The plan doesn’t make much sense because the free tier is write-only. Bots can post 1,500 Tweets per API token per month, but free users can no longer make simple read-only queries about Tweets or users.
This means the free API is only useful for people who want to post Tweets automatically (e.g. bots) and not people who just want read-only access and do not contribute to spam. These users will now have to resort to web scraping, which is much more expensive for Twitter to serve than basic JSON API responses.
Spam bots need read access to find relevant keywords and insert themselves into replies to popular posts - otherwise they have zero visibility. As for hobby projects - I'm sure this will break a lot of them, but those that just post regular updates (like @tinyspires) should be fine.
Really? On the API docs it still says write-only access. I don’t see anything about allowing user queries (unless the docs haven’t been updated to Musk’s latest whim, which should be expected given Twitter’s state I guess).
This means the free API is only useful for people who want to post Tweets automatically (e.g. bots) and not people who just want read-only access and do not contribute to spam. These users will now have to resort to web scraping, which is much more expensive for Twitter to serve than basic JSON API responses.