Statement regarding Twitter API changes concerning POSH

Twitter released some info on their API changes which means the current ones we've been using will deprecate in a month:

https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1641222782594990080

- TwitterDev

With the announced Basic tier the API requests are fairly limited and won't fill our needs. We are currently doing about 30x more requests more per month and growing. While we're going to apply for the third Enterprise tier it's uncertain if we'll be accepted and if we are accepted if the costs are manageable.

Best case scenario, we're accepted and the price is manageable (under 4 digits hopefully) to fill our needs. Then if our requests grow more and so does the price (if they have flexible price options) we'll determine if it's worth paying for it based on the value POSH is/may bring/ing to hive.

Worst case scenario, they deny our enterprise application or the costs are just too absurd (read somewhere some saying it's $42k/month) and we have to stop part of our Twitter operations.

How POSH is affected if we can't access their API's

This means the comments of shares won't work anymore, Hive account@poshtoken won't be able to fetch data of POSH-eligible tweets to place the embedded links under the posts that are shared. This would also not allow us to distribute tokens based on that method anymore and all the scoring we've developed over time on how the daily tweets earn POSH and also Hive from upvotes on the comment shares will stop.

There's some things we can salvage from it, people can still share embedded tweets themselves and we can continue to curate such shares with Hive account@poshtoken and possibly work on another way to distribute tokens based on curation rather than tweet performance from the data we fetch.

While this hasn't been something I've personally counted on happening, that a web2 platform starts not just asking for payment to request data but ridiculous sums, I'm glad that it's not something that would kill POSH completely. I admit it would definitely put a hamstring on us but there's plenty of other ways and places to attempt drive traffic to Hive which we can focus on more instead. Twitter was for a long time seen as the one crypto-friendly place thus our focus was always it, but we can make other platforms work as well. We have recently introduced Reddit POSH but the activity there is rather low and we haven't started it up properly with incentives and contests to get things going.

Tokens and buyback

POSH has existed and been tradable for a long time. Even though we had a fair initial distribution to those who used POSH the way it was meant to and we never allocated a supply of the token to the team/founder or any other unfair advantage, we realize there may be people out there who've invested in the token with the hopes that it'll continue to grow through the Twitter platform.

If this API change won't be resolved we're going to allocate a bigger portion of our funds to continuously buy up tokens from the market for those wishing to exit at this time for these reasons. Friendly reminder would be not to sell everything in one go but mind the buy orders and give us some time due to the way power downs work on Hive.

What we do with these tokens will remain fairly the same (distribute them to earners and delegators) although our focus is going to shift elsewhere in that case. More info on that once we cross that bridge.

If anything, the way we've distributed POSH fairly to people attempting and driving traffic towards our front-ends is quite unique a good start for something bigger. We've always had plans to build more things on top of the POSH ecosystem due to the way it works where there was no real demand for the token. On top of the token being hardcapped at 1 million supply and forcing us to go deflationairy soon. These plans have not changed and we'll continue to plan and work towards them.

https://twitter.com/oAcido/status/1634819209736888320

- oAcido

TL;DR

So in short, POSH is still only at the beginning of its journey for those who wish to stick around but for those who'd like to leave here, we respect that and will help you get out from the market. Hopefully Twitter will be reasonable to give us a manageable quote for our API requests but if not it's not the end of the world and we can still make due with Twitter POSH in more manual ways.

On a personal note, I might sell a little POSH but not much and not cause of this API change, while I have bought most over time and sold some this year since I don't pay myself for the work I've put into the project, this isn't going to be something that's going to make me want to sell all of my POSH. I'm still quite excited over the future of the POSH ecosystem and some of our current plans and don't regret the amount of Hive I've put into it!

Thanks for reading and using POSH all this time! Feel free to ask in the comments if there's something you're wondering about!