Over the last few months since Elon Musk bought Twitter there has been a lot of comment and reaction, but not much with relevance to Hackaday readers. Today though that has changed, with an announcement from the company that as of February 9th they will end their free API tier. It’s of relevance here because Twitter has become one of those glue items for connected projects and has appeared in many featured works on this site. A week’s notice of a service termination is exceptionally short, so expect to see a lot of the Twitter bots you follow disappearing.
Twitter bot owners have the option of paying to continue with Twitter, or rebuilding their service to use a Mastodon instance such as botsin.space. If the fediverse is new to you, then the web is not short of tutorials on how to do this.
We feel that Twitter will be a poorer place without some of the creative, funny, or interesting bots which have enriched our lives over the years, and we hope that the spam bots don’t remain by paying for API access. We can’t help feeling that this is a misguided step though, because when content is the hook to bring in the users who are the product, throwing out an entire category of content seems short-sighted. We’re not so sure about it as a move towards profitability either, because the payback from a successful social media company is never profit but influence. In short: social media companies don’t make money but the conversation itself, and that can sometimes be worth more than money if you can avoid making a mess of it.
If the bots from our field depart for Mastodon, we look forward to seeing whether the new platform offers any new possibilities. Meanwhile if your projects don’t Toot yet, find out how an ESP32 can do it.
Header: D J Shin, CC BY-SA 3.0.
“we hope that the spam bots don’t remain by paying for API access”
Oh, they will.
Or just by not using API, instead going through browser click automation.
Or they keep paying 0.2$/h(maybe less) to people living in third world countries.
What’s Twitter?
❤️
Most twitter spam bots emulate the API used by the browser, so the content doesn’t show as ‘automated’. As long as browser access stays free the spam bots will stay free.
https://mastodon.social/@whorfin/109798737610191254 pretty much sums it up. It’ll be business as usual for the nuisance bots.
Just waiting for the day that the most wretched hive of scum and villainy closes for good.
Oh please. Mastodon isn’t THAT bad yet. But it will eventually get there, so don’t give up.
Hah, nice.
Bots are, generally, useless. There are a few that are helpful/fun, but largely they’re garbage. Spam bots are just going to factor the costs in and ramp up the quantity of posts to increase their cost/benefit position.
My local buoy ‘Bob’ has a bot that tweets his (her? Oblig black adder ref) current sea state conditions. Genuinely useful on an everyday basis…
My toilet flushing tweet days are over Feb 9th :-(
How is Elon going to make his billions back without my toilet tweets?
Its all fine with me,and kinda funny too,I have only accesed
the net “manualy”,component built computers,running various bootleg and open source software,all with a emphasis on not bieng tracked or offered(ha) stuff I did not ask to see
and have watched as each trending web app has drawn in
a huge crowd and then sucker punched them with a slow
inevitable slide into tedious ,censored, add heavy feeds
and the minute differences of how each itteration of this
engages people is not news
Is this like an haiku on steroids?
Cory Doctorow calls this “Enshittification“:
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
I’ve been asking for pay services instead of spyware. I’d much rather pay for products than be the product. The meltdowns over the generally low priced twitter show why we can’t actually have nice things. Too many of you *want* to be the product.
“Too many of you *want* to be the product.”
High quality “product”.
Nah, i rather use a small hobby server where i am part of the community. You know, like in the old days, just happens that the isles are all connected now.
But this is a case where you get to PAY to be the product, worse of all worlds.
Two things:
a) this almost sounded like a pro-bot post which is surreal given the blanket condemnation of the things prior to this announcement. So really it’s about whether you like Musk or not. If he keeps bots he’s bad but if he gets rid of bots … he’s bad.
b) there will be paid-for bots and that will mean there will be a way to ‘following the money’ ie. no anonymous bots
In any case, except for all the moaning and dripping about the company’s ownership there doesn’t seem to be much different about twitter if you actually followed anyone who hasn’t left.
Yes, because no criminal would ever dream of using stolen credit card details to sign up god API access.
Almost nobody was ever talking about removing all bots, you’re chasing a non-existant bogeyman in your argumentation. Automation of all forms and shapes have been essential to twitter’s culture, pretty much everyone loved the API.
Just start your own twitter for bots, breh. Call it botter and make sure all the bots are verified bots. Give them a levitating banana sticker for a verified badge.
It was a pro-bot post.
There are a lot of very nice and useful bots to follow on twitter, as well as plenty of article on this website about writing your own twitter bot.
Exactly. Nothing wrong with a bot that’s there to do a useful job.
Hackaday already knew where all of this would end… nearly 14 years ago:
https://hackaday.com/2009/04/13/twittering-toots-a-chairs-perspective/
Good riddance. Now if Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Palantir and a couple of others would do us a favour and get bought (and fat fingered) by some rich and clueless dude armed with a sink…
Folks, this could be a nice world indeed.
All those are already undergoing systemic enshittification and will inevitably die:
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
I suspect this is about legal cases in the EU and Australia and coming to the USA. It means Twitter can show there is an effort to make sure the bot’s sources are identifiable in the same way as paying a small amount for the authentication bird.
If this is the case and the content it will block is important, it will be very cheap.
What is Twitter ? … Never been over there though. Sites like this are the ‘closest’ I get to ‘social media’. So if they’d all disappear it would ‘ok’ with me — no skin in the ‘game’.
For some reason this site removed ‘kidding’. What is Twitter? ‘kidding’ …
Did you put it in brackets?
Wait, no more tweeting cat toilets? That’s horrible!
I remember the first time I saw Twitter, I thought “Wow this is a fantastic way for my services to communicate their status to me in a fun way, like a place for my bots to communicate in a way me and all my users can see in realtime!”
Never really expected actual people to really use it tbh
It’s a shame actually, because I read an article a while back about how twitter *could* have become the world’s IoT information message service, like a global MQTT broker. They missed the boat on that by not realizing what they had and implementing authentication that prevented any old arduino uno from being able to access it. Plenty of services have sprung up to try and fill the void (eg thingspeak) but so far there hasn’t been a true replacement afaik.
” In short: social media companies don’t make money but the conversation itself, and that can sometimes be worth more than money”
Ehh, what???
How many employees get paid in “conversations” and since those conversations that do not match the agenda get silenced the conversations are more like a combination of an echo chamber and a hall of mirrors. “Oooh, all these people think exactly like I do. I must be right”
Social media companies are all about making money. The interaction is just a tool to get you to come to a site and have ads shown to you.
I’m sure the FBI was paying a hefty sum to have the, pre-Musk, Twitter employees silence conversation and news stories to manipulate the US elections, too.
Regardless if Twitter survives or not, Musk buying it was the best thing that could have happened. One less tool to manipulate elections.
After all those employees are paid from the VC money, they don’t make much profit. The riches of social media founders invariably come from overhyped stock prices.
Twitter’s API features were previously designed for a particular set of advertisers and agencies that are no longer doing business with Twitter post acquisition. If you’re upset about this development I have reason to assume that you are either not very smart, or you work for one of those groups that stood to benefit from being able to abuse Twitter’s API. There have always been other, better ways to automate workflows.
Linus from LTT mentioned this on his podcast, one of the points was “third party apps” – which don’t displah adds…
Getting everyone to use the official app boosts viewership numbers, which is critical for ad revenue. Having all the bots on twitter pretend to be human by using the official app’s keys in order to avoid paying money furthers this aim.