WaPo article: https://archive.is/wip/sgViP
Company owner Elon Musk tweeted that the change was a “temporary emergency measure” to deter third-party scraping of data from the social media platform. “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk wrote.
User "elonmusk" not found
Honestly I keep being more and more sympathetic to him on this one, especially from the programming perspective. Like him or not he's trying to salvage a company that was never really profitable to begin with and was rapidly losing value. The only winners in this deal ironically are the executives who despite having their very public and I suspect staged tantrums are probably off living it up now and laughing amongst each other at what a shitshow they left. I have to wonder as well if any of them are thinking they're quite glad they finally got an excuse to walk away from it all.
So many tech companies are like this and they almost certainly collude with glowies and government ops in the background to get extra cash which is why they had fucking people with direct links to intelligence agencies working at twitter. Add to that so much of the traffic is fake and of course it's all going to come crashing down, they're all going to go this way soon enough because advertiser fraud is not a viable business model.
Part of the reason I'm personally sympathetic to Elon is that he comes off as this highly opinionated nerd. And being a highly opinionated nerd myself I can't help but sympathize with one of my kind.
Except I don't have like $100 Billion and he does, so as a general rule I'm incapable of putting my money where my mouth is nearly to the same extent as Elon can.
And you're right: these giant online forums like twitter and reddit are never meant to be profitable as forums because that makes no sense. They're meant to shape opinion and are valuable on that basis alone. And if you're trying to run one of these things as an honest-to-god public forum where people can give their honest opinion, that's going to conflict with the goals of a site trying to shape public opinion.
I don't have 100 billion dollars, but I'm still right all the time. If people don't want to use that, and who could blame them, be my guest. It's occasionally frustrating but mainly no skin off my back.