Ah, the circle of life for VC-funded social media... Let third party devs write cool apps, copy the features that stick, then pull their rug. Then proceed to squeeze ad revenue in a death spiral as the MAU gently falls off.
Do you not understand fiduciary responsibility? If they can charge and make more money they are effectively obligated to. They would need to sell their investors against the plan that everyone uses AND propose a plan that will make more money.
That’s not how fiduciary responsibility works. It’s very easy to say, “we’re not going to do X because we don’t think it’s a good long term investment due to brand destruction”. This happens all of the time. It’s a complete myth that they are responsible to force short term charges for short term revenue.
What you’re confusing it with is shareholder pressure, which is orthogonal to duty. What Reddit went through was just kowtowing to large potential investors to increase IPO demand.
Not sure where you got that one; they were net profitable for two full years at least. They were generally FCF-positive, and could have reached paper profitability fairly easily at the cost of reducing spending (though their shareholders likely wouldn’t have liked that; the markets like to see smallish tech companies spending what they take in, not paying a dividend, as a general rule).
Twitter was not a massively lucrative company, but the idea that it was financially near death is a myth.
Twitter didn't wait for Musk to attack alternative clients, or charging for API access. Pretty sure that's why it took him all of 5 minutes to flip the switch and turn everything completely off.
> To save you a click, the social network wants to charge up to $2899.99 per month for developers to use this new API on up to 250 users. Of course, that’s untenable. The developers don’t want to pay it and, frankly, neither do their users, us, you, or any other sane person. Additionally, a good third party Twitter app will clearly have more than 250 users. However, as Luke explains, this new API is never (and was never) for third party apps.
