dialed back on social media. Just a wasteland of uninteresting stuff it thinks I might like and gambling ads, increasingly.
Mind you, to your point, I didn’t leave due to instability; my breaking point was the purge of the journalists, and if that hadn’t driven me away, the death of the third party apps certainly would have.
I (kind of, my profile timeline is now inconsisntent/corrupt) deleted all my tweets, locked my account, and changed password to something I don't know.
The only source I've been able to find is here https://app.upzilla.co/statistics/32, which shows something like 99.9% uptime since November '22.
Any simple "upstate" tacker won't notice those things. For me it is notable, though, while I use Twitter a lot less, which of course impacts perception.
It's where I go for access to global establishment personal. The CEO's, the Presidents of nations, the boards of banks, etc...
I don't find them anywhere else. Twitter is my only choice for world business.
A year ago this time, Mastodon was a curiosity. Today, it feels like Twitter circa 2010. That's something.
That competition feels/looks like early 00s blogging -- less mass, pre-eternal-September, Gibsonian ham-radio-postcards -- but then again that's what grew up into what we have now.
It really was just tech-oriented and tech-oriented-LGBTQ* groups that fully abandoned Twitter for Mastodon. Which has been frustrating, I want to support Mastodon but I'm also mostly on Twitter for a good time with a smattering of tech concerns, and it seems like people on Mastodon are generally only talking about tech, having a bad time in their lives, or they're simply bad at being funny.
Dead Comment
Do you need an always on machine to have a ‘server’?
I remember about 6-8 years ago fervently trying to get my friends and family off of FB and Twitter. It was completely useless. I even offered running my own Diaspora server with zero luck. I was constantly pushing decentralized platforms including Mastodon and others for years before finally giving up.
Its crazy what it takes nowadays to get someone to move off of a social media platform for good. I know many have left Twitter because of Musk, but many haven't stayed away and have come back. Its like a drug for some people, its incredibly hard to just walk away from.
https://twitter.com/iFred/status/1641552082003193857
To offer another data point, some of the people I know have actually stopped using Twitter and started using other platforms more. Then again, none of them said the site’s uptime was the reason.
The reason Twitter attracts its current audience is a) celebs & politicians, and b) Twitter-specific creators - think of all the thread writers and serial memers.
All of these people rely on third party tools to schedule their tweets. No one is going to manually craft 1/30 thread series or tweet 8 times a day.
If the cost of running third party tools goes up 10x, a lot of creators, especially on the lower-end, will leave. I can pay $10/month for a tweet scheduling app, but if I had to pay $100 (because the app has to now pay 20x), I won't bother.
A few people seem to have just logged off completely.
Twitter doesn't make money primarily by someone continuing to 'use twitter'. They make money with ad impressions. If everyone who used twitter still continues to use twitter, but 10% of them end up using it 30% less because they get annoyed when the site isn't working, that still costs the company millions of dollars.
I've also unfollowed many people, and they still show up in my feed.
Musk also said only paid accounts will show up in the For You feed, but then later said it will also include people you follow.
My 'for you' feed is a mix of a sprinkling of the people I follow, with a hefty helping of 'entertainment', crazy people, politics (most of these accounts are still on my blocklist, which apparently doesn't function anymore) and a host of other stuff that do no interest me.
See a lot of people saying they are presented with nazi posts, but I have not seen anything at all like that. I do see more right wing / conservative posters but they are very far from Nazis.
I could even see it helping. When reddit was down everyone lost their shit and there would be posts "where were you during the outage of '21" and "today I actually went outside", etc.. Kinda adds to the hype.
It seemed at the time that twitter was beginning to crumble already as they were unable to maintain such a simple feature, I couldn't imagine at the time that they would fail to even maintain the API.
The claim is that twitters api business had a revenue of $400m with ~$360m in profit, and that it is now effectively abondoned.
Also, seven nines of uptime allows for just over 3 seconds of downtime per year, they would never have had that.
Switched to getting my news from RSS feeds instead.
Haven't really switched to Mastodon since there's no one to follow on Mastodon and the platform itself is rather bad.
https://www.neowin.net/news/major-media-outlets-wont-be-payi...
Edit: It's quite telling that the various personal stories and anecdotes are receiving upvotes, while my comment, which contains links to concrete data, is being downvoted.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-twitter-...
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump...
Revenue has tanked and other services are nibbling at their market. This should at least suggest to you that it's not growing .
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
A lot of people like to hate on Musk and act like he is clueless yet they haven't build or done anything, let alone at the scale Elon has been able to run things at, yes he has a lot of people around him, yes he might get a lot of the credit when it belongs to them, but he is still the person that bought everything together.
There has got to be something that he is doing right and a lot of it to me seems to be getting rid of the nonsense that doesn't matter, not having much respect for norms or the way it is normally done, much like the first principles framework he has used successfully in many things he has done.
A lot of programers and startups love a huge amount of frameworks, processes and to be honest nonsense, because that is just how that industry works, musk tore up a lot of that and people then start calling him crazy, but as you point out, do people really care if Twitters uptime is 99% or 99.999999% engineers and people that are so stuck to industry standards do, the rest of the world and reality not so much.
People commenting on current affairs might when they can't comment on events.
Sports fans, etc.
Also, the article is about twitters api, not the availability of the site.
I shudder to think of badly coded consumers of that API sticking that text into a fixed-sized buffer (with the right scaling factor between whatever Twitter considers a character and the actual bytes) and Twitter just wants to avoid buffer overflows like that.
The death of the Twitter API is long, long overdue. Bad for us consumers? Sure. But these companies are not charities, they exist to make money.
From the article: > Twitter already had a $400m paid API business
If this is true, the API would be generating almost 10% of Twitter's revenue. This is a serious business unit for Twitter.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/24/how-the-recently-shuttered...
Why couldn't they just add ads within the API instead of alienating the community which is responsible for its success?
Aka, name another major social network around today which has been as influenced by third party clients as Twitter has
Because the first thing every 3rd party client will do is ignore the ads and not show them to users.
Realistically, how much of the "content" is already ads? Ie corporate announcements, brand building, or political astroturfing, etc. It's almost like twitter is double dipping.
The problem with Twitter was that it had no legitimate monetization for the app itself. It was a zero-interest, investor/vc money fueled growth machine. And even for that purpose, it used that api to great extent to bring a lot of users into the platform and integrate a vast swath of internet to Twitter - from Twitter logins to automatic embeds to entire 3rd party applications that served different subsets of users.
But now that the investors who dumped cash on something that does not have a level of monetization and revenue compared to its over-inflated valuation want something for their money, suddenly growth is not that important anymore and problems ensue.
Even in this particular situation, its a dumb idea to restrict or close down an api. If you do that, another service that doesnt do it will get an ecosystem built around it and it will eventually eat your lunch. A fixed set of people working on a singular app in a company can never produce as much features as an entire ecosystem with its large community can produce through an api. The Open Source movement and its successes follow the same pattern: Centralized, large corporations cannot compete with the development speed and breadth of communities of millions of people, even if those corporations employ tens of thousands of engineers.
for sure. and, as we all know, society only exists so that companies can make money. where would we be without bezos, musk, gates, et al.
On your point: In my opinion 3rd party clients expand services, are a new place of innovation and a place accompanying different usage patterns. The trick is not to kill them; the trick is, to make it work. I would have accepted a Tweetbot with ads. But without Tweetbot I mostly stopped visiting Twitter.
I've used a third-party client for years and I don't miss any features. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing but, like, I can read, comment, and post and that's enough for me.
- Facebook
- Instagram (finally opened in the last two years)
- Youtube
- Linkedin
Perhaps I'm not getting your point, but... most of the major social platforms in the US are still open, except for Twitter.
Working API → users
Therefor:
Working API → revenue
Deleted Comment
Thank you for applying for access to the Twitter API. We’re working on exciting updates including new access types and will have more to share soon. Please stay tuned to @TwitterDev and resubmit your application as soon as we launch our new API.
In the meantime, you can learn more about the Twitter API v2 and find resources on developer.twitter.com. We appreciate your continued interest in developing on the Twitter API.
Thanks,
Twitter
- 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
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
Edit: And the sole active Ads developer who was still actively responding when the blog post was written, was apparently laid off a week after the article was posted. Ouch.
My post is one of the "12 [...] about Twitter not responding to the standard API access request process".
It's easy to keep an API running if you reject access to it, no? Due to a delightful quirk of how the Twitter Ads API review process works, our entire application no longer works, even for non-Ads API use. Genius way to manage the load.
which describes probably 90% of web apis out there
imho, unless a company is dogfooding its own api, I assume it is broken/bitrotted/owner-left-the-company etc
twitter is by no means alone
> Today we are launching new Twitter API access tiers! We’re excited to share more details about our new plans and what you should expect in terms of next steps and timeline.
> Free: For write-only use cases and testing the Twitter API (1,500 Tweets per month)
> $100: For hobbyists or students learning code (50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level)
> Current access plans including Standard (v1.1), Essential (v2), Elevated (v2), and Premium will be deprecated over the next 30 days, so we recommend that you migrate to the new tiers as soon as possible for a smooth transition. Any non-migrated developer accounts will be impacted by April 29th, 2023 at the latest.
It's not unmaintained. They were just putting it behind a pay wall.
Students being famously known for spending three figures a month on hobby API access. /s
That pricing has real "I mean what could a banana cost, $10?" energy. What student or hobbyist is going to pay $100/month for fucking twitter access?
A collegue of mine is writing his Masters thesis part time on deep learning, and he's paying around $30-$50/month for cloud computing
Absurd that these platforms have no scruples about gathering data from users, but if you try doing the opposite, they’ll block you at every turn.
[1] https://twitter.com/feedliness/status/1638580147304505349?s=...
Most people have no problem getting paid too much for something they're selling, but they'll try to block you at every turn if you want them to overpay.