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One data point is that there is no way to get the full text of long tweets from the API. Twitter Blue subscribers have been able to post tweets longer than 280
by h11h 3y ago
One data point is that there is no way to get the full text of long tweets from the API. Twitter Blue subscribers have been able to post tweets longer than 280 characters since early February but the API only returns the first 280 or so characters.
- titaniumtown 3y agoThat's hilarious. The complete incompetence over there lol.
- stainablesteel 3y agois it incompetent to not maintain something you don't want to maintain?
- addisonl 3y agoIt's incompetent to not want to maintain it.
- 100721 3y ago* without taking it offline
- pcthrowaway 3y agoThe incompetence is at the very top, choosing not to maintain something that they were apparently making $400m/year from paid subscribers for
- cutemonster 3y agoYes, at the same time, this: > complete incompetence over there sounded to me as if it also includes the employees
- dev_daftly 3y agoThe post seems to talk about 2 different APIs, a public one they are not continuing to work on and a commercial one that makes $400mm/year
- yamtaddle 3y agoThe API's the thing that makes Twitter tolerably-usable to heavy users—the ones who draw eyeballs to the site so the ads are worth more than $0.00—right? If so, not wanting to maintain it would probably count as incompetent, yes.
- imiric 3y agoI'm not familiar with Twitter or its API, but are ads also returned via the API? If not, then it would be more profitable for them to heavily restrict API access, and kill off 3rd party clients, so that more people would use the official clients where ads are actually shown. I.e. they don't care about heavy users if they can't make a profit from them.
- yamtaddle 3y agoHeavy users are the ones who generate the content that gives the site value in the first place, though. Advertisers aren't there to sell products to the 1% of users who make most of the posts, they're there to sell to the 99% reading those posts. Making posting on twitter a bigger pain for the people who do most of the posting—and especially for celebrity and brand accounts that get tons of "engagement" they want/need to keep track of—is probably not a great move.
- marcellus23 3y agoYes, without either taking the API down or publishing a disclaimer that it's deprecated.
- nonethewiser 3y agoNope
- JustSomeNobody 3y agoMake it awful for long enough so that when you make it better, you're a genius who saved Twitter.
- phowat 3y agoOr so that when you finally pull the plug, people don't complain too much.
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- olalonde 3y agoThe mental gymnastics of Musk haters are next level. If Twitter dies, he is dumb and incompetent. If he saves it, it was all just part of his evil plan. You got all outcomes covered, great.
- JustSomeNobody 3y agoI can't help it if he's very obvious.
- samtp 3y agoEither way he is still the guy who publicly mocked his own employee for having muscular dystrophy, offered another employee a horse if they gave him a handjob, called a cave diver who saved a bunch of children a pedo, spread conspiracy theories about an elderly man who was beaten by an intruder with a hammer.... He's not a good person.
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- olalonde 3y agoI didn't say he was a good person. But it's obvious that he's not incompetent and that he's just trying his best to salvage his investment. The idea that he is intentionally driving Twitter into the ground is beyond ridiculous.
- nonethewiser 3y agoIt seems like they don’t care about the API. That makes it a matter of values rather than competence.
- organsnyder 3y agoThey certainly don't seem to be valuing it enough to assign the quality/quantity of engineering necessary to maintain it.
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- Quarrelsome 3y agoI mean you're a platform company in 2023 and you don't want an API? Idk that sounds like competence to me in failing to appreciate its value. Sure, I appreciate it follows a strategy but I worry that the strategy will not help twitter in the long term.
- ALittleLight 3y agoIn what sense is Twitter a platform?
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- Quarrelsome 3y agoit hosts a communication service for organisations and individuals to build followings and broadcast messages. I guess its about whether you see Twitter as more than its user interface or not.
- toast0 3y agoTwitter was a platform company in 2011, but after they started limiting the api in 2012[1], I'm not sure that they wanted to be a platform anymore. [1] https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/a/2012/changes-coming-to-twitter-api https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/a/2012/changes-comi...
- kccqzy 3y agoThat sounds like a deliberate decision to maintain backwards compatibility. I shudder to think of badly coded consumers of that API sticking that text into a fixed-sized buffer (with the right scaling factor between whatever Twitter considers a character and the actual bytes) and Twitter just wants to avoid buffer overflows like that.
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- onion2k 3y agoThere clearly is an API that returns the full text of a tweet or the official app and website wouldn't be able to display it. They must be maintaining and building an API. The only thing that's not being maintained or updated are the public facing endpoints. That doesn't mean much.
- h11h 3y agoYes, there is a GraphQL API that Twitter's web interface uses, but developers who use the publicly available API can't use that.
- BulgarianIdiot 3y agoSo it can only be used secretly by bots. Good job.
- onion2k 3y agodevelopers who use the publicly available API can't use that The point is that saying there's no API is wrong. There is an API. Elon has chosen not to let developers outside of Twitter use it. It's clearly a political choice rather than a technical competence problem.
- ncallaway 3y agoIt doesn’t have to be a technical competence problem. It could easily be a business competence problem.
- rsynnott 3y agoI mean ultimately it’s all semantics, but the idea that a private API is not an API proper is not exactly unusual. It’s more a business competence than a technical competence issue, likely (unless he’s actually attempting to have a direct technical role, in which case it is Dunning-Kruger made manifest).
- anigbrowl 3y agoThat's like saying that my front door isn't shut because the doors to rooms inside are open. When people say 'API' they mean the public-facing endpoints, not the internal ones that are only accessible to Twitter's developers.