This makes sense to me. Granting free firehose access to a small, fun project like this seems like unnecessary overhead for Twitter. I think their mistake was granting it in the first place.
CocoaPods was throttled not shut down. Twitter has an history of shutting down access to its API without notice or warning when a project becomes too popular.
What baffles me is that CocoaPods was actually providing something of value and their usage fit in with the purpose of GitHub (serving code.)
EmojiTracker appears to be essentially frivolous and puts stress on Twitter's platform for no good reason.
GitHub and Twitter both provided a free service and then modified it for a specific user without warning. I would say throttling CocoaPod affected more "legit" users than "shutting down" EmojiTracker did. (I put shutting down in quotes because it seems EmojiTracker still has limited access to their API?)
How come Twitter gets called out as unconditionally Evil, yet GitHub was just looking after itself?
But then once you do grant it you should only revoke it for a really good reason (such as abuse or some other violation of the terms of service). Otherwise it should simply continue.
