And what did the owner of Twitter blame for the new paywall solution? Data scraping by artificial intelligence startups…
Twitter has introduced new restrictions the other day. First, the restriction was that visitors without an account could not read a single tweet on the site, with new, unconfirmed accounts allowed to read 300 tweets a day, confirmed accounts 600, and Twitter Blue subscribers up to 6,000 tweets a day. According to him, this limit is temporary and will soon be raised to 400/800/8000 (perhaps due to the response). Musk has previously forced subscriptions on Stephen King and LeBron James, for example, and many accounts with over one million followers.
Musk says that hundreds of organizations (if not more) have been aggressively scraping data on Twitter, which he says has already degraded the experience of real users. It’s ruining it in other ways and significantly, but we’ll return to that. What is certain is that this move is yet another monetization attempt from the head of Tesla and SpaceX (Twitter, or instead X, has already been given a new CEO, as Linda Yaccarino, an ex-NBC Universal exec, is running the company). In March, Musk announced a three-tier API change after the launch of Twitter Blue subscriptions. The gist of it is that he has made the API (the programming interface) paid, and even the lowest tier costs a significant monthly amount.
We don’t know the financial status of Twitter, as it is a private company. Hiring Yaccarino is a money-making exercise, but restricting access to the site also removes advertising from users. Musk blames artificial intelligence companies that train large language models (LLMs) (OpenAI – ChatGPT, Microsoft – Bing, Google – Bard). Still, he fails to mention that since taking power last autumn, less than half of his staff have been employed there, and people who were influential in maintaining the infrastructure have left. There have also been outages in March because of this. According to Platformer, Google Cloud bills that have not been paid for months have only recently been settled, and Reuters pointed out that it is looking to save millions of dollars a day on infrastructure costs. Not coincidentally, in November, an anonymous Twitter engineer told MIT Technology Review that there would be more and more frequent and more extensive and more significant issues…
But back to the API topic: it is what detracts from the user experience. In both cases, anyone who might be running a desktop Tweetdeck alternative or looking to see who used to follow it but no longer does, runs into trouble, as the inability to access the API (which can be $100, $500, and $42,000 per month at the Basic, Pro, and Enterprise levels respectively) for free and without limitation causes the experience to deteriorate. Even those paying $42,000 are running into bugs, which shouldn’t happen.
The robust, pre-existing third-party developer ecosystem has been kicked aside. Collin Robinson, the developer who ran Who Unfollowed Me for about 14 years, has quit, even though the app was popular because it made it easy to see who no longer followed us on Twitter. According to Robinson, Twitter didn’t inform the developers about deleting the old API (the site said it would be deprecated, implying that old users could use it). His project was killed on June 13. He worked on rewriting the app for two weeks, but on June 26, Twitter removed the endpoints of followers and unfollowed from the API, and without access, Who Unfollowed Me is unable to function. Twitter announced in its June 26 update that it had removed access from the Basic and Pro tiers, meaning Robinson would have to pay $42,000 monthly to get his app working!
Since April, apps have been suspended or deleted from the API interface weekly or so. Twitter has not informed otherwise paying developers of the changes, and many, even among developers paying $42,000 a month, have complained. Still, so far, only developers of TweetHunter and Publer have received help. Both apps are Enterprise subscribers. How interesting…
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