Performance and general stability has absolutely fallen for me though, and the launch of the DeSantis campaign on Twitter was a technical embarrassment/disaster as far as I could tell.
Cryptocurrency spam has declined simply because the cryptocurrency markets have tanked.
Overall spam is way, way worse than before, and it's shockingly low-effort. My DMs are absolutely useless - just chock full of obvious bot accounts who want to "date" me and just need me to click a link first.
I used to get one of those every few months, rare enough that it would surprise me. Since December or so, I've been getting multiple every day.
EDIT: In the one minute it's been since I wrote this comment, I just received yet another.
On the other hand, this looks to me like trying all sorts of things to see what will work.
They removed the annoying login pop-up.
I only interact with twitter using links from other platforms. I don't use the trending hashtags or search.
So for me, it's been better since Elon took over.
Wasn't that already a problem before he took over? I seem to recall Joe Biden hawking some crypto scam after Twitter's admin got catfished into giving a third party access to his account.
Your impression is probably heavily biased by traditional media, who in general do not like him one bit.
For your consideration, here's some evidence to the contrary. Twitter now agrees to 80% of censorship requests from various governments vs 50% previously.
>Twitter’s acquiescence to autocratic or non-liberal regimes is not an exaggeration by critics of the social network. [...] Since Musk’s takeover, the company has received 971 requests from governments (compared to only 338 in the six-month period from October 2021 to April 2022), fully acceding to 808 of them and partially acceding to 154. In the year prior to Musk taking control, Twitter agreed to 50% of such requests, in line with the compliance rate indicated in the company’s last transparency report (none have been published since October 2022). Following the change of ownership, that figure has risen to 83%, according to the analysis of the data by the technology information portal Rest of World.
Source: https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...
Why did the same commitment to speech over profit not apply to his decision making when he filtered Substack, or Mastadon URLs?
Today "For hobbyists or prototypes" you pay $100. A month!
It's sad.
Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world. Maybe they could add special student pricing for student hobbyists. Aren't they also still doing a free option that's reasonable for testing out the api?
They did, for most of Twitter's history
> ...otherwise everyone's gonna just constantly use them to the detriment of the entire platform!
On the contrary, the free availability of the Twitter API is inarguably what drove the growth of Twitter as a platform. Twitter benefited far more from it than the low marginal costs of operation. It's not even close.
Sure I get what you mean, and I couldn't care less about today's twitter.
But it still makes me sad to know that in today's work. 13yo me without PayPal or credit card wouldn't have any of that fun. And I imagine millions of people can't either.
In this day and age it's expected that companies have generous free tiers for hobby/prototype usage, and it makes sense because it usually costs them pennies to provide it.
Serving API requests is extremely cheap and the volume is almost always going to be so insignificant that they wouldn't even be able to tell if developers are using the API if not for API keys.
They _could_ if it supported people building stuff that increased engagement so they could sell more ads.
I think it's mistaken to think of free-to-access APIs as something the company 'gives' to users at some cost to itself. Done well, it facilitates making the platform a richer place, where people spend more time and attention, and which is therefore more valuable. It's hard to do the attribution to definitely say k% of timeline views (and thus ad impressions) wouldn't have happened without API-dependent stuff, but that doesn't mean it's 0%.
Some categories of examples of stuff that I think formerly contributed to engagement but which would just not get built today:
- write only twitter-bots which give information on e.g. earthquakes, public transit delays, in a way which is genuinely informative, and does not enrich the author(s).
- interactive twitter bots which made twitter itself better to use. The most important in this category may have been Threader, which was ultimately acquired by twitter. But it would have been useless / never written under the new rules. Can you imagine trying to call it, and receiving no reply b/c it had exceeded its limit for the day?
- interactive twitter bots which made twitter a platform from which to do other stuff. E.g. your.flowingdata.com was a self-tracking project where you recorded information by tweeting. Treating twitter as a platform, and orienting itself around tracking routine stuff meant that using this project _required_ you to frequently engage with twitter. This was also a free offering, which wouldn't have existed under the current limits.
An ecosystem in which there are high costs to building means less stuff will be built, and the platform overall is less interesting, less compelling, less worth scrolling through an ad to see. Thinking of these APIs as just a cost center is misguided.
It's the end of that hobby project, at least for me.
twitter currently makes it's money from advertising served on content users generate, creating barriers around programmatically serving that content reduces the value of the platform for advertisers.
twitter is, I guess, looking to switch to a subscription based model, but paid subscription models make the most sense when the content is exclusive in some sense, and create barriers for entry, especially for folks from outside the wealthier nations.
Maybe this will come as a surprise to you, but spammers aren't using the official API.
Some very dumb decisions with their API pricing. How do you go from $0 to $100 to $5,000?
As for the pricing, it's likely they really don't want anyone unlikely to hit the upper tier to even try developing against their APIs to begin with.
Anyways, while I understand wanting to monetize their API instead of having it just be used by tons of people for free, the tiers here just seem like insanity. This might be one of the few instances where I'd actually be happier with a usage-based billing model. $100 for a hobbyist? I personally can't remember the last time I paid $100 on a monthly basis for any non-essential service that I was using as a hobby. Would be interested to see the amount of customers each one of these tiers was actually fielding...
Why 'few instances'? I'd always prefer an API to be pay per request. It's my favourite thing about OpenAI (if you ignore the fact that big players can get access to the base model through Azure).
They don't want the $10/mo student because realistically that student is only going to be a drain on Twitter.
They want the $100/mo "amateur" who has an actual shot at growing to a $1000/mo or beyond tier. If they don't blow up they want that user to stop paying and being a net-drain on Twitter's constrained and expensive (man-hours) resources.
Further they want to price out some bad actors. See cheating differential in free vs. paid games.
Look I disagree strong with Twitter's direction and leadership - but this pricing ain't the hill to die on.
Traditionally, a list of people that are dumb enough to do really dumb things and that have disposable income is very valuable. Having a list of known rubes isn't something you share, for free, to anyone. You charge a lot of money for that list, usually.
But here's Elon, just giving away that list for anyone to see.
Are re-tweets/likes considered a tweet in the tweet limits?
I'm not a heavy Twitter user or developer just a curious bystander and definitely don't have details into the "buy retweets" ecosystem so not sure if the "buy retweets"/buy social cred were using this type of API, humans or webscraping type scripts.
They are a set of users comprised almost entirely of absolute morons who believe everything they read online and also have money to spend on stupid buillshit like Twitter Blue, they are a goldmine for advertisers and this oppurtunity to bilk them of all their cash is just wasted.
