Last month, Twitter CEO Elon Musk quietly cut support for third-party apps, making a move that would piss off developers. As a result of this event, it naturally drew a lot of reaction.
2 days ago, the company announced that it would make API access for a fee. Therefore, it will also become paid for using party applications. Musk announced in his posts yesterday that only one kind of API can be free.
“Twitter will enable a lightweight, write-only API for bots that provide free and good content”
After receiving feedback from the developers, Elon Musk said that Twitter will provide a free, write-only API for bots that provide good content.
This decision is one of the policies that raises question marks on Twitter under Musk’s administration. There is no information on what constitutes “good content” and who will decide that. If Twitter follows this rule, some bots will have extended their lifetime on the platform.
Darius Kazemi, a developer who has developed more than 80 bots and even held a bot development summit in 2016, states in an interview that these automated accounts have been an integral part of Twitter for years. He added that some of these bots, which have thousands of followers, cheer up the homepage of many people every day.
If APIs are paid, as Musk said, it means that bot manufacturers are making a lot of money every year. That’s exactly what Kazemi says: “I have over 80 bots on Twitter, so it takes a few thousand dollars a year to keep them up and I can’t afford that much.”
The biggest criterion here is who will decide whether the bots that provide the ‘good content’ that Musk mentioned produce good or bad content. What are you thinking? Please do not forget to share your thoughts with us in the comments.
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