[HN Gopher] Updates to the Twitter developer platform
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Updates to the Twitter developer platform
Author : coloneltcb
Score : 33 points
Date : 2021-11-15 19:08 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.twitter.com)
| astockwell wrote:
| My historical perception of Twitter is that they were incredibly
| developer-hostile, to the point of almost being predatory (copy-
| ing 3rd party apps/integrations, then shutting said 3rd party
| apps out of the API...). This strikes me as similar to Google
| announcing a new Google Reader developer platform? However
| Somebody please tell me if my impression is outdated.
| foxhop wrote:
| The Twitter platform was very open. This is why it grew like
| wild fire in tech circles. Then over time the Twitter company
| became predatory (claimed it wouldn't have it's own app, but
| then launch it's own), at first nobody cared because the v1 api
| was solid and anyone could make a client or a bot. Then over
| time they started going after clients and at one point said
| third party clients are outlawed (this was immediately
| retracted, but this didn't stop them from iterating in ways
| which broke clients).
|
| As a cry to stop this tyranny things like "app.net" were
| proposed. Then few years after that mastodon and a bunch of
| others which are not around anymore.
|
| When I was using Twitter the most, I finally installed the
| official app after using a few clients over the years. Now when
| I use Twitter it is only to broadcast tweet and I just use
| Firefox on Android using the official mobile site.
|
| After messing with Twitter in a number of different ways over
| the years I decided it isn't worth it. There are a graveyard of
| open source clients which talk to twitter over api v1 in all
| languages.
|
| Also did you hear they can just ban presidents?
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/08/tech/trump-twitter-ban/index....
|
| https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
| easrng wrote:
| Mastodon still exists, I like it and would recommend it.
| gopiandcode wrote:
| Not just mastadon, but the fediverse in general, which
| encompasses quite a diversity of software (pleroma,
| pixelfed, etc.) and has apparently now even started to
| threaten twitter enough to make it start initiatives to try
| and EEE it.
| alangibson wrote:
| Why shouldn't they be able to ban a president? They're not
| royalty.
|
| In any event, they can ban anyone at any time. Their platform
| is private property, for better or worse.
| Macha wrote:
| Twitter's hostility comes down to jealously defending their
| business model. They declared war on third party clients about
| a decade ago, and that hasn't really changed. You'll note the
| API available under the new, looser, rules does not include any
| equivalent of the home timeline endpoint, which would be pretty
| essential to the client use case. A third party client could do
| things like not show their embedded ads (promoted tweets), or
| display the timeline in a manner more useful to the user than
| to Twitter's engagement metrics, and Twitter don't like that.
|
| They've been pretty ok towards e.g. making your CSR tool
| interface with twitter to answer support requests over Twitter.
|
| This doesn't really strike me as a change in direction, though
| it does look easier for people in the second category to get
| started.
| malshe wrote:
| By any chance do you know whether V2 has an endpoint for
| bookmarks?
| Macha wrote:
| The v2 docs are here:
| https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-
| api/migrate/tw...
|
| There doesn't look to be.
|
| I think it has been updated in the last few hours - they've
| added a link to a trello board created 4 hours ago, and I
| don't remember a [COMING SOON] replacement for home
| timeline being there previously. So maybe they're going to
| add more endpoints than currently exist, but it'll take a
| lot to not have people worried about another rug pull.
| segphault wrote:
| Many of Twitter's defining features, such as "@" replies and
| retweets, originally began as conventions that were standardized
| by third-party clients before Twitter natively incorporated them
| into the platform.
|
| When they restricted access to their APIs and began tightening
| the screws to discourage third-party client development, Twitter
| began to stagnate because they no longer had a steady flow of new
| ideas to exploit. It also prevented third parties from providing
| the kind of user experience improvements and specializations that
| heavy users with large audiences relied on to make Twitter
| manageable. Without these things, the platform has deteriorated
| badly.
|
| It isn't surprising that they have circled back around to where
| they started and realized that they need third-party developers,
| but given how poorly they have treated the very people who drove
| Twitter's initial success, I can't imagine anybody is foolish
| enough to give them a second chance.
| AutumnCurtain wrote:
| Having been farmed for ideas and then kicked out once, I can't
| imagine who would sign up for round two.
| runako wrote:
| Twitter started trashing its API 9 years ago. That's eons in
| developer time. This was before the first public release of
| React, for example.
|
| I think if they make a meaningful effort to engage, there
| will be plenty of developers ready to meet them there.
| pookeh wrote:
| Also given that there are now a whole new generation of
| developers who weren't around when the whole trashing began
| years ago.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Perhaps folks who never participated in Round One and
| therefore carry no scars.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| As someone who has been using Twitter daily for almost 14 years
| now, I have witnessed what you are saying and can totally
| confirm it.
| echelon wrote:
| Twitter clamped down on developers in the past by limiting or
| suspending access.
|
| Building in someone else's garden is usually not without risk.
| I'd be wary, especially with a company that waffles on the issue
| as much as Twitter does.
|
| What's to say they don't shutter access again just as soon as
| they get the growth metrics they want?
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Twitter doesn't really have a long term strategy. They tend to
| waffle from feature to feature and product to product depending
| on market pressure and where the winds are blowing today.
|
| Building on Twitter's platforms is dangerous because a single
| leadership change could mean you're dead in the water. It has
| happened before, it'll likely happen again.
| RNCTX wrote:
| > Twitter doesn't really have a long term strategy.
|
| Bingo.
|
| Of the two, Facebook has added functionality over the years
| that does quite well (groups supplant lazy entrenched
| competitors like forums and reddit, marketplace supplants
| lazy entrenched competitors like eBay and craigslist), while
| Twitter has... aligned themselves politically? Hired a bunch
| of bad ideas from Facebook to market themselves to
| celebrities (pre-censored posts)?
|
| Speaking of aligning themselves politically, look at point #1
| in their list of intended uses for the new API:
|
| > Improve the health and safety of the public conversation
|
| Looking to recruit free censors seems high on the list of
| needs / wants. The highest, as a matter of fact!
| riffic wrote:
| > long term strategy.
|
| B-b-but -- _Bluesky_.
|
| (please don't hold your breath while a protocol simply
| materializes. If this were a strategy Twitter cared about
| they would have made this move 10+ years ago when
| OpenMicroBlogging and OStatus were being kicked around).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMicroBlogging
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus
| beders wrote:
| Yeah, a company I've worked got shafted big time by Twitter.
|
| What is Twitter doing to regain my trust?
| nkg wrote:
| at the same time, they killed my bot :( People loved my bot.
| moomin wrote:
| Build what's next (so we can rip it off and monetise it)
| alangibson wrote:
| To me, Twitter never really was much of a product per se. It's
| mechanics are so simple that it seems more like an enormous
| append-only log. I suspect they'd be doing much better if they
| had an ecosystem of clients, most of which would be better than
| the Twitter app only because they couldn't be any lamer, and
| focused on the platform as a global messaging plane.
| vadfa wrote:
| Yeah, I'm going to let Twitter burn me again.......... nope
| foxhop wrote:
| Hell no. Twitter used to have a platform. Then they broke
| twitter. Hell absolute no. They would have to spin off as a new
| company with a small team and even then I'd be highly skeptical.
| Their feed is beyond worthless. I don't need that toxic of a
| firehose. Twitter needs a reimagining and it won't grow from the
| inside. They know this and they are scared. Same with Facebook.
| Nothing good grows in those walled gardens anymore. Gluck!
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but please don't fulminate on HN. Maybe you don't owe
| $bigco better, but you owe this community better if you're
| participating in it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| foxhop wrote:
| Thanks. Just read it again.
| ljm wrote:
| Maybe a case of too little, too late? Hard to win developers back
| after half a decade of being hostile to developers.
|
| > Doubling down on developers
|
| That would require Twitter to be down on developers in the first
| place, otherwise they're doubling nothing.
|
| If anything, more like they're just late to the party supporting
| integrations.
| riffic wrote:
| Twitter's just openly hostile to everyone now, not just
| developers.
|
| Come stop by /r/Twitter one of these days for a whiff of
| sentiment surrounding the company. I'm not saying this to be
| surly, just echoing my observations over the years.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The actual changes to the policy are removing the paragraph "You
| must contact us if you find that your service will require more
| than 1 million tokens. Services that require more than 1 million
| tokens may be subject to additional terms regarding Twitter API
| access." which for some reason was under the advertising section,
| and deleted the entire "Replicating the Twitter experience"
| section which you can find e.g. on
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211019001715/https://developer...
|
| I hope that this will help make Nitter.net more useful. It was
| constantly running into throttling issues, and it's unfortunately
| the best way to get access to valuable information that people,
| companies and government institutions lock behind the walls of
| Twitter's proprietary platform. The official web site has so many
| abusive patterns and is intentionally made unusable if you don't
| have an account (e.g. can't open images).
| paxys wrote:
| The single biggest reason Twitter stagnated as a platform
| (compared to, say, Facebook, who they were neck-to-neck with at
| the start) was their failure to realize the potential of their
| developer ecosystem. Twitter has always treated their APIs as a
| liability and an avenue to make a quick buck, which always was
| and still is a losing strategy. Even in this press release the
| first thing I see is pricing tiers, which is an immediate turn
| off.
|
| As an anecdote - I work for a large company with a popular
| consumer-facing service and we were interested in building some
| Twitter bots/integrations. We quickly ran into API roadblocks on
| their end, and when we contacted them to work out a solution we
| were only given a series of aggressive sales pitches and _very_
| expensive contracts to sign. Needless to say those conversations
| didn 't go anywhere. They couldn't even comprehend the
| possibility that giving developers free access to build unique
| experiences for their users could actually be a net positive for
| them.
| alangibson wrote:
| The competitive advantage of a good API must wear of at some
| point because Facebook's API is borderline useless at this
| point.
|
| I totally agree that Twitter trying to monetize their API was a
| bad idea though.
| paxys wrote:
| Think of companies like Zynga who built multi-billion dollar
| businesses solely on the back of Facebook. Something like
| that has always been impossible with Twitter.
| alangibson wrote:
| At this point, building on someone else's API is a form of
| insanity.
|
| Here's my harebrained proposal: 1. Developers form an online-only
| cardcheck union. As a condition of joining you promise not to
| develop on APIs of businesses that don't have a contract with the
| union. 2. Union negotiates contracts with companies where they
| agree to support API versions for X years 3. Strike on all others
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I'll never touch Twitter's developer platform again.
| riffic wrote:
| Good. Can I suggest an exploration of the ActivityPub
| ecosystem?
|
| https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
| bob229 wrote:
| Twitter is cancer. Delete it now and stop destroying humanity
| jes wrote:
| No. Even if developing something Twitter related was interesting
| to me, I wouldn't want to be complicit in encouraging anyone to
| join or use Twitter.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Thank you.
| aantix wrote:
| I've noticed that when I tweet via the API, those tweets receive
| less impressions vs the tweets that are posted via the web
| interface.
|
| Does anyone else experience this penalty?
|
| It's hard to distinguish whether this penalty is a result of my
| tweet's content, or a blanket penalty that assumes all
| programmatic tweets are spam.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| It's nice to see the elevated access. 500k tweets was just too
| low and a non-starter for anything trying to pull discussions out
| of tweets.
|
| Twitter's "conversationId" and trying to reconstruct "threads" is
| horrendous though. I wish there were an easier way to do it but
| you end up have to paginating and rebuilding the conversation by
| hand, terrible.
| srvmshr wrote:
| I still don't understand their obsession to limiting
| 'likes/favorites' access to about 3200 tweets. AFAIK, a lot of
| people use these as bookmarks. And a lot of patterns can emerge
| from what people favorite. Restricting access to such metrics for
| developers is a self-goal especially if they are targeting ads
| for Twitter users
| riffic wrote:
| it's an abuse vector, and the rate limits are there to prevent
| abuse.
| foxhop wrote:
| They didn't build the API to deal with people using it in a
| useful way so instead of making it useful they use limits to
| guard against use or over use. As a result they also prevent
| abusers / attackers from causing denial of service (thus
| busting SLAs and waking up tired engineers).
| srvmshr wrote:
| If we are talking of abuse vectors, they should similarly be
| limiting access to followers and tweets by hashtags. Those
| are at a higher risk of abuse. I can look up a hashtag or
| follower list and simply run a bot to selectively reply at
| those accounts. Rate limited as a bonus too. It is but poorly
| conceived if that is the reason.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I'm kinda skeptical about developer platforms / SDK's for
| Twitter/facebook/LinkedIn whatever.
|
| They get you in then like a toxic relationship they dump you then
| later they decide they love you again etc etc.
| synthmeat wrote:
| Honestly, as someone who worked on and off with both FB and TW
| APIs for ages now, FB developer (and business) API experience
| was actually superb (I know, I'm shocked as well).
|
| TW is the one who's borderline hostile to developers and
| businesses building on it.
| scraplab wrote:
| I'm a verified Twitter user who runs a bunch of inconsequential
| bots (https://twitter.com/lowflyingrocks,
| https://twitter.com/urnowentering) and has a small side project
| for discovering what your friends are liking on Twitter.
|
| Somehow I've been blocked from accessing the V2 API. Whatever it
| was I filled in a while ago about my use case wasn't good enough,
| and there's no recourse or way to resubmit my application.
|
| It's a shame it's so hard to mess around with APIs and services
| like this nowadays without a commercial reason.
|
| (Can anyone at Twitter help?)
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Twitter treats its developers extremely poorly, probably
| because developing Twitter as a platform is not rewarded
| internally compared to copying Clubhouse or adding a Stories
| clone, even though the platform is the one of Twitter's unique
| strengths that can't be replicated by Facebook or Google.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Please consider not contributing to their network effect and
| not enabling their abusive behavior towards both developers and
| users with your content.
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