Things are about to change.
📅 5 years ago in News | Updated 3 years ago
Back in April last year Twitter announced upcoming changes to their platform, mainly the launch of the new Account Activity API. As we learned from following blog posts, this would also mean deprecation of some existing endpoints.
And today we have some more details on what’s changing.
This is an incredibly important change to our developer platform, that protects users as well as ensuring that we can support legitimate developers. https://t.co/WLjjcwbvn2
— Andy Piper (pipes) 👨🏼💻 (@andypiper) July 24, 2018
You can see the full details in this blog post, but here are some of the highlights relevant to botmakers:
- a new app registration process: you need to apply for a developer account, you can only create 10 apps (you can apply to lift this limit)
- new rate limits for POST endpoints
- and also new default app-level rate limits
Most of these changes are pretty reasonable and necessary, but will create a lot of extra work for active botmakers and possibly also discourage newcomers.
Twitter was an unusually good platform for micro art bots because it proved a way for people to find that art in the way they read everything else. The death of the twitter bot has been obvious for a couple years now, but it’s still so sad. They brought me a lot of joy.
— Misty (@mistydemeo) July 25, 2018
Not optimistic. Increasingly likely I’ll just move everything to @MastodonProject and get it over with
— J. Harry Caufield (@harry_caufield) July 24, 2018
fwiw, I do not plan to take any proactive measures to keep my bots working on twitter after this change, so enjoy them while you can I guess https://t.co/DbKkCc0fmF
— Allison Parrish | @aparrish@mastodon.social (@aparrish) July 24, 2018
(having said that, I do think this is a reasonable and needed policy change on twitter’s part, and I hope it helps their website not be as awful a hellmouth as it currently is, but I’m not holding my breath)
— Allison Parrish | @aparrish@mastodon.social (@aparrish) July 24, 2018
I’m not an artbot man, but I do run a few bots.
Without being too doom and gloom about it, i could see this as the beginning of the end for casual botmakers, teen coders and the like.
☹️— Botvolution (@botvolution) July 24, 2018
Seems like more paperwork to get a bot up and running, minimal effect otherwise. We’ll need to see if Twitter makes approval harder on bot makers, I guess.
— Bryant Durrell (@BryantD) July 24, 2018
I worry about how this will affect beginners. First tries are often “low quality” but they’re necessary. If there had been this kind of barrier to making @quit_it_bot, I probably wouldn’t have made it, maybe wouldn’t have started making bots at all.
— Sprite Guard (@Sprite_Guard) July 24, 2018
As someone who created a couple of friendly twitter bots, I think the new bot policy is a step in the right direction even if it makes life harder for art bot creators
— Elad (@elad3) July 26, 2018
making art bots felt at first like decorating the house we were building together, later like drawing graffiti on the highrise that went up where our house used to be. now it feels like begging robert moses for permission to put up a mural next to the cross-bronx expressway
— Allison Parrish | @aparrish@mastodon.social (@aparrish) July 25, 2018
Where will your bots go, if Twitter shuts down enough of their APIs?
Will you embed them on a webpage?
Put them on Mastodon?
Find a strange new place for them? (smartwatches, Google Home, Raspberry PI bots)
…or will they die here, on Twitter, where they were born?— Kate Compton (@GalaxyKate) August 1, 2018
I’m applying for the increased rate limit – should be okay, though!
— v (@v21) July 24, 2018
It will also be interesting to see if this will indeed make Twitter a safer platform, since there are other ways to make bots on Twitter other than the API. We have to wait and see the full impact of these changes, but if you have already made a few bots and don’t plan on migrating them, this might be a good opportunity to add them to Botwiki. And if you do plan to stick with Twitter, you can help us test our new starter project.
Is your Twitter bot using one of the endpoints that are about to be deprecated?
Help us test a new @glitch starter project:https://t.co/sxiA0L1g1g
Join https://t.co/4FH6OgVuCG for more info. pic.twitter.com/Ldzs8TDf5O
— A friendly encyclopedia of 🤖💻💾 (@botwikidotorg) June 18, 2018
Image credit: Bakani
Update: August 22, 2019:
Stefan
Creator of Botwiki and Botmakers, Botwiki editor, and Botmakers community manager.
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