No developer has received any word from Twitter at all about what is going on. The Twitter API itself is still present, but specific API keys used in several 3rd party apps have ceased functioning. It was approximately 3 hours from then until that API key completely stopped working too, along with all of the other API keys that Tapbots had. People rushed to confirm that TweetBot was back, only to discover that they could only log in and read, not post. Haddad switched out the Twitter API key used by TweetBot, which had already been disabled since Friday, for an older one that it still possessed that had posting limits. Paul Haddad one of its developers has been posting at (directly followable as by FediVerse users). Ironically, the best information about the status of TweetBot is on the FediVerse. That's not good for business, and it certainly doesn't "incentivise" staying on Twitter, much less paying to do so. In November, there were an estimated ~100,000 Twitter Blue subscribers - meanwhile, more than a million Twitter users were driven to Mastodon, and a number have shuttered or mothballed their Twitter accounts - especially in the tech scene. and paying to have your tweets be more prominent makes two classes of user and tweet, effectively fracturing your user base. The new "pay to be verified" scheme is absolute nonsense, and makes the new checkmarks absolutely meaningless. they're likely making more for charging much-more-popular third-party apps for API access, than they're getting for ads on their own (mediocre) app - never mind the fact that Twitter for iOS and macOS were just rebranded versions of Tweetie post-acquisition (circa 2010). Twitter already nerfed the API in 2018, and devs of third-party apps have to pay for the current API, so it's not like Twitter isn't making money from that. It really wouldn't - the Twitter Blue thing is BS to begin with: the checkmark is meaningless, and you shouldn't need to pay to have your tweets appear more prominently / higher in timelines. Turns out the "public town square" is a much more pleasant space when it's not full of a billion people and their sock puppets shouting slurs at each other all day. I'll take one 1000 character reply I disagree with over 200 low-effort trolls and parroted culture war slogans. You can shout "echo chamber" all you want but the lower overall population and stricter crackdowns on trolls and defederation of dodgy instances certainly leads to less noise and more respectful interactions. sports fan bunch of numbers insisting that the police should just shoot protestors) and somehow this stays the same even if I spend ten minutes every now and then just blocking those reply guys. The difference for me is that those 200 tweets are mostly about the same drama and the replies to every one of them are always full of trolls and genuinely shitty opinions havers (e.g. I think that 200 tweets per toot metric may be accurate tho in my case it's closer to 20 (tools like Movetodon can help get you started).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |