I don't know whether killing Tweetbot was intentional or deliberate. However I was a pretty heavy user of Twitter - scrolling through my timeline on the tram, in cafes, on the toilet or whenever I had a spare moment. I assumed that the API outage was temporary so I didn't download the "official" app, and figured I'd just wait a day or so for Tweetbot to be fixed. It's now been ~3 days, I don't miss not having Twitter, I don't check it at all. I'm maybe missing a couple of @dril posts, podcast recommendations or funny images I could've shared with friends but that's nothing.<p>So intentional or not, I'm effectively lost as a Twitter user. I'm not claiming to be particularly high value, but I don't imagine my experience is unique. I'm quite far from a fan of Musk but I enjoyed my Twitter experience enough that his meddling was just an amusing side-show until now. It's not a dramatic rage quit, just a sort of accidental "oh I guess I didn't need that" realisation that I didn't plan on having at all. Weird.<p>Interestingly if Twitter had said "We are killing off Tweetbot, you have to use our app" I <i>probably</i> would have just begrudgingly downloaded the Twitter app. But because they didn't say anything, I just waited and went through the "cold turkey" period, where every now and then I'd instinctively tap the Tweetbot icon before thinking "ah yeah it's down, oh well" - before completely losing that habit. What an own goal.
I'm not sure what that link was supposed to be before it 404ed. But clicking through from the Twitter Developer homepage you can get to these:<p><a href="https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api" rel="nofollow">https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api</a><p><a href="https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api" rel="nofollow">https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api</a><p>All links to dev portal, product information and docs seem to work.<p>I assume the post is suggesting the Twitter api has been "removed" in relation to the reader apps being blocked. But it looks like everything is there still. Anyone got more context on what the "missing" page was?
The Information reports that the suspension of third-party Twitter clients is intentional, and they haven’t worked out the comms strategy yet.<p>TI has a very good track record on this kind of reporting, so I’m inclined to believe the internal messages they’ve seen are real.<p><a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-intentionally-suspended-tweet-bot-third-party-apps-messages-show" rel="nofollow">https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-intent...</a>
I would like to thank Elon for helping me to kick of my doom scrolling Twitter addiction.<p>My usage has been dropping perceptibly over the last 3 months as my feed has gotten stale however now that my Twitter client hasn't had any new tweets in the last 3 days I may finally be able to kick the habit for good.
It reminds me of: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" which describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."<p>I understand that Twitter no longer employs a comms team, so no comms on that particular issue. But... has the revolution come?
So many minor flags already that the problem could be completely accidental. For example people search in android client no longer checks my following&followers. Odd audio behavior in Spaces. More than a few scattered bits of broken micro features work and then don't again. Meanwhile press coverage is look how they only needed half the people on staff so let's do this everywhere asap and recapture value for the poor shareholders.
Anybody else notice that the “latest” page for search results is gone as well?<p>There used to be a top level group for seeing the most recent tweets matching a search term. It no longer appears for non-logged in users: <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=Twitter%20search%20latest%20gone" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/search?q=Twitter%20search%20latest%20gon...</a>
The submission is unclear. I get "The apge is down". I guess the submitter wants to tell us that the page might have been intentionally removed? Or Twitter have too few employees left to keep their stuff maintained?<p>Well, I have come to my conclusion some weeks ago: I don't want to have anything to do with Twitter anymore.
There is no reason for Twitter to remove third-party clients unless they want to move ads outside of the main feed. If you allowed the API anyone could build a Twitter minus the ads.<p>This approach would allow them to decommission their existing ad system likely because they have lost too much institutional knowledge about how to run the previous one. Especially given it is heavily intertwined [1] with the fundamental timeline systems.<p>And given that I am constantly recommended random ads e.g. fertilizer and industrial mining machinery my guess is that the ML models powering the ads system have not been retrained since the last major wave of firings.<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593899029531803649" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593899029531803649</a>
Twitter has started showing me soft pornography and other teams football fans that I don’t follow in my main feed. Either is a step too far for me, I’ve logged out on all devices (web, I’ve never had the app) and I’m going to see how many days I can go before logging back in.<p>Elon Musk is not a product person he’s building something nobody wants in my opinion and I’m happier without it. API being turned off is just another mark against a terrible product.
To document, it says this right now for me:<p>---<p>This page is down<p>I scream. You scream. We all scream... for us to fix this page. We’ll stop making jokes and get things up and running soon.
An incidental data point - I run a number of Twitter bots (nice bots that are helpful), and those are still working.<p>So the API hasn’t been fully turned off. At least, not for all API users.