Having to deal with the Big Corporate Social Media Companies

[David]

Like I just posted in another thread, you guys have no idea what we have to go through every day to keep this site alive and working.

I have had my personal Forums account linked to my Twitter account for easy login ever since we upgraded to Zenforo years ago. Today, I tried to login using Twitter and received an error message (I had previously been logged in for many months without logging out).

I go to our developer account portal and see this:

OK:

1) How in the **** did we violate any rules and policies? This is a simple 'app' that does nothing more than provide a user authentication token back to our forums.
2) They have our email address. Why did they not bother to notify us of this grave crime against society?

I'll tell you what it is. All of these corporate bullies use their Terms & Conditions as a blanket way to shutdown users. They refuse to be specific, thus you have no grounds with which to sue them.

I think what happened is that old Mr. Musk, having paid twice as much as Twitter is worth, is trying to recoup some income. He made the snap judgement that everyone was going to pay for API access, since they're probably all big companies who make lots of money from Twitter data. So, they just shut down everyone's API with ZERO/0 advance notice.

There is supposed to be a 'free' level of access for mom and pops like us, so technically we should not have been shut down.

I'm not even going to tell you about what I went through with ZuckerCorp a few months ago.

 

[HemiHauler]

Reddit is fighting this battle now too. When you have shareholders (in Twitter’s case a shareholder) to satisfy, the real value is ignored.

After a career in software development, I can see both sides: it’s unreasonable to assume unlimited/unfettered API access will be available in perpetuity. At the end of the day, APIs are the secret sauce of the company. OF COURSE it’s OK to monetize. It’s nice to have free stuff for low-footprint users, but not a universal idea.

Much value has been built around these things, however, benefiting both consumer and company. In the case of Twitter, they probably changed the TOS (which no one reads) for API to small sites shut out.

Some Reddit app developers have gotten so popular, the charges under the proposed API fees would be in the millions $$.

Crappy way to go, but not unexpected that free stuff won’t last forever — even when the company can mine for data to sell, not enough value.

 

[David]

All fixed now! No payment required, other than 2 hours of my time and who knows how many inconvenienced users.

I agree, crappy way to deal with it. I suspect the admins were just told to do something like this:

SET api-access = 'no' where userid=*;