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It's worth noting that we've been here before; back in 2012 Twitter attempted to curtail third party clients (albeit in a far more organised, less haphazard way): https://thenextweb.com/news/twitter-4Eventually, they stepped back from the brink, presumably after realising that it was a phenomenally stupid idea (while the fraction of Twitter users using third party clients is likely small, anyone who's anyone uses a third party client; this will vastly disproportionately hit influential users). We'll see if new leadership learns the same lesson.
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It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients and the new owner has removed access. Very disappointing if he has, particularly if he's done it with zero notice too. He has been making significant noise of feature changes in the official client coming in the next couple of weeks. Removing the third party client access would align with that, along with removing the little "posted by ..." note on each tweet a couple of months ago. I wander if the new policy is that you can't have an app that's main feature is replicating the existing functionality of twitters main app. That seems to be the rumour over there. Publishing apps like Buffer and Typefully are still working.
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Does anything stops devs from using the Web interface instead of the API? Sure it makes it a bit more challenging because parsing is involved but AFAIK it is completely legal to parse and display HTML output however you want. It's essentially like a browser add-on. I wonder if Twitter can be killed by the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy? 1. Make a client that combines Mastadon/Others and Twitter feeds, making it switching out of Twitter frictionless. 2. Provide extra functionality for non-Twitter posts, encouraging the use of the non-Twitter services. 3. Once have a good traction, penalize Twitter post to further push non-Twitter adoption. Eventually remove Twitter support completely. 4. Profit??
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You will have 2 problems with this: 1) the law, at least in the US. Laws such as copyright and maybe even the CFAA have been abused to outlaw adversarial interoperability. You'd need to either practice good opsec and operate anonymously or be based out of reach of US-allied law enforcement. 2) Apple (and maybe Google too?) - they will remove any client for a third-party service unless said client has explicit approval from the third-party, all the way up to ridiculous levels such as rejecting an app using the LAN API of smart home devices explicitly designed for this purpose: https://community.lifx.com/t/app-store-rejection-permission-...
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Another point to show what Apple's true goal is: To kill general computing. If you buy an iPhone you should be able to run whatever app you want on it. But no, Apple knows best and will not permit you to do anything it doesn't approve of. As for the APIs being copyrightable see Google vs Oracle.
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Can you elaborate on the first point? Apple might not be such a big issue because they allow reader apps. I guess they can ban you to improve their relationship with Twitter but you can also throw a subscription service as an IAP to improve your odds :)
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While it's quite possible to build an app that way, using scraping. The danger is that users of that app will get suspended from Twitter (users have explicitly agreed not to scrape), once thats happened to a couple of users, thats the end of your app. Obviously you can try to obscure that you are scraping, but that is difficult to get right and there is no way back once you get it wrong.
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On Apple devices that wouldn’t be an issue because you you can load the Twitter Web interface into a real Safari and get the markup from there for processing. Twitter can try things like CAPTCHA but this will degrade the experience for all Twitter users and you can simply delegate this CAPTCHA to your user to solve anyway.
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While for reading that works, there is an easy why via posting to spot people use that app. They can change at any moment the input names so that when posting a tweet you are exposing that you are using the scrapping client.
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Remember that you are loading full Twitter website in the background. You will use their original interface to post Tweets.
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Apple wouldn't permit such an app in the store so it's a moot point.
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Why do you think that Apple wouldn't permit it on AppStore?
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you get into an armsrace where twitter will obfuscate the markup to just wear out the scraper devs. which they can, because $$$
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Doing this requires a fair amount of development time, especially when you can break something else with this and you previously removed all the guardrails.
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That didn't stop Facebook doing it (and breaking all kinds of stuff in the process).
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Then just OCR the rendered output. It's cheap and easy these days.
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Good lick OCR-ing images and videos, though. Twitter isn't just text.
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i heard it works best on iphones, best of luck
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Apple’s vision framework is actually very good, so effective on-device extraction is really just a few lines of code on iPhone(all Apple device tbh).
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I think you'll have the same problem as Twitter with #4!
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Fair point. Maybe have a paid subscription with features that benefit social media professionals? There are some popular and profitable services economy built around social media.
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That is why companies should always stay vigilant about platform risk. In general, own your platform, don't built your business on someone else's platform, it is too easy for them to deplatform you on their whim.
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Nah, most likely Elon pulled the plug on one of those servers that "nobody knew what it was used for" and brought the API down (or maybe API prod was running in somebody's computer and their office got evicted - who knows)
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It's clear that it's not a general API outage, specific "reader" apps have been removed/blocked, including from peoples "authorised apps" in their accounts. This is not an "API Outage", I think we can be 99.9% sure it's a removal of specific apps.
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Could it just be an anti-abuse system going wrong, and reader apps are targeted because they exceed some threshold? Even with Musk's antics I don't see what would they gain by blocking API clients without announcing it - it would take Musk 30 seconds to tweet "oh btw third-party clients are done for" and would at least give everyone clarity.
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Ok, so you may be right and my estimate of 99.9% is probably over zealous. But to play devils advocate, say you are thinking of removing third party apps. You want to test the waters and see if users who use them continue to visit at the same rate when forced to use the official client. You schedule a quite "blocking" of the apps for the evening PT, your team can happily sleep through the noise generated and have the data in the morning from Asia/Europe of how people reacted. In the morning you make the call as to whether to stick with the plan or say it was an errant moderation bot. That may be to much 4d chess though...
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I bet there are people who make Twitter applications for a living. How is he damaging.
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Oh sure, I feel incredibly sorry for small business and indi-developers who may loose their income from this. I hope they have contingency plans for this eventuality and have started to diversify. There is also a whole ecosystem of "publisher" apps like Buffer and Typefully that haven't been blocked yet, if I was them I would be very worried right now.
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Twitter should've announced this, giving developers time to switch.
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You can't announce anything if you've fired the comms team.
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> You can't announce anything if you've fired the comms team. Elon fired the Tesla PR team and yet announcements still are made, usually as Tweets from him. It sucks, but a comms team isn’t necessary assuming you are ok with substandard communication.
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Can't we have the EU force them to provide an API and thus interoperability with competitors? Also, the whole silo thing reminds me of the old telephony days. We got over that, so what is the problem now?
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Why are people jumping to a ridiculous conclusion about the API being removed, especially because it's literally in the middle of the night in California? Like why assume the much more reasonable opinion that it's simply an outage.
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Because the API is still up for other apps.
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API keys are showing up for developers as "suspended".
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Funny that the people on Mastodon care about the Twitter API more than the people using Twitter. That says a lot.
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A lot less than you think. There's no such thing as "on Mastodon" and I picked https://tapbots.social quite carefully, as it's the instance where discussions about TweetBot are most likely to be replicated, given that it's the instance run by Tapbots. One has to pick the right communities, in the FediVerse. https://know.me.uk/tags/tweetbot is a very different story, to pick an example. It's another Mastodon WWW server in the FediVerse but as can be seen almost none of today's news about TweetBot can be found there. One of the things about the FediVerse is that one cannot generalize about the entire FediVerse from what is visible from a single instance.
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If we're being so pedantic, you have misspelt 'Fediverse'.
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The linked account is the developer of one of the most prominent third party Twitter clients.
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Ironically I’m having trouble reading this because I’m on my phone and Twitter URLs go to Tweetbot. So I’m guessing that’s on the list.
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Twitter allowing ban evasion and discussions about it had been a real clever move IMO. Users make a lot of noises and calls for exodus, none working, because it always happens inside the very platform.
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Indeed, never discount network effects. The amount of people that moved to Mastodon (and crucially, have actually continued posting there and haven't moved back) is miniscule compared to Twitter's overall userbase.
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https://deadbird.singlepane.io shows the API up but a trace of iOS Twitterific, Tweetbot, and Birdie shows an EoF response when api.twitter.com is called. I’d wager a backend issue over a policy change as a 403/401 isn’t returned.
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In addition to Tweetbot not working, it's been removed from my list of connected apps.
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The hard part for Twitter is figuring out who's left that can fix it.
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I disagree, the day he took over twitter people were saying "it wont be up this weekend" "it will be down in a week" "it will be offline in 2 weeks"... yet the reality is, its up and running well. The system is running as good as before. The only thing I've noticed is theres more ad's than usual. Edit: Currently there isn't any outage of Twitter as far as anyone knows. It looks like 3rd party apps have been kicked to the curb. A ~16hr regional outage in AU/NZ is not indicitive of anything. In 2021 Facebook had a global ~7hr outage. Since Musk took over we haven't had all the downtime and disruption everyone kept claiming we would have. Big companies haven outages too, but so far the death of Twitter isn't in sight. Also: I hate Musk since his comments on Ukraine and Taiwan. So don't take my comments as trying to stick up with Musk. I'm not, I hope he loses all his money and becomes broke.
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Why do we care so much though? Given the outsized influence Twitter has over politics and society, is it so bad if it shuts down and we have a few years reprieve? Musk has just lost an ungodly sum of money and has loans to repay. He’s not going to be running things for the benefit for humanity.
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Musk needs to care because if his little site is not online when people want to post, they won't use it. I applaud that he doesn't though, makes it so much funnier watching this unfold.
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Facebook had downtime on all services, globally... for like 7 hours 2021, facebook is how many orders of magnitude bigger than Twitter? And a regional outage vs the internet claiming twitter would be offline completely?
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Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most. A regional outage of that size is embarrassing whatever way you slice it. Leaving all that aside, he’s driving a massive subset of his users away at a time when he really needs all the users he can get. You can spin this however you like, this is not a good situation for him. He’s said as much outright and implied it repeatedly. Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening. This is dire for him.
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Not to disagree with your general point, I just want to nitpick this: Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most I think you're overestimating Twitter and underestimating Facebook. I don't know the best source for official stats, but a quick google suggests Twitter is ~300M users and Facebook is ~3B, so one order of magnitude. And of course the new Twitter CEO used the interesting bargaining tactic of talking down his own purchase by implying many of those 300M users are bots... Joking aside, you could argue that very few of those 3B Facebook users are active, and you'd be right; but exactly the same can be said of Twitter and there's no good reason to think the ratio is any better or worse there.
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> Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening. As much as I hope Elon loses everthing. This isn't even related to downtime of Twitter. Volentarly shutting down twitter due to it being bankrupt is not the same as it falling over and having outages. So I'm really not trying to spin anything. You're trying to take something unrelated and use it as justification as to why big bad billionaire do bad.
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This is a fair comment, I'll clarify why I mentioned that. Bringing up Tesla and SpaceX was only to point out that he doesn't really have any way to bail out bad Twitter decisions despite it being a (relatively) smaller company. There's nowhere to pull extra finances from to bail this out, and it's known he already went into debt to make the purchase. I really don't want him to lose anything. I'd like him to go back in time to when he first installed Twitter on his phone and slap the thing out of his own hand and scream "NO! THAT'S A BAD ELON!"
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In that case I agree. I can assume one of the primary reasons for cutting staff and offices is to reduce costs and hopefully get cash flow positive asap even if it’s $1 positive. That puts him in a better position to stop incurring debt.
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> Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy At least in the case of SpaceX the US government will more likely than not step in and nationalize them out of national security requirements.
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It always good to have fallback solution, isn't it?
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And that outage was the first of its kind in a long time and made a lot of news. It's not like this is usual in any way.
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I take it no such outages occurred in the prior history of twitter?
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16h is an awful lot for a social media site, even if region-specific. Single digit number of hours happen from time to time, but double digits are not really a thing anymore. Maybe in early days of social media, not in the past decade.
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Well, RIP twitter I guess. Although strangely if I search the news archives for outages with date set to before 2022..
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You get what? Anything close to that long? Don't leave me hanging! I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016, but I thought it was irrelevant because articles about outages aren't exactly top-notch in quality. Did you find anything better? If so, do share! I'd be happy to be proven wrong!
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> I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016 Actual Guardian article from 2016 discussing twitter outage lasting more than one hour: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/19/twitter-d... Amusing comments over there from readers. You are right and I am wrong. And I'm sorry. RIP Twitter.
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How is that against what I said? I said no outage lasted over an hour since 2016 and you disprove that by posting a 2016 article of an outage that lasted maybe two hours? (I don't know, the article doesn't specify.) Is let's say five hours and sixteen hours within the same ballpark? I'm not interested in a couple of hours, my claim is not one lasted 10 or more in the past decade. If such a thing actually happened, I'm sure someone would've posted it by now.
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Do you remember July 08,2022 when Rogers Communications went down for about 19 hours and services like 911 and Interac a payment service almost all Canadians use was interrupted? I guess it can happen to even the most critical of services.
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> Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business? After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it. The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to scale. The problem with Twitter, and what Musk doesn't seem to understand, is a sociological and political one. Social networks are the crack cocaine of tabloid media, left to the whims of bad actors they can destroy democracies, incite lynchings, distribute hate and misinformation on scales without historical precedent. "Free speech" just doesn't cut it, social networks are publications not mediums, they chose what people get to see and react to, and the fact that the choice is made by an algorithm does not absolve them of responsibility for the consequences, especially if the algorithm is tuned for revenue maximization and easily gamed by bad actors to spread their content. By firing the watchers, Musk is setting Twitter up as an menace to stable democracies around the world.
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At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple. Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff. But the current staff needs to maintain code from a MUCH larger staff. That's hard. Especially with microservices where every team did "their own thing" and some teams just vanished completely. You have "dark areas" where no one knows how stuff works and what's going on. Normally when you downsize at this scale you do this in an orderly way. Every person hands off their work and responsibility. Spends a couple of weeks writing docs and instructions and then leaves. This was done quickly and violently. I'm sure there's many repercussions we don't see simply because the systems are simply running. Once the team looks at some containers and decides to pull the plug to "see what happens" we'll find out...
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> “At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple“ Elon should get real experts like Infosys or Wipro in to rebuild it.
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Sometimes it's really hard to tell if people are joking or serious in HN...
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> Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff. So you are essentially saying Twitter has an over-complicated architecture with regards to its real technical needs, so Musk was right to axe the microservice zealots. Good we can agree on that. The next step is to acknowledge that code and data-centers continue to work long after their original designers have left the company, that's what computers are, tools for automation. Keeping the lights on and services in a roughly functional state is an activity that requires much less people of relatively lower qualification, even if they couldn't have engineered it themselves. Yes, there is a long term risk of code rot and entropy if Musk does not plan for a gradual transition to a better engineered architecture with competent maintainers. But we are not there yet, far from it. Meanwhile, schadenfreude people have rooted for a twittocaplipse from day one, nay, predicted it as inevitable. There is absolutely no sign it's going to happen, and Twitter turned out sufficiently simple after all on the technical side.
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People choose to use social media, as they choose all media. People are individually responsible for the physical actions they make, even if a little bird told them what to do. It may be easier to control people by limiting what thoughts they're exposed to, but a people isn't free if that's done.
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It's all fun and games until you are slain in the street because people chose to regard you as subhuman after a little bird told them so. Disseminating politically extreme misinformation kills people - look no further than Russia, where a state run propaganda campaign has made people no more stupid or immoral than you or me support a vicious war of aggression against their neighbors.
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I don't see leftists compaining about free (leftist) speech on Reddit or 4chan, for some reason the free speech is only problematic on twitter
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They don't have the scale to sway large parts of the public opinion, so they are irrelevant. Also, what you call "left" might simply be the truth, and it's very hard to fight against that. For an example of toxic ideological delusion in the left camp you can see the harm done to adolescents by the gender nuts, it's absolutely out of control on Reddit and there will be reckoning day with its many victims.
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>They don't have the scale to sway large parts of the public opinion According to some infographic in a thread on HN yesterday, reddit is currently the most viewed site in the US, Australia and a few other countries, so it seems like it could have a sway on large parts of public opinion
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So absolutely no outages happened before Musk took over in the past decade then? To Downvoters: Looks like the immediate downvotes over asking a simple question really shows the irrationality and emotive reaction about anything Twitter because of Elon Musk. I guess outages did happen, but somehow commenters here are setting the standard for Twitter's uptime to be 1000% up and always available with absolutely zero downtime when they all know that is impossible unless no-one is using the platform.
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Twitter used to be extremely unreliable, and in fact back on the late noughties this was commonly seen as a reason that Twitter was doomed and would be replaced by other microblogging platforms (there was precedent; a number of early social media sites had already died essentially due to unreliability). Eventually, it became fairly rock solid, and has stayed like that since. A reversion to "oh, yeah, essential features are down for hours, that's just Twitter being Twitter" definitely feels like going back to the noughties.
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No, they happened. They didn't last a double digit number of hours though. Not gonna say in decades, but in the past decade for sure.
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Nobody said "absolutely no outages happened [..] for decades" and the fact that they did doesn't refute what you're replying to. You're not being downvoted for not being irrationally angry at Musk. You're being downvoted for being disingenuous in a very obvious way and then pretending the downvotes prove you right.
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> simple question really shows the irrationality and emotive reaction about anything Twitter because of Elon Musk I think you're right here, just not in the way you intended. Because this is not a reasonable standard to use: > So absolutely no outages happened before Musk took over in the past decade then?
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I feel that my downvote won’t accurately express my dislike of this comment, so to provide a further explanation: you’re making absolutely zero effort to engage with this conversation. You’ve completely fabricated a point of view to oppose. Nobody here can be construed as being on the opposing side of “things have downtime sometimes”. I’ve every right to believe that you’re an Elon Musk fanboy because your reaction seems incredibly emotionally driven.
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If anything is emotionally driven, it's your reply. I am also interested to know if outages happened before or is a recent phenomenon. I don't have a stake for electric car space man, or furiously despise him for god knows what as per above.
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They've likely learned a lot from that incident already. No, Twitter isn't gonna "blow up" overnight. That's nonsense.
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> No, Twitter isn't gonna "blow up" overnight. That's nonsense. It's also not something any of the parent comments claimed.
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If they hadn't purged the entire staff they wouldn't need to relearn the same lessons
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> its up and running well I would from personal experience disagree on the "well" part. I'm suddenly following accounts I recently unfollowed again. Previously blocked accounts show up. The search doesn't find stuff it used to find anymore - posts that are definitely not deleted because I can usually find them via other references.
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I have noticed that the explore page, and my timeline are way staler than they used to be. Tweets I have seen or even interacted with keep popping to the top all day, and trends on the explore page can be there for days at a time. It can take hours for major world events don't show up on the explore page for me sometimes.
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He haphazardly ordered turning off "bloated" microservices, including the one responsible for sending auth codes via SMS for 2FA... Learning through mistakes is a thing particularly for newbies, but a CEO should absolutely have a clue about not micromanaging, especially in areas he practically doesn't understand and after firing most people who do.
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It's not like the employees are some gnomes running the system by pulling levers so it is not surprising that rhe system seems to be running ok. The problem arises at the point when there are bugs or other incidents and there is nobody who can fix them.
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Consider the quality of engineer of the departed team that allowed Twitter to run without incidents for so long. Also, change is the most frequent cause of incidents, as no one was pushing new changes there were fewer chances of an incident.
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Reading that article, I am actually impressed that after that 45-minute outage in 2022, the next major outage was all the way back in 2016. I would say that is actually quite an endorsement for the quality of engineers they had.
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I'm unsure if it is running as good as before. I have noticed more issues over the past week than I ever have using Twit. Particularly, a nasty bug that keeps the timeline refreshing while scrolling and is constantly moving content around on the screen. Curious if anyone else has run into something similar.
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If you buy a house and move into it does it suddenly break apart? If not, does the new owner get credit for it not breaking apart? It’s working _in spite of_ the new owner, not because of.
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His comments on Taiwan were prompted comments in request to a question buried in some interview. He didn't rant about it. He hasn't ever mentioned it on Twitter. And how he was quoted was very different from what he actually said.
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I said good comments. Not his tweets. I’m fully aware of what he said. It was all over the news in Taiwan. He pissed off a lot of people here. He showed everyone how in bed he is with the CCP.
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This comment feels a bit out of place on a post about part of Twitter being down.
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Currently it looks like 3rd party apps have been cut off, not the Twitter or the API being down. So I don't consider it out of place.
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It’s running well because the old guard built it so well. Musk threw them all out, so it will slowly but surely degrade. There was a reason Twitter had such a large workforce.
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The tragedy of Twitter is that: - they were absolutely undoubtedly overstaffed - Musk's approach was absolutely undoubtedly insane shenanigans of a stupid rich cry-baby Both are true at the same time
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This is roughly my feeling, but I'm a little less sure of the absolutely/undoubtedly part. Someone below is asking for evidence but I don't think any one of us could produce evidence for or against this. It all boils down to either "Twitter had ~7500 employees and..." 1. ... that feels like a huge amount for a company that has basically a single product 2. ... that feels entirely appropriate for a company operating at their scale What we've observed is that they've kinda managed to keep going despite Elon axing an enormous number of employees, but they've also had a few high-profile outages like this one today, the 2FA issue and 16hr Aus outage. I don't know if these are enough for either side to declare that they're correct. One thing I would like to say - even though I had a feeling Twitter was probably overstaffed, I was in no way celebrating the redundancies. Similarly even though I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, I'm not delighting in all these little goofs he's doing and how it's impacting him personally - every little embarrassment he suffers and every dip in Tesla stock makes it more likely he'll just call it quits or fuck up Twitter more. For all its faults, I quite like Twitter and I don't want it to just disappear.
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> they were absolutely undoubtedly overstaffed Oh? What's your evidence here?
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Look at FB's staff from back when they had comparable revenue and way more users. I believe that 2013-14 FB was comparable in terms of revenue and users, and they had approximately half the staff.
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So? WhatsApp had 35 developers and 350 million users. By that measure, every other company is grossly overstaffed. Personally, I could argue that every social network is grossly understaffed by the measure of how lax they are about what they are supporting. E.g., in 2017, that company you say is more appropriately staffed contributed to a genocide that left tens of thousands dead: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
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WhatsApp wasn’t a social network with public posts of rich media. It’s trivial from an architectural perspective because there isn’t anything that needs to be sent to millions of users.
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> By that measure, every other company is grossly overstaffed. Recent layoffs across a big chunk of the tech industry suggest this argument may have at least some truth in it. > that company you say is more appropriately staffed contributed to a genocide that left tens of thousands dead Contributing to a genocide has nothing to do with staffing levels and all to do with unhealthy incentives - the company makes its money on "engagement", and it turns out polarizing/divisive/violent/outrageous content generates a lot more of it than friends/family/cat pictures, so effectively moderating toxic content is actually against their bottom line and is only needed in extreme cases where the toxic content's negative PR impact outweighs what it will bring in "engagement".
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So under what conditions would you consider a company overstaffed?
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I would say you are overstaffed if A) you can't afford them and / or B) you've grown so fast, you don't know how to make use of the staff you have. Perhaps there is a C) which is a variant of B) the business model you are running only requires so much staff and you hit a ceiling in growth.
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I would not claim to have enough information about twitter being overstaffed? They might have a lot of technical debt, which can cause the need for more people to run it. But that is not "overstaffing".
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The question is also how overstaffing is measured. If adding another person reduces the average productivity, you might define that as the cut-off due to the declining ROI for every other person added. But you probably also want some level of redundancy (aka reducing the bus factor) in order to account for the ongoing global health situation and general churn. Of course repeated waves of mass layoffs, demanding a pledge of allegiance to the company and revocation of all employee privileges at the threat of being fired and publicly throwing your employees repeatedly under the bus are also ways to reduce churn, so the bar for "overstaffing" might have actually lowered.
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Is this the same twitter who almost died trying to scale when they started? They have been in worse spots. They will be fine and much of the old guard still works there.
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If you’re going to argue against what “people” say, you’re always going to look like you’re the smart one and the person you’re disagreeing with is the stupid one.
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Really don't know why this is downvoted. We had relentless articles like this [0] expecting the complete and total shutdown of Twitter, globally. That never happened and everyone knows that it was pure hysteria. > Since Musk took over we haven't had all the downtime and disruption everyone kept claiming we would have. Big companies haven outages too, but so far the death of Twitter isn't in sight. So because [0] did not happen most of the critics are setting a new standard for Twitter uptime to be 1000% globally 24/7, absolutely zero outages of any kind and never down for one person. If one outage somewhere happens, it is immediately the end of the world. It wasn't the end of the world when Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok had worldwide outages, but 1 regional outage on Twitter and it is somehow the end of times? Please. The fact is, You are getting downvoted because Twitter is still up and running and many of the replies here cannot stand that predictions like this [0] did not come true and will point at any intermittent issue to show the 'Twitter is dying' narrative. The death of Twitter has been greatly exaggerated. If you really wanted it to die, just ignore it. Simple. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
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Is this potentially retaliatory to negative responses to recent Twitter Blue changes? I saw that Twitter started displaying Blue subscriber tweets in a rather obnoxious way, which resulted in non-subscribers removing and blocking subscribers. I’ve also seen that some users were subscribing Blue expecting their deboosting penalties to clear, only for it to be worsened. That weakly suggests to me that Blue subscriber demographic is split between undesirable users, either undesirable to other users or to Twitter itself. If so, …
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This might be the last straw. I flat out refuse to use their horrible app with its nonsense algorithmic timeline. Give it a few hours to see if it's permanent but if it is, I expect a huge wave of new mastodon users..
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Let's be real, if your "last straw" moment wasn't several weeks ago it's unlikely this is gonna be it. But if it is, shame on you. All the silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying "mastodon", or saying anything negative about Tesla, or criticizing Musk in any way, that didn't do it. But now you have been mildly inconvenienced and it's the last straw. Really?
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There's two reasons to leave a service, you can make a political statement - you leave because you disagree with their politics and you don't want to endorse them by associating with them. That's a legitimate reason to leave (although extremely often people declare they're doing this and then don't). But it's also perfectly legitimate to say "I'm leaving because the product got worse". It's sort of orthogonal to the political reason. Some people don't buy from Nestle because of Nestle's terrible track record, but I don't buy from Nestle because they're not selling anything I want. The second reason, generally is the thing that actually kills services. Digg didn't die because it conducted business unethically, it died because they fucked up the product, and that's what's happening here.
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This is an excellent reply. Microblogging lends itself to absolutist statements. I guess sometimes people forget that the black and white thinking on twitter is a function of the medium and not a fact of reality.
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I mean, I think there are going to be a lot of people who _don't_ care about Saint Car's antics, but do care about Saint Car making the site unusable. And killing third party clients will make it unusable for many people. Personally, my last straw was the journalists, but if I hadn't cared about that or other ridiculous Musk behaviours, _this_ would still drive me away; I haven't really used Twitter by any means besides Tweetbot in about a decade. They're essentially different issues. The journalists, and the Fauci stuff, and the unbanning of various Nazis, are all, essentially, content/moderation issues, whereas this is a usability issue.
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Eh, that seems a bit unnecessary to me. I left Twitter nearly two months ago. Ultimately, I just couldn't stomach supporting Musk by continuing to view ads, contribute content, and give people positive feedback (via likes and retweets) that helped them stay: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1593662348568326151 But I don't think that people who stayed are necessarily morally defective. There have always been reasons to quit Twitter and reasons to stay. Most people stayed either because they decided Twitter was a net positive for them or because Twitter is a habit-forming drug, or a bit of both. It's not only unsurprising to me that some take longer to quit than others, that's part of what made me leave: to undermine, ever so slightly, the rewards for staying. If this disruption to their usual method of consumption is what pushes them over the line, great. We live in an age where it's impossible to live an ethically pure life, so I'm happy to celebrate steps forward as people take them. Good job, Twitter quitters! Welcome to the club.
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Ha, fair response. But the truth is I haven't much cared, you're right. Twitter is a private company, they agreed to sell and Musk bought it, if he wants to screw up his asset and his reputation by doing ridiculous things, that's his prerogative. I don't really follow much of that drama, nor do I regard twitter as some kind of indispensable public utility. But yes, now it is personally inconveniencing me, and so I'm looking at alternatives.
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> All the silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying "mastodon", or saying anything negative about Tesla, or criticizing Musk in any way, that didn't do it. Not all of this is accurate. Sure, hating on Musk for banning linking to Mastadon is legit, but there isn't a ban on criticising Musk, there are countless accounts with tens of thousands of followers happily ranting about how evil Musk is. Similarly Tesla. Also, if you're talking about the Thursday Massacre aren't they all reinstated?
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How dare people care about the functionality of a service. Only moral judgements are allowed.
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God forbid someone stops using a product because it’s no longer nice to use. No no no, every commercial interaction must be driven by a deep political alignment strategy.
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The thing about last straws is they're usually just a small bit of straw
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For a few days now on the iOS app I have "For You" and "Following" on the top and I can swipe between them, left and right. It has a tendency to keep switching back to the "For You" that I don't like but at least it's quick to switch back to who I'm actually following. Am I being A/B tested?
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Silly peasant, stop fighting the algorithm and embrace being fed filtered garbage instead of something atleast temporally coherent... /s
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This is not new at all. I forgot when the "For You" tab got deployed, but for a while my iOS app kept switching to it-- hasn't happened in months now.
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I use twitter.com in desktop browser, and chronological timeline is still there (accessible via "sparkle icon").
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That’s chronological but still algorithmic.
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Sure, technically, chronological ordering is an algorithm. I wonder what you would want. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Tweets flowing at 250kbps or more 24/7, of course… Edit: the way “chronological” timeline works is, Twitter decides on your social graph and hide posts until it fits your serving. Shadowbans, Boosting and Deboosting are factored in as well. That is technically chronological, only technically.
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>the way “chronological” timeline works is, Twitter decides on your social graph and hide posts until it fits your serving. Shadowbans, Boosting and Deboosting are factored in as well. That is technically chronological, only technically. Source? The thing is I compare chronological timeline with lists (of users I follow) all the time, and I didn't notice any missing tweets. "Shadowbanned" tweets always were visible in lists, I personally checked that.
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Yeah, unless something has changed drastically in the couple of months since I stopped using Twitter, I believe the web-based chronological timeline is exactly as you say. As soon as you click on a tweet to see replies you're getting things ranked, of course. But one's home timeline should be fine.
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I moved to Tweetbot a few weeks ago when using internal keywords to hide "X person liked...", "X person follows..." tweets stopped working. Now it seems im forced back. ~50% of my feed was from people i dont follow. Does anyone know how to hide those tweets on the timeline?
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I'd say just leave twitter, bookmark those people's direct twitter feeds or use something like fetchrss or feedcreator to integrate them to your favorite rss client.
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Switch to the original timeline, not the algorithmic one.
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The issue is not the ordering, it is that it contains tweets from people i am not following. Before i could hide those by muting suggest_activity_tweet and suggest_recycled_tweet_inline This does not seem to work anymore
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Wait, what? Since when? I'm regulary reading using the chronogical timeline and I'm not seeing anything like you describe (I only see that using the "for you" algo timeline). Very concerning anyway. :(
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Oh, it seems it was reset to use the algorithmic one. I for sure did not change that myself... Thx for making me double check
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Ah! Yes, since they rolled out the For You/Timeline things, the apps tend sometimes to revert to For you randomly for no reason... One of my alts gets switched everytime, while my main account does not. All using them from the same iOS app.
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Elon is a fan of the chronological timeline, so I
would take a pause there and consider. He even tweeted out instructions on how to switch to it and away from algorithmic.
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I remember him saying that, but I'm pretty sure that was way back before he completed the purchase and the site was still perpetuating what he calls "the woke mind virus". Now that's he's fixed the algorithm so that it is instead pushing right-wing ideology he may have changed his mind.
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Talon is the only reason I used Twitter for over a year, yeah. I can't stand the site. (Talon is also not loading any tweets at the moment)
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I’m the same, I don’t really mind ads but I do not like the “algorithmic” timeline. Will find a way that doesn’t involve using their official iOS app, even if it means falling back to mobile web
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I use the mobile web. It's better than the app, and switching to chronological is easy.
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Agreed. I can't speak for iOS but the Android app is terrible. The font is too big and the scrolling is incredibly janky on high refresh rate displays. Mobile web is the only way to use Twitter on Android, and the PWA behaves mostly like a real app.
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which other social app allows using chronological-mode?
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Elon said recently there are big changes coming to the timeline so it can be whatever you want
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There were reports about timeline changes on iOS: >In a change rolling out to iOS users first, the company has taken away the star button at the top right that let you switch between two feeds. In its place are two tabs — one labeled “For You” and the other “Following” — and when you open the app, you’ll see the For You tab first. https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/10/23549368/twitter-for-you-...
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Still waiting for the Tesla Supercharger network allowing non Tesla vehicle use.
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Heck, I'm still waiting for the robotaxis. "[2020] for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road,"
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Other API apps like Movetodon and Tweetdelete still work, it looks like it's only third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific that have stopped working. They're also gone from my Connected Apps. This makes it look deliberate.
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I checked my Connected Apps list and can still see Tweetbot there, but it said I approved those permissions back in 2011, is ”Tweetbot for iOS” the same as the current Tweetbot available in the App Store?
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No. The current subscription-based version required new auth when released (was a separate app).
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Surely someone at Twitter has to say something official about whats going on here. There’s no way they can continue radio silence.
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What was it, “Twitter, which no may longer have a public relations department, did not reply to a request for comments”?
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True but they still managed to communicate the new timeline changes somehow. One would hope that someone could at least acknowledge an issue seven hours or so after it’s happened.
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Why would they acknowledge it? "We are killing our competitors" doesn't spin well, so might as well ignore it
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If that is their intent, then yeah - bit ruthless and self-defeating but I sort of get it. But it is a possibility that there was a fuckup, some clients got deleted, and they’re either working on resolving it (and failing) or the only people left who can fix it are in a time zone where they’re still asleep. eh we will see I suppose
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Seconding the appreciation of Fenix. Using the official app after being accustomed to Fenix is such a let down.
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Same thing is happening with Twitteriffic - I’m assuming Twitter’s API is down, or worse: the new owner has decided that 3rd party clients are not desirable anymore
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As Sean Heber, a Twitterific developer, posted it’s now a game of wait and see if this is policy or just an outage. If it’s not an outage, I guess I expected more ceremony around this.
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Elon's Twitter is the exact opposite of ceremony.
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Hahaha first I've heard this nickname. My agua fresca would like a word with whoever came up with this.
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I’m believe the full nickname is Melon Husk.
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I wish Twitterific made a Mastodon client, its great UX compared to the official Twitter app is one of the major reasons I was still using Twitter. And events like this shows they shouldn't put all their eggs in one basket.
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That is a very sensible proactive move on the part of the team, they must have both been concerned about the future viability of third party twitter clients, and the potential of Mastodon as a new market. From what I've heard the Mastodon client they are building is very good, it's in closed beta right now.
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I'm looking forward to trying it when more Testflight spots open up, it will be a day one purchase when released.
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They’ve said they expect to release publicly by the end of the month. I don’t Mastodon much, but the beta is my only client and slick to use.
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I don't post to Twitter, but I still sometimes use Twitterrific to read it since not everybody I enjoy there has successfully moved to Mastodon. (Although tbh it is only William Gibson, David Frum, and Grady Booch that keep me reading Twitter.) I too thought the 'garch might have abruptly pulled the plug on the API. But then, I installed the Twitter iOS app and tried that, and it emitted a cascade of error screens, too. So if I had to bet a dollar, I'd bet on "shit malfunctioning".
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I know, but (like a lot of people) he didn't end up posting there after signing up. Although Mastodon ended up being "about as good" for me (who just reads it when e.g. waiting in a line or something) as Twitter, there are these few people like him who made my Twitter feed something special who aren't really active on Mastodon. (BTW indie dev world, I've paid money for years for Twitterrific and would definitely pay money for a client that did a reasonable job of showing me people I follow on various social brainfart networks, all in one place).
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Hope this is a good old fashioned outage. However, after the “sent from” feature was recently removed, I have a hard time believing the owner has a positive opinion on the existence of the API. A shame how much it has been pared down already.
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Did someone play around with the servers again? :) Maybe he chewed on some server cables this time
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I noticed an error on Twitter an hour ago. It looks like there are old school radio buttons peeking out from behind Twitter-style checkboxes that are (I think) supposed to cover them entirely: https://imgur.com/a/HCWmfgS
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Would be interesting to inspect element and see if there are new radio options.
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Since third-party clients don't make Twitter any ad revenue, I could see them making API access a feature of Blue in order to get revenue from those users.
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It'd be very Elon-like to ignore that there are countries other than US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the UK.
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Given that his entire [claimed] rationale is “restoring free speech in America” you can scratch countries 2-6 off that list.
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The rationale is to control the narrative and align Twitter’s politics with his own. It’s just like the hundred other rich dudes who bought newspapers over the years.
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Admittedly there being a big right wing social media would be an interesting change. Curious to see how it goes (from a distance as I don't use twitter).
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Twitter was that big right wing social media site, in that it was extremely useful for a large number of right wing organisations and people to amplify their messaging and get many followers. That's what made it far more attractive to those on the right than Parler, Truth Social, Gettr, and all the others. For instance Trump owed much of his popularity to his Twitter account and the way it allowed him to communicate much more effectively in a completely unfiltered way with both his existing supporters and undecided potentials. The same pattern has repeated with right wing politicians in other countries. Those who were banned or otherwise de-amplified tended to be very fringe or extreme, and were never a significant chunk of the right wing. That's one reason why the alternatives never took off, as the kinds of people they attracted were those that few people really wanted to deal with or associate with.
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Trying to be the new Rupert Murdoch, but failing.
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I feel like kicking 3rd party apps off the platform must be at least nominally illegal in some of these countries. Aside from the US, these are countries with strong consumer protections with real teeth.
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Is that the Commonwealth and its major colonies…
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That would be actually great - I don't mind paying to avoid annoying ads
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I wished everyone who Tweets would also post to the Fediverse. Because fediverse nodes like Mastodon support RSS out of the box. Twitter is my only news source that I cannot consume via RSS. So if you publish something on Twitter, you miss most of my attention and only catch it if I log into Twitter that day. Or post to your personal website and have it support RSS or Atom. It is super easy to implement. Or if you use a ready made cms like Wordpress, it usually supports it out of the box.
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just a tip, if you really need it for some interesting accounts, you can consume twitter feeds as RSS by using nitter, eg: https://nitter.net/dril/rss
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I do the reverse. My primary is now Mastodon, and I use a relay. I do have to pop into the birdsite to check replies, though. That's about all I do with it now.
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Shouldn't Tweetbot be in my Connected apps? It's not anymore.
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I’m seeing others report the same thing. I have a Tweetbot in my connected app list, but that could be an old version somehow.
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Good lord people... Why is everyone jumping to "this is the end of the Twitter API" when in reality it's late at night in California and is much more likely a simple outage. Everyone needs to cool their jets. I don't understand the hyperbole. Every new thing that happens at Twitter is a new "this is the end of Twitter" even though it never is.
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I have seen a handful of “this is it” comments out of ~180 in total and they were all downvoted to 0 or less. Most of the rest of the comments are people trying to figure out wtf works and doesn’t or people speculating if Twitter are moving to kill off 3rd Party apps (and whether they’d have to move to Twitter mobile web).
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Almost every top post is a "this is it" post, along with many of the second level posts on the top posts that aren't.
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The top few comments are… Top: speculating about 3p clients “It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients …” Second: about lack of comms, “Ironically, we can know about this through posts to the FediVerse from the developer of Tweetbot, and ensuing discussion.” Third: list of banned clients Fourth: link to API status visualisation Fifth: your comment Sixth: someone saying that they don’t want to use Twitters own app so they’ll just quit are we looking at the same thing?
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RIP. I’m hoping it’s temporary but not optimistic. Could it be a coincidence that Twitter relaunched the algo timeline for everyone and within a day 3P clients that are linear-first stop working? Although with the all the people laid off, who knows.
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Fenix also got removed from my connected apps and can no longer update its timeline. Feels like they're intentionally removing authorization for third party clients
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Pretty sure my Twitter bot is still happily tweeting via API (on a periodic cron job, doesn't seem to have missed it's post schedule). I'm not at my computer right now but I'll check my logs later and see if I got any errors.
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This. I immediately checked my IRC/IM bots and other tools that uses the API, they still work perfectly. So it looks like it's a sort of crackdown against third-party clients, and not API wind-down or technical issue (why would a technical issue only block some?).
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Same. The API seems fine, just specific applications that have had their access revoked.
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Can confirm: Tweetbot suddenly stopped working for me, on macOS, a couple hours ago.
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Well, I hope they don’t mess with Tweetdeck.
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Don't worry, Clownlon will quickly rewrite the Twitter API service this weekend, make it as "beautiful as Niagra Falls", and hand it off to the Twitter engineers to maintain.
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I can only see Twitter beginning to monetize third-party API access with some subscription plan whilst keeping the Twitter app free of charge (and protected with captchas, anti-botting tools, etc) Either way, this demonstrates that it makes no sense to build an entire company soley on someone else's API.
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Someone should have told Slide, "the creators of SuperPoke!" Besides that tagline about making a useless Facebook add-on feature that already existed, their recruiters never did explain what they did beyond like 3 Facebook API calls.
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Tweetbot can't authorize, but Twitteriffic authorizes and works
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You were probably using an auth token that hadn't yet expired. If you reauthorize, it will probably fail.
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Hmm, 7 minutes after your post, my Twitteriffic still fails and is stuck on the "Sign in with Twitter" screen.
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Tweetbot won't authorize, but Twitteriffic does
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Here’s what I see: Something Bad Has Happened At Twitter Twitterrific users are currently unable to access the service via the iOS app. As of this writing we have heard nothing officially from Twitter and are trying to learn more. This may just be a temporary bug; it may be more a more serious issue. As soon as we know more we'll update this message. We thank you as always for your support and patience as we work through this problem. - The Iconfactory Team
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