What stage of late Twitterism is this?

 Elon broke something else.

The response to Twitter killing some of the most beloved content on the platform has been almost entirely negative—ironically, a trend that will be harder to analyze in the future now that the platform is making this change. But it’s not surprising; what else can you say about a decision that results in tweets like, “This change may mean the end of the Hug Fairy on Twitter,” and “This change will mean the end of HourlyPony as we know it.”

Along with the Hug Fairy and HourlyPony, it’s likely also the end of song lyric bots, book snippet bots, poetry bots, art bots, satellite imagery bots, bots that tell you how much of the year has passed, bots that remind you to take a drink of water, those that share daily screenshots from TV shows, and the many, many other bots that demonstrate the creativity  a free API allows. But it’s also a lot more serious than that.

The decision will likely impact bots that assist disabled people using the platform; it will kick bots that share earthquake updates and polling data offline; it will hamper people’s ability to research Twitter trends and accounts; and it will affect tools that make it easier to leave Twitter for new platforms. It’s an open question whether researchers with “academic research access” to the Twitter API will continue to have it; researchers seem to think not.

This blog has a bot that posts updates to Twitter.  After the death of Google Reader and the general abandonment of RSS, automated posts to social media were one of the few easy ways to keep up with updates from one's favorite content sources. The promise of the early internet as a leveling and unmediated space where people could easily find one another has been fading for some time. Twitter was one of the last little outposts of something sort of like what we once thought we were building.  That's on the way out now too. And for what? 

All of this amounts to a forced exodus of some of the most interesting parts of Twitter, and with only a week’s notice to boot. Before Elon Musk took over the platform, Twitter began an effort to label the “good” bots, which made it easier to see what accounts were automated. But even after that, there’s no easy way of knowing how many accounts and how much content this change will impact. There’s also no way to know how much money this will bring the company—if any at all.

Doesn't matter. Nothing matters but the logic of profit. Or in this case the unmitigated consequences of failure to monetize.