Twitter and Bounded Rationality
A little about the free Twitter API going away and Systems Thinking
It’s Feb 9 today and Twitter is eliminating access to the free tier of their APIs. There’s not much information on pricing yet, but just like Kate Starbird said, could “very well be the end of an era for platform transparency and social media research.”
Over the last few weeks, I am taking a class in HCDE (at the University of Washington) about analyzing data scraped from the web, where our project deals with Twitter and needs us to communicate with the Twitter API. Throughout this class, our professor has discussed concerns with how the platform is changing and whether we can work on our projects on the social media platform that apparently wants to “give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.” Just the idea of not having a free version created doubt about what alternatives can be used to study certain patterns on social networks.
The API being free has had many benefits over the years, from learning in classrooms to enabling small creators to build tools that enhance engagement on the platform. It is difficult to imagine whether people will adapt to the paid model or choose to find alternatives, but one thing is for sure — the company has clearly taken a step back from making the platform an open and engaging space. In a new announcement, they did introduce an Academic Research access level, however, restricting its access to general student users or curious researchers like it was before.
While many critics are arguing that it is not absurd for companies to charge third-party creators when they get so much value from Twitter, I am not so satisfied with the idea that many of these tools, bots and research studies do not provide significant value back to the company.
Bounded Rationality
Reading a little on systems thinking and looking at the blunder happening at Twitter over the last few months, I have been thinking about the idea of bounded rationality undertaking. I thought I would talk about this a bit as I find it interesting and quite common.
Bounded rationality is when an individual makes decisions based on the limited information that satisfies them rather than what is optimal for the collected group.
Elon Musk came to Twitter knowing very less (my assumption) about how the company operated internally and made some drastic changes, including the layoffs, almost immediately. This decision probably led to Twitter being able to reduce costs significantly, which according to Elon, otherwise could have been drastic. Again assuming that some of the tweets and news I have seen over the last few months are true, some critical teams, like the Ethical AI team, were completely eliminated by the layoffs. While it may have been necessary to lay off every individual within that team for specific actions they had taken, was it really the best decision for the company?
There is certainly an individual, if not a group of people, who are satisfied by the changes, but these might not be the optimal decisions considering the negative effect on Twitter’s brand value and the trust of employees. And with the API not being free anymore, it certainly would have a negative effect on the academic research community and Twitter as a platform itself.
A list of things
Here are some of the interesting things I found on the internet.
A bunch of these go to the announcement of the new Bing and Edge browser with a customized GPT model integrated. I have not had my hands on these tools yet, but have only seen good reviews and am excited to try them out! If you haven’t looked at these, trust me, it’s worth it.
Microsoft introducing the New Bing and Edge Browser
This announcement and showcase are quite exciting. So much that a browser and search engine can do now makes me think about the many other tools that may just be eliminated by this.
Satya Nadella’s Interview by Nilay Patel from The Verge
This interview is definitely a must-watch. Satya shares his vision and his perspective on this new technology and his straight ideas on how he sees Google as a competitor.
Binging Portfolios
A hosted Notion page with a list of portfolios of some industry designers and researchers that I collected as inspiration.
Just leaving it here for now! ✌️