We’ve heard feedback (#breakingmytwitter) from our customers about the pain this causes. We’re committed to understanding why people hire 3rd party clients over our own apps, and we’re going to do better with communicating changes

— Rob Johnson @robjohnson 2018-08-16 16:01:17

Because those third party apps understand what we want from our Twitter timeline. To have it in the right order. To not interrupt it every five tweets with something else. To be compact, fast to use, and ultimately to let us read tweets from our friends. You know, the social bit.

But really it’s not about us, what some might call power users. Or early adopters. Mostly people that use twitter in a way now seemingly niche. See something else @robjohnson wrote:

We introduced the Account Activity API as a faster & more streamlined way for developers building customer service and brand engagement tools, chatbots, + more. As this new API doesn’t include home timeline data, it is not intended as a solution for 3rd party clients

— Rob Johnson @robjohnson 2018-08-16 16:01:17

is telling. They see the API as a tool for injecting content IN.

It’s about brand interaction. And those monitoring twitter for sentiment. And people building tools for that. It’s not about the end user having a great experience. It’s about making money. And we don’t make the money directly, we’re just aggregated eyeballs.

Because I can’t directly pay for twitter, I am therefore limited in being a passive consumer of ads to make the service viable. And third party clients aren’t about ads or brand engagement. They’re about us interacting with each other. And that’s not profitable.

Twitter decided to profit from mass consumer behaviour. And those of us using third party clients don’t help that. I joined twitter early (user 12,026). And twitter no longer sees me as valuable because I want to continue using it the way it always was. Until now.

And that, @robjohnson, is why I feel like you’re #BreakingMyTwitter experience. Because you no longer act like a company that cares about me, the actual user, getting to read what I want and interact with other people using your system in real time.

Compare my timeline in @tweetbot with that of @Twitter. One has tweets. One has a single tweet unhelpfully unfurling a URL, an ad that is entirely useless (don’t have a mortgage) and the start of a block of in case you missed its. Which, incidentally, I hadn’t.

Let me pay for a proper user timeline API @robjohnson. I’ll pay you at least 50c over the average you make per user per month with these shitty ads and awful attempts to make me engage more. Per account. I have several and I’ll pay for each of them.

I’ll pay you double for being able to drive @eurovisiondrink in real time with actual timely notifications next year. Because otherwise I might not do it at all.