Text feed are the lightest weight most cachable thing you can serve. The costliest part of the text component is the mixer that ranks the content. The companies scraping them don’t care about the ranking they just want bulk tweets. That’s what the API is for. Elon charged them insane rates so they all went off the API that cost Twitter a tiny fraction to serve and instead the API consumers switched to crawling the website instead, which costs Twitter orders of magnitude more, but is free for scrapers. Elon is indeed a stable genius.

Excuse me for a second.

Buahahahahahahahahwhahahahahah!

Spez didn’t borrow billions of dollars he has to pay back with interest though so he won’t need to fire almost all his engineers.

He did however send all the most talented developers working under the platform to his biggest competitor so that wasn’t smart.