It’s not a surprise that Musk is destroying everything good about twitter (including, now, closing down free API access on Feb 9 which will kill thousands of cool bots). It’s part of the game plan. It’s a flex, and he’s a dick.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Even back when I still somewhat cared about the site, the API was lacking (and that’s putting it extremely nicely). In addition to lacking the support for many, if not all, new features, the alternative clients, relying on this not so great API, also had a very strict, hard limit of accounts, allowed to use them. That’s why these clients usually didn’t last long, or had a million different versions and charged their users to make those few user slots last.

Some might have had a better contract (don’t know if that was just a rumor, or not), but now with Elon taking over, none of it matters - they’ll all go away now. Sure, it might force people to use the ugly default app and see the ads, that it is full of, but I hope the users aren’t this brain-dead and that it’ll have a negative effect on the company, in the long-run.

Surely, there must have been a better solution, than shutting it all down. If the API was updated and ads included, in the alternative clients, or it had some other from of monetization, Elon could have removed the hard user limits instead and be seen as the good guy, like he was often in the past.