Excuse the short post. If you’re wondering what’s happening to Twitter right now and why you’re reaching limits on everything. Please allow me to explain. Recently Twitter announced they’re changing the API system. I made a post about the ramifications it could have the other day. I did not expect it to have this massive blowback.
This is currently the Twitter experience for the heavy Twitter users, but why?
Apparently, as an outsider looking in, every Twitter account uses Twitter’s API system. Which now makes sense on Twitter’s claims of how many people use their API system. I have not seen it used much in the wild. What this means is the 2500 free API use limit is being applied to regular accounts. What counts as an API use? Likes, reading tweets, DMs, retweets, following people, blocking people, searches, tweeting, comments, deleting tweets, and logging in. This means currently, since they just implemented the 2500 limit, users can only do 2500 of these actions per month until this shit gets sorted out.
If you’re curious how I was able to figure this out. Some of my friends were using Twitter like normal and then got hit with the message of hitting their limits. Some were greeted with it the second the API limits went live. While I was not hit. See I’ve not been using Twitter outside of posting my blog posts and occasionally checking in on people. I made a bunch of comments, likes, and everything without an issue. Everyone I know who has limited their Twitter usage doesn’t have these issues. This didn’t happen until those API changes went live.
This is why it’s important to not fire everyone who knows how a system works, or those who will say no to you. Musky boy made a huge mistake getting rid of everyone right away who knew how the systems operated. If he had kept one person who knew this employed at Twitter we wouldn’t have these issues right now. We also wouldn’t have these issues if he also kept people who would tell him that this might possibly fuck up Twitter.
Which goes into the biggest issues of Twitter. Since he’s taken over we’ve had random shit keep breaking because they pushed shit to their live services so it looks like they’re working. Here’s the truth of every software company ever. Just because devs don’t update something frequently doesn’t mean they aren’t working. We have non-live versions of our software that we update and test shit on to make sure shit like this doesn’t happen. When you’re testing hundreds of features, hell even just tens, it’s important to make sure each works in an isolated testing environment and then in a safe testing environment with them all active. Right now Musk is demanding everything be pushed to live Twitter ASAP to look good. I don’t even do this with my blog. I have two isolated testing servers for new background changes.
First, why is every account using Twitter API? I’m not sure, but I imagine it makes updating the API system easier and gives devs easy access to full account features. I’m not sure if this is an industry standard, but would love to find out.
Second, this is why you don’t just fuck with everything for no reason. You can’t make sweeping changes without breaking shit. Especially in software and especially as software has accrued technical debt.
To give an example of this I was recently fixing the movement in my current game. When I removed the swimming function entirely I lost the ability to jump. I could not figure out why as they were not supposed to be linked functions. Apparently, in my sleep deprived coding, I used an external class to manage both and when I deleted Swimming() that external class broke. It took me 5 minutes to figure it out but it’s an example of changing shit breaking stuff.
If you wish to see my other post on Twitter’s API click here.