There’s been a lot of things happening on Twitter recently, but this Wednesday was a busy one for the social network. The day began with the expansion of Twitter Blue to more countries and then the roll out of long tweets of up to 4,000 characters. But then Twitter went through a major outage, and now the social network has announced new limitations to its API (or what’s left of it).
Background on what’s happening with the Twitter API
Earlier this year, many of Twitter’s third-party clients simply stopped working out of the blue. Although the platform took a long time to explain what was going on, Twitter later announced that it would no longer let developers use its API (a tool for other apps and website to communicate with Twitter) to create alternative clients for the social network.
It was the end of popular apps like Tweetbot and Tweetdeck, but Twitter didn’t stop there. Last week, Twitter confirmed that it would shut down its free API, which would result in a lot of automated bots and accounts stopping working. For example, you can only see the latest 9to5Mac posts on Twitter in real time thanks to this API.
But Twitter owner Elon Musk was generous enough to reconsider his decision. A few days ago, Musk announced that Twitter would launch a new “light, write-only API for bots providing good content that is free.” But of course, this wouldn’t come without a catch.
Twitter to limit the amount of tweets accounts can send with its API
Following everything that happened with Twitter today, the company thought it would be a good idea to make another big announcement. So while the free Twitter API will still be available, it will now have a limit of 1,500 tweets per month for each account. The company says that the decision was made in order to “increase quality, reduce spam, and enable a thriving ecosystem.”
This decision is potentially dumber than killing Twitter’s third-party clients. A lot of people use Twitter as their main source of information, because everything there happens in real time. And as mentioned before, you can only get a lot of news from other websites in real time there thanks to Twitter’s API.
But apart from thinking that this is a dumb decision, there’s one thing to keep in mind. At least for now, this change won’t affect regular users. While some people have mistakenly understood that they won’t be able to post more than 1,500 tweets per month, this limit applies exclusively to Twitter’s free API for automated content.
What to expect for the future
Still, it won’t be a surprise if Twitter eventually restricts what regular users can do without paying for Twitter Blue.
Following the weird outage that affected Twitter for about an hour earlier today, some users noticed messages saying that they’ve reached the limit of tweets or DMs per day. In some cases, Twitter is also imposing a limit on the number of accounts a user can follow.
Since Elon Musk became CEO of Twitter and started changing a lot of the company’s policies, Twitter has been losing a lot of its advertisers. In a desperate move to hold onto the company’s revenue, Musk has been pushing Twitter Blue further and further. However, Twitter currently has less than 300,000 Blue subscribers. For comparison, Twitter has 396 million total users.
It seems pretty obvious at this point that Twitter will do everything to push users into subscribing to Twitter Blue, and that includes ruining the social network for good.
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