from Hacker News

Elon Musk just shut down potentially life-saving public safety Twitter accounts

by kripy on 4/16/23, 5:51 AM with 6 comments

• by DoreenMichele on 4/17/23, 1:05 AM

  When Twitter introduced its new API plans, the company maintained it was to go after the bots. However, according to many developers, Twitter has refused to offer any lower-priced tiers somewhere between the $100 and $42,000 range. It appears that Musk's Twitter would like to broadly eliminate the vast majority of the Twitter third-party ecosystem.

  Sounds like someone paid $44 Billion for a company now worth less than half that and thinks they can get their money back at gun point.

  "You can't get blood from a turnip."

  Most people simply cannot pay that, full stop. Even business entities who are in some way making money via Twitter are unlikely to be making so much money that it's worth $42k per month to them.

• by gsatic on 4/16/23, 6:24 AM

  Ad funded freebies (chat,email,video,social etc) over the last 20-30 years have made ppl forget they are free because someone else is paying.

  Usually with their attention, time or data being stolen.

  This year for the first time Ad revenues of all the major big tech companies dropped.

  People are blaming macro economic conditions. But as with the subprime mortgage meltdown freebies are never free forever. The bills are due.

  New data centers will keep getting built every week no matter what happens right? Wrong. Welcome to the new Attention Economy. Where ppl who think they deserve Free attention are going to discover the real cost of scarce attention.

• by slyall on 4/16/23, 7:32 AM

  I run a few small bots. The most important was probably @nz_quake that just tweets about New Zealand earthquakes.

  They all broke about a week ago. I was using a command line twitter client to post and that broke with the new API changes. The author abandoned it so had to find some other way to post.

  As a temp measure I got a free IFTTT that came with one twitter account hook. However longer term I've got to sort out my developer's account and then write some code to authenticate and allow everything to post.

  There are a lot of "bots" out there (even Elon follows a few) providing automatically posted content.

• by jacquesm on 4/17/23, 12:56 AM

  This and many other reasons besides is why authorities and the general public should not rely on commercial entities for stuff like this.

• by kstenerud on 4/16/23, 6:31 AM

  Bull, meet china shop.

• by eimrine on 4/16/23, 5:54 AM

  Bots suck tbh, and I don't know devices which can run Twitter but can not receive the live-saving alerts.