Twitter’s API is down? | Hacker Information

Phil Tadros · January 13, 2023

2023-01-12 21:51:48

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Apps like Buffer and Typefully are still working.

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

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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).

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.

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..

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Source Link

What's Your Reaction?

Leave a Reply