Dashing the hopes of dozens of startups that had hoped to make money where Twitter had so far been unable to do so, the social mini-messaging company announced Monday that it would not allow third-party advertising on its platform henceforth.

In a blog post Tuesday, the company spent more than 1,200 words to get to the meat of the announcement: Twitter will reserve permanently the right to “inject paid tweets into a timeline” using the Twitter API. In other words: Sure, you can accept payment for a Tweet, type it up yourself and publish it using the service — but you can’t create an automated system to do this using the code Twitter provides to companies that want to build their own empires using the Twitter infrastructure.

This makes sense doesn’t it? People can type an ad into the system, but they can’t automate the process. Bots aren’t allowed in many places.

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