back to article Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

Numerous third-party Twitter clients stopped working on Thursday evening, Pacific Time, and as of Friday morning, they remained non-functional. It's not clear why this occurred. The developers of apps like Twitterrific, Tweetbot, Echofon, and other third-party apps for interacting with Twitter have been unable to learn more …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What a beautiful bit of sarcasm..

    Twitter developers, long accustomed to indifferent, inconsistent treatment under previous management, can now enjoy active contempt.

    If things were still working this would have possibly lead to a TSMB (Thin Skinned Musk Ban) as it's not complimenting the brilliantness of Musk's leadership.

    And yet it's so, so true. Thanks for the chuckle..

    1. bazza Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: What a beautiful bit of sarcasm..

      Active contempt? Active contempt? You lucky, lucky bar stewards. When I were a lad, we'd have wept with joy to have been met with just active contempt. We ad to search through reams of made up assembler neumonics to find an API call in an actual book, wearing a blindfold with random pages made out of tin foil wired to the national grid. An if we were lucky to find out how to make an API call, we'd have to sacrifice a close relative to appease the API God to ave any ope of getting a return. Pah, active contempt is for softies, I can tell you. Next thing you'll be complaining that your mechanical keyboard is too noisy.

      (TSMB is great btw!)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: What a beautiful bit of sarcasm..

        Active contempt is for softies, you say?

        Ohh we used to DREAM of active contempt. WE only had Microsofties, and the only thing active in our lives was ActiveX.

        But you try telling the youth of today

      2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

        Re: What a beautiful bit of sarcasm..

        find an API call in an actual book

        Ah memories.. back when I was still pretending to be a programmer (1994-5 ish) - writing a small .com binary that used DOS system calls (from the Big Book of DOS Internals) to enumerate all the OS2 Lan Server print servers on the network, connect to the default share (by default open to everyone) on each print server then crawl down the directories to see what people had dumped on there (people generally didn't know how to connect to those shares so those in the know used to use them to pass pirated stuff around).

        Some very interesting content.. this was before the days of usuable video content so none of it was *that* interesting..

        Sadly, people noticed that the LAN (IBM 4MB Token-Ring) got quite slow and eventually worked out why. So I could only run it out of hours..

        I grew out of being a programmer and started doing support. Much easier, even with having to deal with programmers..

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "...can now enjoy active contempt."

    latest thought droppings .... "virtue rises with the sun" and sets with musk?

    Really sets new standards of buffoonery to which the likes of Boris Johnson could only aspire.

    What constitutes some people's idea of enjoyment does verge on the incomprehensible but based on my little exposure to "social media" I am not sure I really have any desire to understand.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: "...can now enjoy active contempt."

      I wonder exactly how far North he is to have an 0814 sunrise? Clearly he had a lie in that morning and probably his "virtue" was all used up by sunset at about 1600ish. Doe this mean his virtue is not only dependant on daylight, but it varies in start/stop times based on his latitude and time of the year? As someone who owns at least three private jets, this may explain a lot about his strange behaviour.

      1. keithpeter Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: "...can now enjoy active contempt."

        Round about 52 degrees north

        (Greetings from the Midlands)

        Icon: no coffee pot available here

  3. sarusa Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Mars Ahoy

    Yeah, this is just the kind of angry petulant toddler you want in control of your life on Mars.

    1. Andy 73 Silver badge

      Re: Mars Ahoy

      "Dome Nine - you have not been consuming your required minimum number of Musk-Bisks. Oxygen will be limited until you meet the corporation's expectations. Peace, citizens of Mars. Virtue rises with the sun."

    2. simonlb Silver badge
      Big Brother

      Re: Mars Ahoy

      "Take two blue pills. In ten minutes, take two more. Help is on the way."

      1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

        Re: Mars Ahoy

        Viagra will help?

        Hmm, at least I will have something to play with while waiting...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Mars Ahoy

          You're a hard man.

          No, wait ..

    3. mobailey

      Re: Mars Ahoy

      re: "Sorry, when exactly are you going to sod off to Mars, mate?"

      But as soon as he got to Mars, he'd fire half the astronauts.

      -mobailey

    4. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: Mars Ahoy

      We've all seen Total Recall.

      And at least that guy had some logic / rationale of purpose, even if it was outright greed.

      I think I'd rather have him over Musk, at least you can predict what he's going to do next.

  4. gecho

    Live

    I noticed this week that Twitter got rid of live (ie: chronological) results for hashtags. It's making Twitter useless as a local news source for me since it only shows Top results from a week ago.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Live

      Still an option for me on twitter mobile web (in portrait mode)

      https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=%23london&src=typed_query&f=live

  5. Winkypop Silver badge
    Facepalm

    When you’re in a hole

    Keep digging?

    1. chivo243 Silver badge
      Windows

      Re: When you’re in a hole

      dig faster? Dig deeper?

      1. nematoad
        Happy

        Re: When you’re in a hole

        dig faster? Dig deeper?

        Just the job for the Boring Company.

      2. Jimmy2Cows Silver badge

        Re: Dig deeper?

        No, no, no, dig up! Any fule kno that's how you get out of a hole.

    2. zuckzuckgo Silver badge

      Re: When you’re in a hole

      When you're an a-hole ...

      Fixed that for you.

    3. hittitezombie

      Re: When you’re in a hole

      Good news! He's got a company for that!

  6. redpawn

    Genius is as Geius does

    I would have said "Monkey see, Monkey do" but that would have yielded better results for Twitter. All hail that panjandrum who is Musk.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Genius is as Ge[n]ius does

      Weirdly, just before reading this I saw a program on the telly which in part was talking about the WWII weapon, the Panjandrum, and it's total and hilarious failure to work as intended :-)

      1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

        Re: Genius is as Ge[n]ius does

        Wikipedia: Panjandrum, also known as The Great Panjandrum, was a massive, rocket-propelled, explosive-laden cart designed by the British military during World War II.

        Me, glossobuccalicly: what could possibly go wrong?

  7. trevorde Silver badge

    Extended error message

    {

    "title": "Unauthorized",

    "type": "about:blank",

    "status": 401,

    "detail": "Everyone is Unauthorized except me-Elon Musk (mwah ha ha ha ha)"

    }

  8. trindflo Bronze badge
    Happy

    Mastodon is pretty good

    May I recommend hachyderm? https://hachyderm.io

  9. T. F. M. Reader
    Coat

    From the article

    "It may be that the authentication issues are a consequence of lack of ad visibility or payment in affected clients."

    And Twitter has no one left to change the 401 Unauthorized code to 402 Payment Required? --->

  10. Dan 55 Silver badge

    Fritter (F-Droid, Play Store) is still working.

    That's a read-only Twitter client which doesn't need an account, probably the best way to use Twitter after not using it, since they can't keep account details safe either.

    1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      AndStatus is also working: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.andstatus.app/

      1. DvorakUser

        Also working

        The Choqok client (https://sourceforge.net/projects/choqok/) is still working for me as well.

  11. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    The meltdown continues

    Clumsy bull in China shop keeps breaking things. Soon will get angry because of all the broken pieces lying on the floor.

    The only question remaining is : when will the fire start ?

    1. Khaptain Silver badge

      Re: The meltdown continues

      Personally, I believe that Musk is going to make Twitter a much better platform.. It just won't be the one that those on the extreme left want to keep in their control..

      It's actually a win-win for everyone except for the extreme left/right who no-one wants anyway.. The far right are the same as the far left in the context that they are both extremists within their respective points of view...

      What this will eventually do is allow the non-extremist leftists and rightists to communicate like adults rather than the childish antics and comments of the others...

      Why would that be a bad thing ? Unless of course there are ulterior motives !!

      1. veti Silver badge

        Re: The meltdown continues

        And what do you base that belief on? The one about Musk's plan for Twitter, I mean.

        1. Khaptain Silver badge

          Re: The meltdown continues

          Because Musk is capable of putting together some very clever people and then making things come to life.

          1. Insert sadsack pun here

            Re: The meltdown continues

            "Because Musk is capable of putting together some very clever people and then making things come to life."

            Musk is certainly capable of it (just like Trump could have hired "all the best people", as he promised). But that doesn't seem to be his plan for Twitter.

          2. Alistair
            Windows

            Re: The meltdown continues

            Khaptain:

            Musk has certainly brought together an awesome group of folks to accomplish something a few times in the past. One thing in there is that he has always started the process, then handed off the overall accomplishment of the task to the awesome group that he put together.

            Until he gets his hands off the steering wheel, this vehicle is gonna be bouncing off a *lot* of things in its path.

            And in this particular case, he has absolutely set himself up for failure on a spectacular scale. The *very* few people with the vision and perspective required to coordinate and quarterback an entity like twitter into a 'brilliant model of the town square' are very, very, likely to be vehemently against almost *every* action he's taken so far with the company.

            Furthermore, Musk isn't about removing the extremes from the fold. He's absolutely about "Free speech for all". And the extremes of all sorts are going to jump on that bus constantly, littering the application with a far larger number of them. Besides, with that attitude, you're going to get a 4chan mentality in a hurry. Humans devolve to the lowest common function in large numbers in all cases.

            WRtA, while twatter appears to have killed their API for 3rd parties, keep in mind that FB did something pretty damn similar about 2 weeks ago AFAIK.

      2. Paul Crawford Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: The meltdown continues

        What this will eventually do is allow the non-extremist leftists and rightists to communicate like adults rather than the childish antics and comments of the others...

        Gee, have you ever actually used social media?

      3. John H Woods Silver badge

        Re: The meltdown continues

        As I get accused of beivg a left wing extremist when I quote Adam Smith, I'd have to disagree.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The meltdown continues

          With all this talk of extremes in political opinion on a UK site, I think the US "conservative" Wikipedia knock-off covers things "appropriately" around the important issues of abortion, gun control, same-sex marriage and the death penalty.

          https://www.conservapedia.com/Conservative_Party_(UK)

        2. Arthur the cat Silver badge
          Facepalm

          Re: The meltdown continues

          As I get accused of being a left wing extremist when I quote Adam Smith, I'd have to disagree.

          Speechless.

        3. hittitezombie

          Re: The meltdown continues

          Unless you're on the right of Mr. Genghis Khan, it doesn't count.

      4. kat_bg

        Re: The meltdown continues

        Please define extreme left for the non-US people, as I have a distinct feeling that americans have no clue what extreme left mean

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Re: The meltdown continues

          Extreme centrist dad.

        2. arctic_haze

          Re: The meltdown continues

          It's simple. You are extreme left in the US if you believe no one should be too poor to buy food, have a roof above his/her head and have access to medical help just because he/she is unable to work.

      5. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The meltdown continues

        You're comparing annoying SJWs to violent Nazi racists who want to overthrow democracy?

        Don't tell me - there are "good people on both sides"?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The meltdown continues

          Your proving of their point was so good, it's almost suspicious.

      6. DS999 Silver badge

        Re: The meltdown continues

        What this will eventually do is allow the non-extremist leftists and rightists to communicate like adults

        No, they will be shouted down by the extremists who will dominate any platform with "maximal free speech" where you can make just about any threat you want so long as it isn't a threat to Musk himself (the level for speech to Musk being "very minimal free speech", because he subscribes the stereotypical dad philosophy of "my house, my rules")

        1. Khaptain Silver badge

          Re: The meltdown continues

          because he subscribes the stereotypical dad philosophy of "my house, my rules")

          And isnt that exactly ones of the reasons that bought Twitter ? It was happening on all the other sites .

      7. small and stupid

        Re: The meltdown continues

        Lol top Poe

  12. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
    Trollface

    Vitrue

    0814 Pacific Time, was, "virtue rises with the sun."

    1714 Pacific Time, "virtue sets with the sun."

    1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

      Re: Vitrue

      Virtue may rise with the Sun, but Vice gets a nice civilised lie-in and then approaches the day with a smile on its face.

  13. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
    Alert

    Number Crunching

    Twitter: Price increases /monetization

    Tesla: Price cuts

  14. Zolko Silver badge

    who pays for the API

    I'm missing an information in this article: what benefit is (was, would-be) there for Twitter to provide and support an API where external programs can connect to ? What do Twitterrific, Tweetbot, Echofon give back to Twitter in exchange for the service they receive ?

    (disclaimer: I don't use Twitter, and I can't imagine any use for it, it's purely a curiosity).

    1. Andy 73 Silver badge

      Re: who pays for the API

      With any social media, the value is in the reach - the more users you have, and the more active they are, the more revenue they generate.

      Providing lots of ways for people to feed content into your system, and consume it is generally beneficial to your service.

      You're also saving money by not having to develop, support and invent new tools to interact with the core system.

      The relatively small loss of a small number of dedicated users not being fed adverts is usually offset by giving them tools that encourage them to engage with the rest of the community. Their posts, likes and other interactions will drive many other users to spend more time on the site.

    2. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

      Re: who pays for the API

      Presumably they show "monetised tweets"? And allow the input of content which can be mixed with "monetised tweets" to make people wade through the "monetised tweets"?

    3. tiggity Silver badge

      Re: who pays for the API

      Its useful for companies / content creators / average people who want to publish to multiple platforms with "one click"

      Plenty of software makes use of APIs so people can create content once & then push it to whatever platforms they like such as Twatter, FB, Insta etc. Saves duplicating effort. Typically they also do helpful stuff for you such as splitting text into chunks to spread across multiple posts if needed based on platform word limits per post.

      Happily I don't have to do social media these days, but back in the day I had to write some code that allowed company I worked for to optionally publish content to their website (back when content was on websites instead of fobbing off people with social media feeds) and various social media outlets using APIs for the social media stuff (none of the available products quite met their needs as website updates were a key part of it plus other permissions / verification stuff e.g. any content submitted but not written by the MD went to him for final approval before publishing)

      1. Hail Cabs

        Re: who pays for the API

        “ those who develop software for Twitter”

        API’s published, yet the wording the author chooses suggest some sort of entitlement for companies who monetize this free service, … aside from any FOSS orgs.

        I dimly recall a twit terms of service, say ten years ago, the user promised not to be a bot, automated post things not allowed…. maybe that changed.

        1. hittitezombie

          Re: who pays for the API

          Bots were pretty much allowed, and encouraged to create automated content.

    4. martinusher Silver badge

      Re: who pays for the API

      Reading between the lines -- "It enables bots".

      1. hittitezombie

        Re: who pays for the API

        You can write software to interact with the front web page as if a web user and create as many accounts or content. It's now just a bit harder.

    5. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: who pays for the API

      Most of those bot-like things are used by corporations to bring together all their comms in one format.

      Same way that Twilio can message over SMS or Whatsapp - so you don't need to change anything. You just add a Whatsapp account, advertise it, and your media people, your employees, your customers, still talk to you over the same channels as always. No retraining for your staff required.

      Bots like those (and I don't know those in particular, but those kinds of things) are used as part of a "This is our Monday company message". Write it once, press a button, it goes out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, the website, email, etc. all together in an appropriate format, with link modification, etc as necessary.

      Because none of those companies will work together to help you do that, so you have to have 3rd-party software to do that for you.

      Sure, "nothing in it" for Twitter... but find me a large company nowadays that doesn't offer their own customers an API of some kind for things like that. Hell, I've spent this morning looking at my cloud-switch/routers API and tying it into a status dashboard along with a dozen other programs, including the site access control management panel which also offers REST/JSON etc.

      "Nothing in it" except your customers making greater use of your system whereas without it they may not even bother to get on there because they can't use their normal tools to do so.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: who pays for the API

        I know of a document-management system at a large university which was using Twitter bots for a change-notification mechanism around 12 years ago. Twitter bots for that sort of application have been around nearly as long as Twitter itself has. Using Twitter for short-text pub/sub tasks is an obvious use case.

    6. hittitezombie

      Re: who pays for the API

      About 0.01% of the Twitter users create over 90% of the content that actually matters. Super-users tend to use more specific applications to manage their online presence. The API cull basically killed all of these tools.

      What will happen is the content creators will eventually show the finger and move onto better platforms, and people will eventually follow. What will be remaining is the 'absolute free speech' far-right American nutters shouting to each other and Trump Social and Parler etc. shows that is not a winning plan since the amount of angry far-right American nutters is even smaller than the super content creators...

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "The best way to use Twitter is... not at all,"

    There must be good reasons to use Twitter... just none that would ever apply to me.

    1. bazza Silver badge

      Re: "The best way to use Twitter is... not at all,"

      There are good reasons, but now the advice is to wear safety goggles, gloves and a face mask. Just in case.

  16. Howard Sway Silver badge

    Virtue rises with the sun

    And Musk's net worth falls with the sun. About $1 billion every 3 times it got dark on average last year.

    So much in fact that he set the world record for the biggest drop in wealth in human history.

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      Re: Virtue rises with the sun

      So much in fact that he set the world record for the biggest drop in perceived wealth in human history.

      Fixed it for you :)

    2. Khaptain Silver badge

      Re: Virtue rises with the sun

      Why do you care ?

      1. veti Silver badge

        Re: Virtue rises with the sun

        Who cares? GP is just being snarky.

        I'm more interested right now in why you care.

    3. bazza Silver badge

      Re: Virtue rises with the sun

      The irony of him being considered as having achieved the biggest drop in wealth in human history is that, in part, that's assuming Twitter is of zero value under his stewardship. As a private company there's now no public knowledge of the financial state of Twitter, but I think that everyone's assumption is pretty sound.

      In a different (and altogether unlikely) universe, the decline in Tesla's share price would have been made up for by an increase in the financial performance in Twitter and he'd have come out on top, laughing.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Web UI change maybe?

    Noticed yesterday that the Web UI has changed a little more for the worst. At the top of the time line column are now two view choices: "For You", "Following", which makes no sense to me and not how I want to consume posts. Wonder if this new format imposed an API change that broke other clients.

    1. Matthew "The Worst Writer on the Internet" Saroff

      Re: Web UI change maybe?

      Following is the old chronological, For You is the algorithmic bs.

    2. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
      Alert

      Re: Web UI change maybe?

      "For You", "Following"

      Wait till Musk starts using the term "Your Twitter"

  18. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    For NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTivated Forces and Alienating Sources

    Twitter is ideal for AI ‽

    What say you, Elon? Do you have any Future Building Plans that Dare Care Share Win Win Derivative Options with Advanced IntelAIgents for Safe and Secure Secretive Type Development?

    Do you want some?

    And yes, that is a real valid current terrifying/exciting offer here registered as universally readily available.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: For NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTivated Forces and Alienating Sources

      ChatGPT is getting more advanced by the hour.

      1. veti Silver badge

        Re: For NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTivated Forces and Alienating Sources

        When GPT can match AManFromMars, it will have achieved sentience.

        1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
          Alien

          Re: For NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTivated Forces and Alienating Sources

          There have been I believe, a couple of other incarnations of "a man from Mars" , as one of the other commentards mentioned sometime back. As befits a "1.0" release, "amanfromMars 1" has a few rough edges, but I'm certain all will be sorted out by "amanfromMars 3"

          1. hittitezombie

            Re: For NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTivated Forces and Alienating Sources

            I'm sure my hamster running on top of my keyboard can generate content more coherent and meaningful than the Musky.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: For NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTivated Forces and Alienating Sources

          Who will achieve it? AManFromMars?

          1. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

            Re: For NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTivated Forces and Alienating Sources

            Who will achieve it? AManFromMars? .... Anonymous Coward

            Has IT already achieved it, is the much more disturbing question which will be answered far too late for the many presently with everything to lose because of unpleasant alien practices in their engagingly sordid and rewarding endeavours and enterprises.

            And with nowhere good to run and nowhere safe and secure to hide makes such worthy dullards, rightly terrified justifiable targets for especially RAPT [Remote Advanced Persistent Threat] Attention.

            And because that may be so extremely difficult for one to believe, is its existence today guaranteed greater influence and power in every subsequent tomorrow with IT uncovering further darker and deeper secrets and higher enlightening observations for sharing in the future casting the light of explanation and clearer reason into the despair and despond of unfolding titanic recession and rampant enveloping depression.

            One of those very easily extremely dangerous and virulent ... Damned if you do and damned if you don’t recognise the situation conditions whenever impotent to intervene in a state of play already long ago decided and implemented and mastered.

        3. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

          Re: For NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTivated Forces and Alienating Sources

          it will have achieved sentience.

          That's assuming that AMFM has also achieved sentience..

    2. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

      AI Mentoring of Systems Monitors. The Bull Elephants For Sale from a China Shop

      All in the West is lost to AI and the East whenever the West does not recognise the leading almighty overwhelming advantage an engaging unconditional support of Stealthy Alien Services easily remotely virtually provides and continues to deliver both from and for the future power and inexhaustible energy enjoyed and employed and deployed by NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTivated Driver Operating Systems.

      With there being no evidence at all in the West of such an in-house, home grown recognition/realisation, despite all possible help for systems unveiling being clearly textually documented and freely shared for assimilation and engagement, one can fully expect news and that vacuum to be filled and exploited by others in the field being enlightened as to available future leading possibilities elsewhere

      Knowledge abhors a vacuum and there are no defences able to rightly contain and justifiably restrain it for arrogant ignorance to abuse for selective exclusive executive gain ...... which is not to say that such is not very selective exclusive executive gain territory for such it may certainly well be, and for all of the most valid of very good reasons that require novel and noble AI leadership.

  19. Tascam Holiday
    Unhappy

    Not all broken

    The nice unobtrusive desktop Twitter client I use is still working for now, no ads, chronological time-line, really slick and with very low overheads. Not going to mention its name as I don't want it becoming any more popular if the Reg's theory is correct that clients with fewer than 100000 users are still allowed to work...

    I'm just a Twitter lurker who avoids the toxic crap and just sees tweets from the people and orgs I'm interested in. Never post anything, never had and don't want any followers. I'll miss it when it inevitably folds or becomes unrecognisable and everyone I like has fucked off.

    1. ICam

      Re: Not all broken

      Maybe those people will fuck off to Mastodon. That doesn't seem so bad if you can just create an account there and follow them on that platform instead.

    2. hittitezombie

      Re: Not all broken

      Come to Mastodon. It's significantly more civilised and no rich guy can manage to take it over...

    3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Not all broken

      Never post anything, never had and don't want any followers.

      Really? I never posted anything, but over the short time when I actually paid any attention to my Twitter account, I accumulated over 30 followers. Pretty much all people I knew, too. I guess they found the account via Twitter network-based recommendations.

      Haven't authenticated to the account in many years, and I don't care to do so now just to find out if I have more people enjoying my complete silence.

  20. Len
    Thumb Up

    Ivory

    It turns out to have been amazing foresight of Tapbots (the makers of Tweetbot) to start working on their Mastodon app, Ivory. It's still in alpha and yet some people are already raving about it.

    I suppose that, even though the Mastodon network works differently from the Twitter network, all that UX experience with Tweetbot turns out to be quite transferable.

    1. bazza Silver badge

      Re: Ivory

      That's sounds like a pretty good supposition!

      Users don't care about the techie details of the back end so long as it works.

  21. grizzly

    Twitter is dead for people like me now. I can't cope with ads & non-chrony timeline.

    I've tried Mastodon instead, don't like its near-double Twitter's word limit. The name of the game is micro-blogging, not small-blogging. Many of the eight billion want to spout on the internet and life's too short to read them in non-micro form. I know there's a nuance-deficit in micro-blogging, but if you really can't fit in micro, can thread. It's clear that given mastodon's 500-char sprawl, people get lazy with their grammer & phrasing. There's more tautology. They don't think about every word they spend. Mastodon thew the baby out with the bathwater.

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Some of us like context and not random soundbites...

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Precisely why I gave up on Twitter after only a few months of reading, and why, aside from a quick look at one recommended server, I haven't bothered with Mastodon.

        I own maybe a hundred books I haven't finished reading yet, and a couple dozen journal issues. I have at least that many on my wish-lists. I could easily find recommendations for thousands more. There's good longer-format work to read online, including "blogs"1 and other essay and book-length forms.

        Twitter was very popular in some of the communities relevant to my interests and work, but I never, not once, saw something elsewhere which was reported earlier on Twitter, and regretted missing it there.

        When Twitter first appeared it received a fair bit of attention in the composition (in the sense of "teaching of writing") & rhetoric and writing-technologies academic fields, at least in the US; there was a fair bit of buzz about it at conferences like Computers & Writing. I was working in those fields then, avocationally, and I was already dubious about Twitter and "microblogging". The years since have not made me suspect I was wrong.

        1A loathsome neologism, which in any case is rarely used in its original, etymological sense.

    2. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

      "people get lazy with their grammer & phrasing"

      The irony.

      1. Joe W Silver badge

        Yup. In publishing this is referred to as "Muphry's [sic!] Law".

    3. sabroni Silver badge
      Facepalm

      500-char sprawl

      Your post is 600+.

  22. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
    Joke

    Musk the Merciless of the planet Mars

    Sorry, when exactly are you going to sod off to Mars, mate?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_the_Merciless

    "Ming[Musk] is depicted as a ruthless tyrant who rules the planet Mongo[Mars]."

    Note: icon

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is this news ?`

    Musk has woken up and realised that a lot of people are making money out of Twitter and he's not seeing a cent.

    Whether whatever he has in mind to correct that can be commercially successful had yet to be seen.

    But it could presage a wholesale shift in how 3rd parties interact with the web.

    1. Joe W Silver badge

      Re: Is this news ?`

      It is not making money, in part because Musk burdened it with the debt. Twitter has to buy itself for (not from) Musk and even pay the interests. I hate that this is possible, but this is not the first time this happened. Musk did not invent this.

      1. M.V. Lipvig Silver badge

        Re: Is this news ?`

        I kinda wondered about that. I wonder what the debt load for Tesla and SpaceX were before the Twitter buy, and what they are now.

        Musk buys Twitter and immediately takes it private, helping his buddy Dorsey make a huge pile off an otherwise worthless company (Twitter was known for years as losing money). Musk publicly goes on a rampage while transferring debt from Tesla and SpaceX to Twitter. And, with Tesla's value in the tank from Musk selling stock while making other stock-dropping announcements, Musk starts buying his shares back. Later he relists Twitter on the stock exchange while anouncing some other sap will be CEO; as sole owner of Twitter, all cash from the relisting goes into his pocket.

        End result - Tesla and SpaceX lose a ton of debt, increasing Musk's wealth. Buddy Dorsey is a billionaire in cash instead of stock. Musk makes more off Twitter than he laid out, and a lot if former Twitter stockholders who bought back in find themselves holding a company that's even less profitable than before.

        1. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

          Re: Is this news ?`

          Understanding those workings of the Great Game have the likes of Nasdaqs and New York Stock Exchanges and the Federal Reserve Banking Systems essentially outed as Ponzi enablers and thus always ripe rotten ready for catastrophic collapse, M.V.Lipvig.

        2. hittitezombie

          Re: Is this news ?`

          > Musk publicly goes on a rampage while transferring debt from Tesla and SpaceX to Twitter.

          That's fraud and would end up with a prison sentence.

          1. M.V. Lipvig Silver badge

            Re: Is this news ?`

            "That's fraud and would end up with a prison sentence."

            Where's the fraud part? At the moment, Twitter belongs to Musk like your wallet belongs to you. As long as it's privately owned he can do as he wishes. That includes volunteering to take on debt for other companies. When he goes public again, he only has to disclose that the debt exists, not necessarily its original source. Whether it's shady or not, this could be completely legal. Doubt it would be after, but then a lot of law is written after someone comes up with the crime.

  24. jollyboyspecial Silver badge

    Too big to fail?

    Not long after Musk took over I commented that he seemed to be doing his best to destroy the platform. I got a lot of responses asking the lines of "no matter what he does with twitter it will be a success because the platform is too big and too popular to fail"

    Of course it's far too simple to respond to these comments listing companies and platforms that were once thought too big to fail which are either long gone or so niche as to be almost non existent, but that would actually spoil the fun. What fun? The fun of observing all the twitter fanbois and goirls and finding out what their breaking point is. More and more people I encounter are turning against twitter and Musk after weeks of defending them.

    Sometimes a really wonder if he is trying to destroy twitter. Or maybe he's experimenting with how far he has to go to before twitter is on the edge of collapse as some sort of exercise in finding out how badly his other companies can treat their customers and still make money. But I can't believe he would do either having borrowed so much to buy the platform in the first place. The debt will still be there even if the platform collapses.

    1. DS999 Silver badge

      Re: Too big to fail?

      There was a time when most people would have considered Myspace too big to fail.

      Clearly Mastadon is not going to take down Twitter, its federated decentralized model is just too complex for the average person in the street to deal with, but I'll bet there are at least a dozen startups that have formed in the past six months attempting to replace it and within a couple years one of them will have succeeded.

      Hopefully they also replace Facebook and Tiktok as an accidental bank shot!

      1. breakfast Silver badge

        Re: Too big to fail?

        Mastodon's decentralised model is probably the safest bet because it can't be bought out wholesale and rendered worthless by a wealthy dumbass manbaby, but whether it will hit a usability threshold where it becomes more accessible is hard to say. I don't use it the way I use(d) Twitter and I don't really know how I would, but I appreciate that the model is way better.

      2. hittitezombie

        Re: Too big to fail?

        People have been able to deal with more complicated stuff. All you need to know to use Mastodon is "pick a server and create an account". Accounts are transferrable between servers and even that's quite easy to do.

        How Fediverse will solve fake users is an unknown, I expect that to be a problem for a long time, but most people already understand john.wick@google.com and john.wick@yahoo.com can be different people.

  25. Grunchy Silver badge

    Twitter is a pretty small ‘app’

    How many programmers does it take to maintain the minuscule code base? I heard SMS was originally created to piggyback off of the constant data handshakes between handsets and cell towers, which had room for 160-character messages injected with the rest of the handshake data frame. It was unused & otherwise unusable bandwidth, which is why it was originally provided for free.

    … just because somebody paid $40 billion for the app doesn’t mean there’s $40 billion worth of content there, or any particular need for any staff. The entire interac network was created and operated for years by two guys, I dispute that there’s ever been any need for any more headcount than that.

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: Twitter is a pretty small ‘app’

      Some people post really nasty shit. There's a need for having staff to monitor this sort of thing and not just drop the job into the incapable hands of an AI.

      1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

        Re: Twitter is a pretty small ‘app’

        But he didn't mention moderating?

        Just the app itself. 10 developers would be enough for sure. More will just mess things up.

        1. veti Silver badge

          Re: Twitter is a pretty small ‘app’

          Quick thought exercise: can you list the functions of any given Twitter app? Comprehensively, I mean, as in a spec?

          I suspect there's more to it than you're thinking of.

          And what exactly is "the app" that you're so calmly dissing, anyway? Is it the client installed on a user's phone? The web portal? The server? The API?

          1. My-Handle

            Re: Twitter is a pretty small ‘app’

            Scale is also an issue. It's a hell of a lot simpler to put together a blogging app or site for a few authors and a few dozen readers than it is to do the same for millions of each, spread across an entire planet.

            On the small scale, you'd have a single full-stack dev managing most functions. Database storage is a single SQL server and a handful of queries. On the large scale, you have entire teams of DBAs making sure that data is stored, retrieved, backed-up and cached efficiently across many data centres and locales.

            1. F. Frederick Skitty Silver badge

              Re: Twitter is a pretty small ‘app’

              "Scale is also an issue."

              Not really. Caching is straightforward since it's not exactly critical that people see the latest tweets the moment they're submitted. So while it deals with an awful lot of data, the issues that a lot of systems have to deal with aren't there.

              1. hittitezombie

                Re: Twitter is a pretty small ‘app’

                Tell me you've never met an average Twitter user w/o telling me...

    2. hittitezombie

      Re: Twitter is a pretty small ‘app’

      The complexity in Twitter code would come from scalability to hundreds of millions of users and making sure those people get their feed within the second someone they follow post a message.

      That's no small feat, and Musk is too stupid to understand this.

      Going around randomly shutting down server racks works for a while due to redundancy and fault tolerance of the current Twitter design but as he continues to cut people and servers down, Twitter's reliability will get a lot worse.

      This is one of the reasons why he's also cutting down on functionality, to spare server capacity.

  26. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

    People (developers) are crazy to depend on things like this.

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Like the Boring Company

    It’s a race to the bottom!

  28. Potemkine! Silver badge

    Twitter is broken?

    Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

  29. sketharaman

    Not Musk

    Nearly 10 years ago, in my company, we built a Twitter sentiment app called HEATMAP360. Suddently, it stopped working one day. Apparently, the engineers at Twitter had decided that each API call had to be authenticated, which meant that users of HEAMAP360 had to sign into Twitter. Despite its then-bloated staffing levels, Twitter took weeks to release a solution. This probaby has nothing to do with Musk and lack of staff or communications team.

    1. hittitezombie

      Re: Not Musk

      > Twitter had decided that each API call had to be authenticated,

      All you need to do is get an auth token and feed that back to the API with every request until the token is about to expire, then renew token. It's not rocket science and not a thing for Twitter to resolve...

  30. Throg

    That Curl query works with my bearer token, so the v2 API is definitely up and running.

    This does suggest that certain developer projects and their associated tokens have been disabled.

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      As presented in the article:

      curl --request GET 'https://api.twitter.com/2/tweets/search/recent?query=from:twitterdev' --header 'Authorization: Bearer $TWITTER_BEARER_TOKEN'

      it won't work, assuming a Bourne-like shell, because shell and environment variables are not expanded within single quotes.

      I have no way of knowing if that was an error in the command line that was actually used, or only in how it was printed in the article.

  31. breakfast Silver badge

    Could simply be cock-up

    It's easy to jump to a conspiracy explanation here, seeing as Twitter under Musk has done nothing to make us believe they are trustworthy. But around the point he fired half their engineers and sysadmins it was suggested that the site would probably coast along for a few weeks/months before it started to fall apart in ways that no remaining employees knew how to fix.

    It's a plausible explanation and I could definitely credit that we're approaching that point now.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Could simply be cock-up

      No. Cook is a different twat.

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