Twitter meltdown
I have already left Twitter last year after being taken over by fascists.
Thursday, 9to5google reported that one of the last mechanism that provided users agency to Twitter, namely the API, has been shutdown, breaking third-party clients:
Around 11 p.m. ET this evening, many Twitter users noticed that third-party clients were throwing back error messages related to the Twitter API. This widespread outage is occurring across all third-party apps including Twitterrific, Fenix, Talon, and many others on both Android and iOS, as well as macOS. Tweetbot is also affected by the API outage, but Tweetdeck, thankfully, appears unaffected.
I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.
And it seems that app developers haven’t even heard from Twitter either.
Third-party clients have been giving user agency by allowing users to customize the way they would view their Twitter feed. Chronological order? :check:. Mute and filtering keywords and hastags ? :check:. These clients invented the retweet and the hashtag1. And more importantly, the client did hide ads, sponsored tweets, etc. Given how advertisers have been fleeing the platform, it seems logical that Twitter would look into stopping the bleeding. I don’t know the % of users who actually used third-party clients, but given how these have been limited by Twitter in the past, it’s probably not that big. Maybe it’s just cost cutting: no need to have staff to maintain something that’s shutdown.
If I hadn’t left Twitter already2, I would be right now. I can’t stand reading Twitter using the website or their own app.
And if it ever comes back, then we’ll know it was just a failure. Or just another U-turn.