Elon Promises A Free API For ‘Good Bot Content,’ Again, Demonstrating He Has No Idea How Any Of This Works
It's been clear since the takeover, that Elon's running Twitter entirely based on his fleeting and oft-changing whims. The weird decision last week to suddenly, with one week's notice, remove the free tier for Twitter's basic API, has create a bit of an uproar, as tons of tools, services, and useful bots made use of it. Many have been posting farewell messages on Twitter, leading Musk (as he seems to do all too often) to announce a policy change in a reply tweet. He did this when he rolled back his bizarrely stupid policy that you were no longer allowed to link to other social media (a policy so obviously stupid, that only Musk's mother would defend it). Musk rolled that one back in a reply tweet - meaning a tweet that very few people would see, because they don't show up nearly as much.
Here, Musk responded to a tweet from the automated @PepitoTheCat account, which pointed out his account would have to be shut down under this new policy. The new policy, according to Musk in this reply tweet (which got many fewer views that his regular tweets) is that:
I guess we could give all Verified users access to the API for posts like this
Responding to feedback, Twitter will enable a light, write-only API for bots providing good content that is free
Really.
So... the policy might be that all verified users" get access to the API... but only for posts like this." Or... it could be that a write-only API" (don't even get me started on how nonsensical that is) for bots providing good content that is free."
The point is: these are not policies. These are brain fart whims. This is no way to run a business with many millions of users.
Of course, it's reminiscent of the naivety that Musk has demonstrated about all of this before. Like when he declared that content moderation was simple: you just delete the wrong and bad" stuff, and support the good" content.
Okay, genius: define good." Define good" in a manner that your remaining team of flying monkeys can put it into practice without having to constantly consult your tweet replies to see if they're doing it right.
The process of content moderation on a competent trust & safety team involves crafting a policy that can be understood by the team in charge of carrying it out. Creating a truly exceptional policy would be one that most users can understand.
None of that is happening here. Musk's random well, if it's good" they can get some sort of weird sorta API access is not fixing anything. This is what good trust & safety teams actually do, and what they're skilled at doing. It's a constant challenge, of course, because as you write policies, you'll constantly be running up against exceptions and things that challenge the policies. But saying make an exception for good' bots" is worse than useless.
It's simply reinforcing just how risky and ridiculous it is for anyone to build anything that relies on Twitter today. Who knows what nonsense will come from a random reply Tweet to a cat meme tomorrow?
Meanwhile, I'll just note that over the weekend, I discovered three new services being built on the Mastodon API that are replacing things I used to use Twitter for. One of which, FeedSeer, is basically just like TweetShelf, an incredible Twitter tool that seems likely to need to shut down thanks to these changes.