- Free API continues until Feb 13 instead of sunsetting tomorrow
- $100 paid tier grants access to Ads API, which is where promotion and scheduling of Tweets happen. So this will become a necessary but minor expense for brands, influencers, and third parties that cater to them.
- Free API access will continue to be available but users will be limited to 1500 tweets/month.
This actually strikes me as a rational compromise that will bring in a few million $ a month in revenue with significantly disrupting the development/research/comedy bot ecosystem. Bad for spammers and shit-tier brands, both of whom deserve to suffer anyway.
> This actually strikes me as a rational compromise that will bring in a few million $ a month in revenue with significantly disrupting the development/research/comedy bot ecosystem.
A few millions a month is peanuts compared to what Twitter actually needs, which is measured in billions per year. Was it worth the negative publicity and reinforcing the image that Twitter is unsteady and that policy is changed day to day by a flailing attention-addicted teenager? The end result might sound reasonable, but the process to get there was anything but.
100$/Mo is a lot for most and Twitter is relatively easy to scrape and script.
I'd imagine this move will probably not earn Twitter any considerable amount of profits as Twitter is weirdly heavy app and new lazy web scrapers/bots will drain all of those 100$ sales.
For some context, currently there are two ways to scrape/automate twitter outside of the official API since it's a heavy JS-only web app:
- run a real script-controlled browser (using something like Playwright/Selenium/Puppeteer).
- reverse engineer their backend graphql API.
The former is super easy to do but since it runs a full web browser it's expensive resource-wise as it loads everything a normal web user would load (unless configured explicitly not to). The latter is much more efficient but not accessible for most developers as Twitter's backend is pretty complex.
Not necessarily. There are so many ways to obfuscate it and generally public facing graphql endpoints have introspection and all of those convenience features disabled.
To add, Twitter's backend has a bunch of layers on top of it. I did a bit of reverse engineering for my blog article on scraping Twitter [1] and there's a bit of magic token/header generation involved.
Good resource if you'd like to learn more about how the whole backend works is Nitter [2] which implements most graphql functions in Nim (it's very readable even if you don't know Nim).
As a regular lurker, Twitter hasn't really changed in the last few months besides launching a few new features and doing a fresh start on some banned accounts.
I'm just curious but what is that unchanged state to you? Because I have a twitter account that I never use and I tried using it a few weeks ago only to be greeted by spam robots, malware robots, "sexy women" sending cryptic messages that want me to do something.
I saw very little human engagement in my few minutes on twitter.
I'm not sure what to say. I've used Twitter since 2010 and can't recall ever seeing any of that. The only spam I've seen in the last 1-2 years is when I search for a recent news event and sort by latest. Then there have been nude photos. Unfortunately, search on Twitter has never been any good.
My feed consists of 200 people and _most_ tweets seem to get around 5-20 replies. The closest thing you can come to spam are "fake" accounts that comment on political posts. It became big news a few years ago when it was revealed that the largest political party in Sweden were behind some of them. I don't think there's much you can do besides block them since they are real people with fake accounts. But it's only on political posts so I rarely see them.
Maybe that's the problem, that I never used my account. So I get whatever twitter is trying to recommend to me to get my feed started. And it's mostly shit.
Twitter appears to be adopting a mindset of "move fast and break things", which includes testing in production. Some of the new features eventually turned out fine, but they definitely didn't get everything right on first try.
The Twitter before last year seemed more careful about changes that could disrupt users and businesses, as is appropriate for a company with millions of users. The current Twitter don't seem to mind as much.
Key points:
- Free API continues until Feb 13 instead of sunsetting tomorrow
- $100 paid tier grants access to Ads API, which is where promotion and scheduling of Tweets happen. So this will become a necessary but minor expense for brands, influencers, and third parties that cater to them.
- Free API access will continue to be available but users will be limited to 1500 tweets/month.
This actually strikes me as a rational compromise that will bring in a few million $ a month in revenue with significantly disrupting the development/research/comedy bot ecosystem. Bad for spammers and shit-tier brands, both of whom deserve to suffer anyway.