Speaking as someone who had mostly been using the first party twitter app in recent years and so wouldn't have been impacted by this even if I was still actively using twitter, this seems pretty poorly done by Musk.
Shutting down third party clients? It's arguably a valid decision. They presumably want to consolidate the users into directly controlled clients, where they can be advertised to and can have premium subscription features prominently featured. The former could have been rolled into the API, but the latter would have been basically impossible.
But doing it like this is just giving everyone who was a hardcore twitter user (if you use a third party client, particularly one you're paying a subscription for...) a nudge into jumping ship. The alternative approach of announcing the "no more third party clients" API terms change and giving everyone time to wind their apps down would also have generated complaints, but I bet it'd have gotten them better press and user outcomes than this. Hell, just announce "you must have a Twitter Blue subscription to use a third party client" and that might have actually gone well for them.
Musk could have just tweeted "As we focus on increasing the velocity of developing new features we don't want the baggage of maintaining the legacy API for clients so we're going to wind down support for third-party clients in a month from now." and it would have headed off like 70% of the hate. You don't need a comms team for that.
PS: let me clarify a bit. I'm not saying that Twitter should not have or does not need a comms team or that getting rid of them was not a stupid thing for Musk to do.
What I'm trying to say is that this latest stupid thing (not giving any warning about changing their app API rules so that app developers and users could have some time adjust) doesn't really have anything to do with the lack of a comms team. It's not one of the stupidities that naturally falls out of not having a comms team.
In this case all that was needed was for Musk when he decided to change this policy to (1) tell whoever he ordered to implement it to deploy it on $FUTURE_DATE, and (2) tweet that he'd ordered this change and it will go live on $FUTURE_DATE.
One of the many values of a good communications team is that they communicate in both directions. They’re not just mouthpieces for the company, they know the customers and users and market as well. A good comms team will tell the company when users are confused about something; a great comms team will tell the company _before_ users get confused at all.
By shutting down the comms team, Musk isn’t just saying that he doesn’t want to play by corporate communications rules, he’s saying that he doesn’t want to _listen_ to anyone, either.
comms teams are great, but how hard is it to post a simple straightforward writeup about the upcoming change? heck he even announced a bunch of other stuff from his personal account before, even promising to put stuff like this up for voting. confused
> and can have premium subscription features prominently featured. The former could have been rolled into the API, but the latter would have been basically impossible.
Not so, clients have exclusive keys (whose supply has been highly restricted since they were introduced a few years ago, making gaining any sort of grounds with new clients a challenge).
Twitter could have made the validity of these certs / keys conditional on subscription integration.
Oh, I didn't mean letting the clients support them, I meant making the clients support them and feature them how Twitter wanted them to.
E.g. if they wanted to change the notifications defaults everywhere to showing the "verified" notifications first, as a way to promote sales of Twitter Blue... good luck getting the third party clients to go along with that without some serious coercive micromanagement.
Shutting down third party clients? It's arguably a valid decision. They presumably want to consolidate the users into directly controlled clients, where they can be advertised to and can have premium subscription features prominently featured. The former could have been rolled into the API, but the latter would have been basically impossible.
But doing it like this is just giving everyone who was a hardcore twitter user (if you use a third party client, particularly one you're paying a subscription for...) a nudge into jumping ship. The alternative approach of announcing the "no more third party clients" API terms change and giving everyone time to wind their apps down would also have generated complaints, but I bet it'd have gotten them better press and user outcomes than this. Hell, just announce "you must have a Twitter Blue subscription to use a third party client" and that might have actually gone well for them.