Ad revenue must be down bad.
Twitter Dev @TwitterDev
Feb 2
Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead 🧵
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Replying to @ericnakagawa
my guess is it’s more about raising the friction to make bots

Feb 2, 2023 · 6:14 PM UTC

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Replying to @BillyM2k @ericnakagawa
Yeah, free API is being abused badly right now by bot scammers & opinion manipulators. There’s no verification process or cost, so easy to spin up 100k bots to do bad things. Just ~$100/month for API access with ID verification will clean things up greatly.
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seems like the replies are some combination of a few valid concerns alongside many hyperbolic hate boners 🤪 but that seems to be par for the course for people reacting to every change 😭 parsing through the noise is annoying
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Replying to @BillyM2k @ericnakagawa
My guess is it might also have something to do with AI companies data mining Twitter for free and potentially competing. But the change is too sudden, especially for small/solo devs that have been just experimenting and making little/cool/useful things in Twitter for years.
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IMO: it would be reasonable to introduce a bigger free tier, and delay the introduction of the change, at least of a few weeks, at least for smaller projects.
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Replying to @BillyM2k @ericnakagawa
It even makes sense purely in a business sense. Twitter data has been harvested for ages for free, including by OpenAI.
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Replying to @BillyM2k @ericnakagawa
And in the end it will cut number of non-invasive bots. And bots made for educational purposes, because 150 bucks just to make a hello world is a bit too much imho. Harmful spam bots owners can afford to pay.
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Replying to @BillyM2k @ericnakagawa
Then all the official, reversed and leaked api keys should be revoked and changed on a hourly basis. This would have the nice side effect of forcing people to keep their app up to date.