New tweet buttons or goodbye counter

On November 20, Twitter turned off the ability to view the link counter via the private API of its buttons and removed the counter itself from their official design, which they warned about on their blog a little over a month ago. New buttons now look like this:

This is an API located at: cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json . Previously, by passing the desired url, you could get the number of tweets / retweets that contain a link to this url. From today, instead of the usual json, the API returns a 404 error.

Although the API was officially private, in fact, it was in no way limited to use and over the years of its existence, it managed to form the basis of many services involved in this or that data analysis.

Officially, Twitter connects this with the complexity of transferring functionality to a new platform, or rather, to the low priority of this task, relative to others, and convince their users that the button counter does not play any particular role for site visitors. However, this is the first case of failure of a large social network from the counter on its button.

So it turned out that this change did not pass me by. I used the counter API, as one of the main data sources for building news rankings on my Top.st service. Naturally, turning off the meter is likely to hit the quality of the selection, so you have to look for workaround options.
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I propose to all not indifferent to express their opinion on this situation. Has this service affected you or your company? If so, how did you use it and do you plan to collect this data in any other way? Does the counter on the “share” button matter to you, as to the user, do you consider this data relevant?