The ever changing Twitter API, Early-February 2023 Edition
They killed Ebooks is @HourlyLizards next?
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the Twitter API. At launch, it was access to build tools for a thriving community. Then they focused on advertising and locked it down. Stopping the creative environment that spawned many user experience experiments in various Twitter clients.
Their lockdown of the API infuriated so many people that a start-up founder, Dalton Caldwell, now part of Y-combinator, wrote a manifesto, took his idle team and raised money to recreate a paid Twitter with a promise of an open API. They attracted most of Twitter’s ex-client developers and continued these experiments. This project was called app.net, and unfortunately, they could sustain their initial growth, which led them to 350k users until they shut down in 2014.
This led me back to Twitter, where in 2014, API was obtainable without human review. As a result, I built some content-generating accounts and utilized the API for pulling the data for various projects.
Life was what it was until 2016. Bob Iger had rejected to buy Twitter because the platform was unsafe. This left an urgent mark on Twitter. They had to make themselves purchasable. One of their measure to curb safety was limiting API keys. They implemented a human review. You had to really deliver value to their platform and explain yourself. Many of my requests get stuck in queues, never to be replied to or straight-up denied.
They continued to limit the API, obsoleting older APIs and making it much harder to create posts. This effectively killed Ebooks bots which could take a Twitter account as a source and try to mimic talking like it, which was a source of amusement to various communities. These bots could no longer operate and disappeared from the ethos.
Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and has been making changes. One announced shift this week is that the Twitter API will no longer be free to use.
This leads the list of bot-driven content-creation accounts to announce their potential death. Hourly-lizards would be no more. I did not think it would be a big problem for some that a merchandise store couldn’t solve, but I understand the extra work that would add. Ultimately developing their content into business is likely a good move to build passive income. Still, not everyone is ready or has time for that.
In response, Elon announced that well maybe Twitter Blue (monthly-paid-users) should receive API access for free. This gave some a sigh of relief. Psychologically a fixed cost is much easier to plan for but is $8/mo less expensive than less than a cent per post? I guess it really depends on how many posts you put out there.