I wrote a statement a couple weeks ago regarding the new changes to Twitter's API. We reached out in their application form for their third tier API structure they'll be selling just to check what's up and turns out they really do expect people to pay $42k/month to increase the API requests to more than the very limited tier 2 at $100/month. Not only is that a highly ridiculous amount which I'm having a hard time seeing anyone pay for it, thus this change eliminating 99% of hobbyists and devs who've integrated their apps or websites to Twitter, but on top of it all do they expect you to be a registered company to request for tier 3.
Basically POSH requires about 3-5x more API requests than the 2nd tier which comes at $100/month which would be manageable. The project and Hive itself is constantly growing though, so we don't see the number of usage and registered users going down. The issue is that the next tier instantly becomes $42k/month, there's no 2.5 Tier for some unknown reason to pay something "reasonable" like $1-2k/month, I personally would've found that respectable and probably used it. Or a tier where you pay based on usage would be acceptable as well.
We also can't limit it in some clever ways like asking people to tweet less or banning people from the program, we'd still have to fetch tweets with the hive tag and links whether they're registered/banned or not. As far as I understand it we can't be selective of who's posh-eligible tweets we scan.
Okay so this means if Twitter goes through with this, at the beginning of next month you'll see the @poshtoken comments stop sharing twitter embeds like they currently do. We'll have to pause it and see if there'll be any solutions in the horizon to get it back to working the way it is now, but worst case scenario if we can't get it back up it'll mean a few things:
The whole automation and ease of sharing your POSH tweets onto the shared posts will be gone. The way payouts work currently where when the author or someone else (for instance the team curating POSH shares at the moment) upvotes them will also cease to exist. Similarly the way we distribute POSH to sharers right now will also stop working. The thing that really annoys me is that some of our future ideas that required this to work will also not come to fruition now due to this, for instance the idea to allow registered users on the website without even a Hive account earn BTC/ETH in the form of POSH and Hive being exchanged and sent to their registered wallet. We were very excited for that idea and have been working on creating profile pages on the website primarily for it, but not all's lost.
If the API won't be usable anymore we'll have to make due in more manual ways, we'd have to start encouraging sharers to share the embedded tweets themselves again in comments rather than relying on @poshtoken to do it for you. The curation team behind POSH may have to start using Twitter itself to sift through POSH shares listed through the #hive tag and go to the posts to look for the comments the sharers have placed to upvote. This is currently the plan of how we'll switch things up if every other attempt with the API fails. We'll check how that flows and improve from there.
As for the website, we do have more ideas, some that weren't as reliable on the API to continue working that we'd like to evolve the project into and we'll be continuing working on that after some edits to the website and informing people how you can use POSH now (or can't).
As mentioned in my previous post, we plan on making sure we can buy up POSH tokens for those who've invested/earned and would like to exit due to these unfortunate and uncontrolled changes. I'm also personally going to be selling a little of my bags I've bought over the years, not necessarily due to this but it's probably healthier for the project in general that some people don't have too much of the token. On top of it all when I started this project to support the sharing of Hive links on #web2, I told myself I'm not going to be paying myself for the amount of work that went into it. While I have gladly paid people for services, dev work, maintenance, etc for POSH, I've stayed true to not pay myself but instead "put money where my mouth is" and invest into the token with my own Hive. While the goal wasn't really to profit off of it but rather help maintain the price so others got some value out of their sharing, I'm glad it's done well and that I can at least recoup the Hive I've put into it.
I was also going to discuss POSH and the way it's funded as it seems some stakeholders aren't fans of it, but with the upcoming changes I've currently stopped funding it the way we did and will be relying on the already collected funds to keep the project going, evolving and at the same time buy up tokens for the secondary inflation period that's coming up soon.
This means POSH issuance will start decreasing over time as we have to mind the cap on the total supply of 1M tokens. You'll still be able to earn it through delegations and sharing, but the latter may pause at the beginning of the month and we'll have to figure out a different way to allocate tokens to sharers due to the API changes. Either way, both of those issuances will start to drop over time and when it gets to 50% of what it is now, we plan on adding tokens we've bought back instead so the "new token inflation" continues to drop from 50% to 0% while the "bought back tokens" are being fed so delegators and earners still receive rewards. This'll mean POSH will go deflationary by then and issuance will start to depend on how much the project manages to buy back in periods, although we'll try and keep it constant.
Either way, I want to thank everyone who's been a part of this project, grown with it both on Hive and Twitter, and tried their best to get traffic onto our ecosystem and at the same time talk Hive on web2 with other Hivers being around to amplify and support your actions. We're still quite a small project in the general crypto space but I'm happy to know POSH has played a small role in getting people out there and active and at the same time brought some value to our content from outside and inside visitors.
While these changes are quite a bummer, there's still a lot that POSH can do and become due to its way of token distribution and fair airdrop. We're looking forward to the near future and I'll be a bit busy in the coming weeks to try and shift some of our sharing focus onto other places with some contests and incentives to get things kickstarted. Will post about it soon!
Thanks for reading!
