If you follow one of the many more or less humorous bots on Twitter, you may have recently seen an out-of-the-ordinary message, written by a human.
Many are those, in fact, who do not agree to comply with the change of policy decided by the all-powerful boss of the social network. Always looking for ways to make his acquisition profitable, he decided that as of February 9, the use of the API of Twitter will be paid, and few are those who are ready to pay the bill for posting jokes, quotes, or the same photo over and over.
Save money…
The API, which stands for Application Program Interface, is an interface that allows you to connect and exchange information and commands between two software and services that are a priori independent of each other. It is the free access to the API which until then allowed independent developers to create bots generating content planned in advance at given times, but also the use of applications allowing to personalize or facilitate the user experience, such as Twiterrific or Tweetcaster.
Concretely, Twitter’s policy which will come into effect on February 9 will not remove this possibility, but will make it chargeable, whereas it was previously free below a certain number of requests per month. Unsurprisingly, few bots, whether humorous, helpful, or just plain weird, are going to pay.
… by degrading the product
In his defense, Elon Musk had announced during the takeover that one of his objectives was to rid the site of its bots. And many are those who naively believed that he was talking about thousands of fake propaganda or scam accounts. But no, the billionaire, in his business of destruction, continued to clearly degrade the user experience by removing a possibility that had been offered until then.
This policy change will not only prevent quotes from Lenin or pictures of fruit baskets from being posted hourly. Indeed, the Twitter API was also widely used by academic researchers. It allowed a collection of data difficult to acquire otherwise on subjects as vast as the dissemination of disinformation, the effect of political campaigns, or the impact of certain economic and social measures.
But all this will not be in vain: Elon may be able to eat his fill and pay his rent.
Source : Vice
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