I'd argue almost the opposite: The worst thing for society done by twitter is the promotion of all the virulent garbage speech which is then parroted by the media.

> And I’d, in turn, amend that comment to strike the gratuitous swipe at “the media”.

You're flat out wrong, until the media you consume don't report anything at all about politics and at that point it's hard to call it media any more - simple reason: many politicians and even some companies communicate mostly with Twitter "soundbites" instead of holding press conferences.

It was one of the worst things they did for a sizeable subset of users and devs; for "the business" though it may well have made sense in financial terms at the time. With the public API before it was heavily locked down I mainly used it in third party Twitter clients to avoid seeing the (revenue generating) ads in the official Twitter apps - I know many others who did the same. An open, freely usable Twitter API can actively hurt revenues at a time when Twitter desperately needed to demonstrate ability to generate profits.

As long as Twitter remains a publicly traded company, I imagine this unhappy continuum between "Twitter as universal protocol for short messaging" and "Twitter as large publicly traded software company" will always put competing pressures on how open a standard Twitter can ever really become.

>With the public API before it was heavily locked down I mainly used it in third party Twitter clients to avoid seeing the (revenue generating) ads in the official Twitter apps - I know many others who did the same. An open, freely usable Twitter API can actively hurt revenues at a time when Twitter desperately needed to demonstrate ability to generate profits.

I wonder if they ever investigated just making API access paid, not free? Users were paying for 3rd party clients making use of the API just because they liked them so much better already, so clearly there was some money in it. And it seems like the Venn diagram of "using client to avoid seeing ads" and "already running, or soon would run, adblock in the browser" would be pretty darn near a circle. Pretty trivial though to make API access require a paid token per account/user, and heavy Twitter users might well put down $1-10/month to use their client of choice.

Don't know, maybe just an artifact of the era. At the time on the web in general it just seems like there was this real aversion to any sort of paid offerings even if they were pure bonuses for heavy users with no actual content hidden at all. That's changed a lot since then, but still particularly for a company desperate for hard revenue and facing controversy over a specific somewhat power-user feature, a bit curious they didn't just try to monetize it. Doesn't seem like an honest presentation of that would even bother that particular subset, certainly not more then having it axed entirely.