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.
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.
And Bluesky, which honestly has proven a pretty good alternative for Twitter.
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.
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.
