As Twitter and Reddit price out third-party apps, James O’Malley investigates our precarious relationship with big tech
It’s stressful to think about it, but so much of our digital lives exist precariously. With a few taps of the keyboard, Microsoft could stop us from accessing our documents, Google could deny us access to our emails, and Facebook could disconnect us from our friends.
If you’re thinking “they’d never do that”, recent events suggests it’s far from a remote possibility – just ask power users of Twitter and the social news site Reddit.
In January, just weeks after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was finalised, users of a number of third-party Twitter clients including Tweetbot, Echofon, Birdie and Twitterific, suddenly found themselves unable to log in. And it wasn’t a bug in the system.
After several days of uncertainty, it emerged that the new proprietor had decided to restrict access to the Twitter API, the technical means by which apps made by outsiders talk to the company’s servers. In an instant, Tweetbot et al were dead.
Then in March, the screws tightened further. Twitter announced a new regime for other third-party apps that use Twitter data – think scientists who use it for academic research, or have Twitter hooked into specialist software; or the users of useful tools such as Thread Reader, which makes long Twitter threads easier to read; or Tweet Deleter, a tool that you can use to purge your posts.
Not much changed on a technical level, but the most important thing did: the price. Under the new API rules, hobbyist coders are expected to pay $100 (£76) a month to read up to 10,000 tweets – and “enterprise plan” access starts at $42,000 (£32,000) per month.
Twitter is not alone in hiking its API prices. In April, Reddit followed suit. CEO Steve Huffman gave developers only 30 days to pull out their cheque books and sign up to the pricey new regime. It was a decision that quickly led to the shuttering of Apollo, one of the most popular third-party Reddit clients, especially among the site’s more hardcore consumers.
In both cases users could continue to use these services via their official apps, but it meant dramatic changes in how users of these apps used the two platforms, with reduced functionality and fewer options to tailor the sites’ output to their particular needs.
Big tech suddenly turned the screws on the third-party apps and their users, and now it’s raising deeper questions about our reliance on a handful of tech firms and
