Comment by throw0101a
Comment by throw0101a 2 days ago
Many moons ago Twitter used to have RSS (Atom?) feeds for each user so you could use any old news aggregator to keep up to date.
Comment by throw0101a 2 days ago
Many moons ago Twitter used to have RSS (Atom?) feeds for each user so you could use any old news aggregator to keep up to date.
Twitter shut off RSS access over 10 years ago along with their popular 1.1 API.
I don't think that's fair - getting back the chronological timeline itself made the purchase a good one in my eyes, alongside the For You feed, which seems to work wonderfully (for me). Not to forget you can literally turn off ads if you want. I seem to be a real minority, but I do genuinely believe Musk has done a great job with Twitter (or X).
You could get SMS notifications whenever a user tweeted, too. Imagine signing up for that today!
You could also for a long time send SMS (if you registered your number) to 40404 to tweet to Twitter. It's still in my address book from the era when I was tweeting T9 from dumb phones or using voice-to-SMS to tweet on early smart phones.
That makes more sense to disable as SMS is expensive. This is still fairly easy to set up yourself using a tool like IFTTT[1] or similar.
Social media used to be about content sharing, but it's clear that it's far more profitable to keep your users on your site at all times and keep the content they create in house rather than linked somewhere else.
HN is probably the last true aggregator site left that I know of.
It's partly why the web is so much worse. There's really no reason to create content outside of a walled platform is it is getting increasingly difficult to find an audience for it. Even blogging is an uphill battle since more and more social media sites penalize link sharing (they want you to create the content on their platform and leave it there).
That's why it's not surprising that these APIs are disappearing since the fundamental model has changed.