In my case I literally just had a bot running to pull in my own following/followers list so I could diff them and then tweet out the result privately so I'd be aware of any changes to it.

It was useful to check to see if someone else decided to softblock me/deactivated their account (and in at least one case, has helped me to reach out to someone in need). That's not "making money from the dataset", it was a hobby project and I imagine the overwhelming majority of Twitter bots are that. (Most of the ones I used to follow generally just scraped various subreddits to tweet out/source fun art to look at).

I'm not gonna pay money to access my own data, Musk can sink in his own shit for that and I don't blame any of those other hobby bot devs for not wanting to do that either.

They already have an enterprise tier for people who want to build commercial stuff on top of Twitter, and they already monetize their datasets and have done for years. How do you expect to sign up students/new developers if they have to pay before they figure out how to use the API?

Well they mentioned "basic tier API", so I guess let's wait for the pricing and capabilities, no? My main criticism is they're not being assholes just for charging for an API access to their data.

You can't "wait for pricing and capabilities" as they're cutting access literally one week from now.

No attempt at making this seem like reasonable behavior and communication with developers can succeed here.

And by the way if you expect reasonable cost, you're in for a surprise. Twitter is DESPERATE for cash.

_Their_ dataset? The data comes from the users!

No, the data comes from users' interactions with the platform, and they have to run a massive engineering feat to take all of that and run 24/7. It's expensive and so it's reasonable to charge something