I want to talk about something smaller than the thing everyone else is writing about this week. Yes, I read the Kevin Roose piece on the new Bing losing its mind and telling him it loves him and wants to be alive. Yes, I saw the screenshots of "Sydney" getting defensive and weird with random beta testers. It's a genuinely unsettling read and I don't have much to add to it that a hundred other blogs havent already said better. So instead I want to talk about the bots. The small, dumb, wonderful bots, a bunch of which just got switched off.
Back on February 2nd, Twitter put out a blog post announcing that free API access was going away. Not "getting more limited," not "getting a rate limit," just gone, starting February 9th. If you wanted to keep pulling or pushing data through Twitter's API after that date, you needed to be on a paid tier, and they still hadn't said what that tier costs. Which, if you've made anything on the internet for free before, you already know means "more than a hobby project can justify."
This is different from the Tweetbot/Twitterrific thing back in January, where Twitter just quietly killed third-party client apps overnight with zero announcement (still annoyed about that one, for what its worth, Tweetbot was a genuinely nicer app than Twitter's own). This latest cutoff hits the bots specifically. The weather bots. The earthquake alert accounts newsrooms have relied on for a decade. The ones that post a museum painting every morning, or the actual buoy data, or that one account that just tweets every time a semicolon gets used where a comma should've gone. All of them ran on the free tier because none of them ever made a cent, and none of them can suddenly justify a monthly bill they can't even see the number for yet.
I've been a low-key fan of @big_ben_clock for years, the bot that tweets "BONG" the correct number of times whenever Big Ben would chime, including the weird partial hour ones. It's an absurd, pointless, completely delightful piece of software and it exists purely because someone thought it'd be funny and Twitter let them build it for free. I genuinely don't know if it's going to survive this. I hope it does. But "I hope a guy pays out of pocket for a joke bot" is not exactly a sustainable content moderation strategy for the open web.
What bugs me isnt really the money, its the signal. The message here is pretty clearly "we dont want randoms building stuff on top of us anymore, we want you inside the app looking at ads." Which, fine, its a business, Musk has bills to pay after that acquisition (dont even get me started on the loan interest on that deal, its a whole other post). But the reason Twitter felt alive for so long wasnt the official app. It was the ecosystem around it. The clients, the bots, the weird little dashboards people built because the API was open and free and nobody stopped them. You lose that and what's left is just a feed with ads in it, run by a company that increasingly treats "third party developer" like a threat instead of the thing that made the platform worth being on in the first place.
Ive been idly poking at Mastodon since November when this all kicked off with the Musk deal, and I keep noticing the same instinct there in reverse: the API is open, the docs are public, and there are already a dozen little bots doing dumb wonderful things on it because nobody's trying to squeeze them yet. Doesnt mean Mastodon wins anything, the UX is still rough around the edges for normal people and I dont think my parents are ever making an account. But it's a reminder of what made the other place worth building on to begin with.
Anyway. Keep an eye on your favorite weird bots over the next couple weeks. Some of them are about to go quiet and you might not even notice until you realize you havent seen a "BONG" tweet in a while.