Twitter tells users to touch grass, adds new rule limiting how many tweets you can read per day
Elon has responded to the criticism and is increasing the limits to a whopping:
Verified accounts: 8000 posts/day
Unverified accounts: 800 posts/day
New unverified accounts: 400 posts/day
Lol
Nothing like telling someone they can’t use your product. I can only imagine what the advertisers are thinking.
For ease of math, let's say you see one ad for every ten tweets, this effectively limits a single users ad impressions to 80 day. That is not something advertisers would have expected when they dropped dollars onto the platform. As an advertiser, you also can't be assured going forward that Musk isnt going to randomly implement some other major change that effects your business.
I'm guessing the rational here is fighting against scrapers harvesting tweets for AI. Whether this is effective on that front, and whether worsening the user experience is a worthwhile tradeoff, I don't know. But it's smart business to at least give people, users and advertisers a heads up first. It sounds like Musk implemented this change Saturday morning and didn't announce it until he tweeted about it hours later.
This doesn’t do much to stop scrapers though. If accounts have a limited number of tweet views, the scrapers just create more accounts. Scrapers are gonna scrape, especially if there is some of that sweet AI money to be had. Trying to stop that is just another endless cat and mouse like fighting ad blocking or piracy.
Meanwhile this could do a lot to reduce user engagement, and thus hurt ad revenue even more. The panic over AI data doesn’t seem worth that. Perhaps there is another explanation for this. Or maybe this is just more tech company craziness, it sure seems to be catching at the moment.
My understanding is that there's very few left?
And most of them are scams.
There's some interesting context:
In 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion contract with Google to host some of its services on the company’s Google Cloud servers. Platformer reports Twitter recently refused to pay the search giant ahead of the contract’s June 30th renewal date. Twitter is reportedly rushing to move as many services off of Google’s infrastructure before the contract expires, but the effort is “running behind schedule,” putting some tools, including Smyte, a platform the company acquired in 2018 to bolster its moderation capabilities, in danger of going offline. Engadget, June 11, 2023
So tl;dr appears to be - Elon refuses to pay Twitter hosting bills, migration plans to a different provider fall behind as pretty much all of the technical talent has been fired or quit, inevitably gets throttled by GCP for non-payment and then introduces "emergency measures" by throttling their user base themselves to try and mitigate it all. The man truly is a visionary.
Excuse me for a second.
Buahahahahahahahahwhahahahahah!
THIS is what happened. I'd bet solid money on it.
Man, these big tech companies are really imploding lately, huh? Wonder what's next.
It makes me worried for the end game. We all joke that these people are stupid and some of them are but enough of them aren't that I can't see this all being coincidence
not coincidence, but not conspiracy either. Smarter people would explain it better, but essentially big-money investors got fed up (hehe fed) with unprofitable 15-year-old startups and demanded returns on their investments. This means a big social media platform needs to either start generating cash or get new cash quickly to pay CEO's early retirement bills. Reddit's IPO is an attempt at getting cash quickly - tell the suits at Wall Street that if they give Spez money he'll give them more money later on. To make this claim even remotely credible he needs to plug holes and at least stop losing so much. Plugging holes means killing off everything that can be easily killed to reduce operating cost, such as API, trimming workforce etc.
This happens all across the industry, I wouldn't blame it on some big setup by billionaires, Saudis and Xi Jinping. Just economy doing its things but this time it does things with services used by millions. The one question is how long until the bulk user has enough and leaves bringing the whole house down.
I don’t think they’re that stupid. Their business model was never built to last. Other than the ability to shitpost Twitter has nothing to offer with its subscription ( I never used Twitter, this is based on hearsay ) and the ads aren’t covering the traffic.
I had to look this up, couldn't believe it. I've been pretty indifferent to Musk and Twitter...cause I've been always indifferent to Twitter, but this is crazy. As an example, my city's police and bus services and others all use Twitter to send updates out. And I'm sure it's the same for most places. And now they've essentially lost the ability to mass communicate with people, because they need to be able to reach everyone not just those with an account.
I used Twitter for all my local updates - from what's happening at city hall to live traffic and weather updates.
What's up with CEO's messing with social media companies. Huffman and Musk seem to enjoy ruining good things :(
What’s up with CEO’s messing with social media companies
I have some theories but they all boil down to: They openly despise us commoners. Maybe this will prompt public services to take better care of their websites. It would be a welcoming change.
Yeah I don't understand it.
I'm sure something else will come along, the public service sphere of Twitter is too important. What else can they do? Go back to sending out press statements and breaking news on the radio or TV? Something will come along and fill that gap.
It's a symptom of the end of cheap money. It's fine to not turn a profit when the economy is bullish and there's money sloshing around everywhere, but at some stage you have to justify your existence, especially when advertisers stop buying ads, which has been the case for a while
Rabbits
The US National Weather Service's local offices (which each have their own Twitter handle) post Twitter updates for every watch and warning (thunderstorm, tornado, hurricane, you name it) they send out. Imagine if you couldn't receive those updates or they couldn't post them.
Kinda stupid that a local government funded institution relies on a service from a private company to send out notifications
It’s been fascinating to watch Elon test how much Twitter’s user base will tolerate.
Such a dumb move
Now, this is ridiculous, of course. However, you shouldn't be reading more than 600 tweets a day. I mean, I don't think I've read 600 tweets in my whole LIFE!!
Anyways, mastodon.world.
I’m not a twitter user but my understanding is that any replies to a tweet also apply towards the limit. So scrolling a popular tweet with hundreds of replies could drain your entire tweet limit in a matter of minutes.
It's not just reading. Any tweet that loads as you scroll past it on your feed counts towards the limit.
People were expecting Twitter to go to shit because of bad moderation, but it turns out Elon is much better at adding infuriating features that drive people away in the first place.
It helps when he doesn't pay the bills due as well and then is forced to do things like this
It seems I am moving to Lemmy just in time then.
A lot of Twitter users are more addicted to Twitter than some people would be addicted to crack. He could charge $1000/mo for unlimited vicious bile and they'd pay it.
I don't see anything wrong here.
Ahh yes, killing your social media by limiting your request per user at a day. Genius. I know that data scrapping is a problem in any social media platform
So people now can’t view Twitter without logging in, but once people are logged in, Twitter only lets them look at a limited number of tweets.
I’m not sure what sense there is for a social media company to keep telling consumers to stop consuming content. Has the Twitter infrastructure become that fragile? Are they running out of tweets? Whatever they are smoking at Twitter HQ they might want to give it a rest.
It's funny because if he's trying to reduce costs, letting people upload 2 hour videos probably costs far more than having your website be accessible to people not logged in LMAO
Text feed are the lightest weight most cachable thing you can serve. The costliest part of the text component is the mixer that ranks the content. The companies scraping them don't care about the ranking they just want bulk tweets. That's what the API is for. Elon charged them insane rates so they all went off the API that cost Twitter a tiny fraction to serve and instead the API consumers switched to crawling the website instead, which costs Twitter orders of magnitude more, but is free for scrapers. Elon is indeed a stable genius.
Holy shit, I hadn't stopped to realize your point there!!! Of course any AI scrapers would just start bit crawler accounts, if any of them weren't already doing that as well. Along with any other info scrapers out there - I can only think of the one example tbh
At this point if you still use twitter you are a moron.
It's fantastic for real time news, like NBA free agency information. I have a list of reporters I can scroll through to make sure I get all the details.
Something tells me he is exempt from the limit, otherwise he'd hit it by 8am
What a 🤡
Don't you want users to be on the platform as long as possible to maximize ad revenue? If this was just to force people to pay for verification, why wouldn't they make that tier unlimited? I honestly can't even believe this is real.
So a subscription is only 10x more valuable than a non-paying leech?
Someone is desperate to monetize lurkers. That seems like a self-defeating strategy.
Touch grass, indeed
Seems Elon wants to keep Twitter as his own personal echo chamber and having an exclusive club for like-minded folk willing to pay. Limiting posts is one thing, reading limitations is just crazy.
In fairness, most Twitter users do need to touch grass...
Unverified and new unverified? Lol. What's exactly "new" here?
A new account, presumably.
400 posts a day seems like a lot. Am I missing something here? Is a post a tweet?
Seems like a lot but the definition of "read" here means scrolled past. So about 10-15 minutes of scrolling and you're out
Oh wow, yeah I missed the headline lol. I wasn't sure when I read OP's description if post meant like API post request or like posting a tweet. Turns out maybe neither? But yeah scrolling past a few hundred tweets will go by real fast.
When you do the right thing for the wrong reason...
If you have 800 posts available and you read a post every 10 seconds, then you can only spend 2,2 hours per day on the site before you can't see new posts.
Twitter basically forces its users to verify their accounts to use the site in a normal way. That will definitly backfire.
My question is , What is smoking this guy??
That is so cool. Elon is just trying to help.
Has he finally go completely insane? It feels like he wants to kill the platform for some reason
How true is the LLM data scraping threat?
Who knows. One thing for sure is that this is just one more thing he pulled out of his ass without any backing
Meta has shown that getting huge amounts of training data can lead to great results with a model that's much simpler than what openAI uses and it looks like they are taking a more open approach to LLMs because of that. Twitter has shitloads of possible training data, but it's Twitter so that data isn't great.
Elon is known to be afraid of AGIs becoming hostile, so that explains the decision.
I don't think it'll slow down AI development too much. There are new Llama-based models coming out every month that are better than the previous ones.
Reddit is a much better source of data and if they don't want to lose SEO, their data can still be gathered by scraping even after the API changes take effect.
He sees 'em lurkin'
He's hatin', patrolin'
Tryin' to catch them dirty
good thing right?
Who reads more than 800 posts every day? I only ever get on twitter for juice drama every few months
Every tweet you scroll past counts as a read tweet. That probably cuts down the number you can actually read by quite a lot.
I mean scroll down the replies of a big tweet and you’d easily see 100 or 200 tweets according to Elon’s “view” system. Pretty much any tweet loading counts as a view to Twitter.
I could probably scroll 600-800 replies on like 5 sports free agency drama tweets. It counts just scrolling by a reply or post against your limit.
Replies count as well? This is insane.
Elon himself has spammed me numerous times when scrolling down reading other tweets to subscribe to him. 800 is nothing. Think about those large mega threads on reddit for sporting events or whatever. You would 1000s of posts.
Or perhaps the social media model of reading people's every waking excremental thought is inherently flawed.
Elon is helping people to move towards Mastedon and Lemmy.
Thanks Elon.
Between him and Spez, they've done a great job. 😂
He is spez’ idol. So while Reddit’s circles the drain and value decreases, they’ll will no doubt kill old.reddit on August 1st or something dumb, followed by a posting limit next year. 🤣
It is a success. Actually searched out Mastodon to add to my rss feeds for the first time for accounts that had them.
Think people will end up on BlueSky over mastodon.
Bluesky probably will be the winner; but it may be an activity pub site
Good guy Elon
And Bluesky, which honestly has proven a pretty good alternative for Twitter.
The biggest obstacle for Bluesky is the invite-only nature of it right now. It won't be able to grow into the "next big thing" until the masses can move over to it.
What are the big differences between mastodon and blue sky?