This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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
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. 🤣
Spez didn't borrow billions of dollars he has to pay back with interest though so he won't need to fire almost all his engineers.
He did however send all the most talented developers working under the platform to his biggest competitor so that wasn't smart.
It is a success. Actually searched out Mastodon to add to my rss feeds for the first time for accounts that had them.
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.
“I can’t wait for my brand to be associated with a site that was a festering sore to begin with, and is now run by the world’s most inflamed asshole and unstable to boot.”
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 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.
The problem is with your city's public servants. Relying on something like Twitter was a huge mistake.
Until recently it was a great way to reach people in a way you can't really do with any other platform.
But this day and age breaking TV broadcast doesn't work for anyone under the age of 55 or so
Relying on a single service was a huge mistake. You can always diversify.
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 :(
It’s been fascinating to watch Elon test how much Twitter’s user base will tolerate.
Also fascinating that there are people that still use Twitter
It’s funny to me how a lot of twitter posters said they were gonna go to mastodon, but quickly went back when they realized they weren’t getting the same engagement.
Makes sense, since Twitter draw seemed to me more for self promotion with nobody really caring about the user comments unlike reddit. Pretty why I just relied on rss for Twitter, and didn't bother with the account. Same for Instagram and tiktok too.
Such a dumb move
It seems I am moving to Lemmy just in time then.
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.
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.
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
I don't see anything wrong here.
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.
Can confirm. I scroll past blue checks when I read comments and I had run out my post limit in under 20 minutes today.
Wild when you think about it... Twitter is supported by ads. The more you are on Twitter the more ads you theoretically will see, making the adspace more valuable. Additionally, the more trouble users experience the less they want to use/interact with the service. Isn't such a small and arbitrary cap sort of kneecapping themselves?
I'm assuming the Twitter servers are on figurative fire and this is the only way they can deal short term, because I have a hard time seeing the benefit for them.
It's not just reading. Any tweet that loads as you scroll past it on your feed counts towards the limit.
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.
Something tells me he is exempt from the limit, otherwise he'd hit it by 8am
What a 🤡