One of the biggest blows that has came with Elon Musk has been the removal of the free Twitter API, and I feel like most people don't understand how big of an impact this was.
A lot of projects rely on the Twitter API, some of which you might not even realize. For example, Downdetector mainly sources reports by how many people are Tweeting about a service being down. You can manually report an outage on their website, but most people don't do that.
However, in my opinion one of the biggest blows from this has been the ability to Tweet from almost any device.
This era I would say ended around 2019, but that's just a number I'm pulling out of my head. But have you ever stopped to think about just how many devices that you could Tweet from?
For example, most game consoles from this and last generation have a dedicated button for taking screenshots so you can upload them to Twitter (or Facebook). Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation have all recently removed these features.
Another thing that people forget is that earlier versions of iOS had Facebook and Twitter integration built into the OS itself (Facebook was added with iOS 6). This was especially the case with iOS 5 and 6, which allowed you to share to Twitter from other apps (later they made it so any app could do this). In iOS 7, Apple took the Twitter integration further, adding a shared links section to Safari as well as a trending on Twitter station to iTunes Radio.
More devices than just mobile devices got Twitter integration. For example, Sony Bravia Televisions had Twitter widgets. My TV has one of these integrations (I couldn't find an English video, so enjoy this one in Spanish). One of the remotes that came with the TV has a Twitter button, but no input button.
When the first Apple watch was announced, it was promised to come with a Twitter app. There is currently no Twitter app for the Apple Watch, and there hasn't been for awhile.
I have even played pinball machines that although they don't directly have Twitter integration, they still generate a QR code you can scan to prefill a Tweet with your score. Imagine if people cared about Google+ in the same way.
Sadly, Elon Musk hates fun, and decided to shut down the free API tier. This was both as a cost cutting measure, and because Elon thinks he will stop bots. This clearly isn't working, because the latest transparency report claims 464 million accounts have been suspended for spam during H1 2024.
This is sad because its making the internet feel less social. While it might not of made sense for most devices to have Twitter integration, some devices actually had a good reason. Being able to share pictures and videos taken on gaming consoles was really cool. However, now we can't have any of that. Even if BlueSky or Threads ends up overtaking Twitter, I doubt social media integrations will continue to be a thing.
Despite being interesting, maybe that is for the best.