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 🧵
Show this thread
70
139
8
3,395
my guess is it’s more about raising the friction to make bots
29
36
2
1,323
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.

Feb 2, 2023 · 9:31 PM UTC

3,010
2,102
6,039
10,065
Replying to @elonmusk @ericnakagawa
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
69
35
10
1,193
Yuh, that is par for the course
200
169
30
3,175
more replies
Replying to @elonmusk @BillyM2k @ericnakagawa
This won’t affect the spammy malicious bots (maybe 1% of the bots, other 99% will be the same). Malicious tweet/reply bots exploit the client API to auto tweet, they don’t use the dev API. So this won’t hurt them at all. Ironically, this will hurt the “good” bots more.
22
146
16
2,937
Err yes it will solve large parts of the problem.
56
5
10
more replies
Replying to @elonmusk @BillyM2k @ericnakagawa
This is a great move. Another option might be to rate limit the API for free accounts to something crazy small so people can’t use it at scale for free. Freemium. Or possibly a sandbox mode for experiments.
29
5
3
74
💯 There has to be consideration for those building ideas that don’t have ~$100 a month for personal projects. In killing the bots like this Elon is taking out emerging ideas too.
14
3
143
Replying to @elonmusk @BillyM2k @ericnakagawa
I feel like the bad actors will still get around by abusing Twitter’s private API (the one the official apps use)
13
12
2
283
They’ll also go one step ahead by automating the browser / app interactions Might be worth considering doing reCaptchas on clients of low confident scores when they’re trying to engage
19
6
1
173
Replying to @elonmusk @BillyM2k @ericnakagawa
Do it! Twitter has been improved greatly by whatever you did to deboost the Woke Propaganda bots and human Woke Knight Trolls. I love how they're hidden behind "Click here for more" where they can tweet "Define Woke" all day long and no one sees it. Woke Mind Virus―deboosted
131
3
39
49
My dude. Wtf are you talking about
8
6
1,494
Load more