Twitter's New Dev Rules Suck for Curious Coders (A Rant)

I'm bringing back some blogging to this platform because I'm really excited by what my friend @Jim is doing here on reading.supply. Let's see if this gets me to writing regularly again!



So, if you're attuned to the software development world, you've heard that Twitter drastically changed their developer rules a couple months ago. Why? Well, if you're attuned with the world at large, you've probably heard about how Twitter™ has totally f***ed everything up by allowing Russian bots (oh and real life Nazis) to spread misinformation on the platform. In response to this, Twitter decided to close off its once famous open API; to continue developing on their platform, you now have to apply for credentials through a process that can take a couple days to a week.



As someone who's kept myself out of the tech world in recent years, I didn't think much of the rule changes. But then I saw quite a few tweets and replies from active bot makers and developers that made me realize how far reaching the Twitter changes were.















It seemed like the developer rules boiled down to this:



1. You had to apply for a dev account for every single account that was currently running an app — for someone like Darius that would mean spending hours (if not days) applying for over a hundred bots

2. If you had more than 10 accounts, you had to submit another application justifying why you had that many accounts

3. Almost every application was taking days and sometimes weeks to respond to.



I'm pretty annoyed to hear that — Twitter bots are how I got my start coding for the web. As an unabashed Shitty Programmer™, the Twitter API is how I taught myself to build my first server side web apps since university CS classes are much more theoretical.



Now, those I mentioned above are people who've built platforms and who Twitter should have a vested interest in keeping on the platform as they're the people who brought to many to it in the first place. And while Twitter is doing a shitty job of it, I wonder how it would work as someone without a real platform. As of this writing I have 287 followers in contrast to the thousands of those above.



So I decided to apply. And I wanted to apply in the same thought process that I had as a 21 year old bright eyed Baby Shitty Programmer™ — the one who was intimidated by everything with no idea what he was doing, and didn't realize that nothing mattered.



Wow damn, Twitter will take forever to respond: Applying for Dev Credentials.

Or how I learned to hate Twitter even more.

To apply for developer credentials on Twitter, you have to go to this very pretty website.







Once you press the appealing purple button, you fill out some questions about what you want to do on the platform, to which I said "Make joke projects and get people to laugh on the internet" because that was the genesis of almost all of my projects. I filled out the rest of the form and submitted.



And then I waited.



Then I waited some more.



More than a week later, I figured my application fell through the cracks. Then, that evening I got a message. I won't replicate the entire thing, but it was a request for appeal that had this to say:





And then there was a list of a bunch of necessary information. Thing is, if I'm creating a stupid twitter bot for the first time, I don't know this information. So, I responded with this:





And got this in response:









Before this gets away from me and just turns into a very well designed ZenDesk support email chain, I feel like I should get to the point.



The New Twitter Developer Rules f***ing kill creativity and stop intimidated programmers from actually creating cool things and as;kljfkbsh;fj



Like I said earlier, I'm a terrible programmer. I was always lost in my computer science classes and baffled in my internships because I was thrown into massive codebases without any idea which way to look or code. Most environments either siloed us so much that there was no translating those skills to the real world, or threw us into an assignment with no direction.



I heard about twitter bots during one of these internships, and for the first time in my coding career I learned that people could have fun with code. At the same time, I was also trying to understand the ins and outs of node.js and npm with absolutely no starting point because it was too new to be covered in class. But Twitter was 1) a platform that I recognized and 2) made it really easy to set up your first ever app. I was able to make something fun on a platform I already had some experience with.



Want to know what my first ever twitter bot was? It was a bot that literally tweeted the UTC TimeStamp every minute, on the minute.







It was super basic, but finishing that bot culminated in the most triumphant I had felt in my coding journey today because it meant that I had done all of the following I had never done before:



1. Use node.js

2. Use NPM to incorporate Twit

3. Use Express

4. Spin up my own server

5. Use setInterval correctly

6. Connect API tokens

7. Use Heroku

8. Use .gitignore



If you're a veteran developer, these milestones might seem extremely minuscule, but when you're new to everything, each and every single barrier is intimidating. How do you google to learn something new if you don't even know what to google?



Almost every single "stupid" project I've done was to teach myself something new. I made Beyonc8 Ball to learn how to reply to people on Twitter, I made Anna Kendrick Lamar to learn how to handle image processing in Node, and Child Separation Bot to combine Twilio and Twitter and to call out the Trump Administration. With the new developer rules, I wouldn't have been able to get into any of these because I would've been scared off by the first sign of having to explain why I wanted to make a phone number that swears at you.



And I'm not even a marginalized person in tech! I mean look at me!





Most people instantly assume I can code because of racial stereotypes! And they're not wrong, but I don't even program as a day job! How does this all bode for your underrepresented minority in tech who already has to face way more barriers than South Asian Male Aviral Goel Bagla over here? When women are instantly shut down on forums when they ask for help or try to contribute to open source, why would they even do the extra effort to apply for developer credentials they might not even get?



And it's not like this will even stop the bots and Nazis! I have a whole diatribe but I think Casey really nailed it when they said this:







These rules won't change anything. All they've done is kill what was left of the curious coders on Twitter. I'm not afraid of losing the Dariuses, Allisons, and Caseys of Twitter — they've all mentioned how they've decided to move their bot making to Mastodon now. I'm afraid of losing all the intimidated coders who need a playground to practice the things they don't know yet.



Anyways, I'm just going to do all of my projects over on Glitch (mastodon is too intimidating) because at XOXO they made clear the creative web will live on there. As someone who got into the world of software way after the creative web supposedly died, I'm hoping this works out. I also have way more faith in Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch, than I do in Jack Dorsey because I asked a question about Glitch and Anil answered it at like 11pm when there was no reason that he would do that.





kthxbyeeee,

Avi







P.S. Twitter, if you read this, PLEASE GET RID OF THE FUCKING NAZIS, it's like basic clean up yo. Least you can do after losing some of the most creative voices on Twitter in an effort to prove to your investors you can change something.