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
  • simplecyphers@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Nothing like telling someone they can’t use your product. I can only imagine what the advertisers are thinking.

    • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • thehatfox@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      “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.”

  • ijeff@lemdro.id
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    1 year ago

    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

    • whoami@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Kohta@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Man, these big tech companies are really imploding lately, huh? Wonder what’s next.

    • ThatWeirdGuy1001@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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

      • jantin@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • queermunist@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’m convinced this all goes back to Silicon Valley Bank imploding and then everyone just pretending we didn’t have a banking crisis lol

      • BlahajEnjoyer@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • 429@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • ghariksforge@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The problem is with your city’s public servants. Relying on something like Twitter was a huge mistake.

      • Thereisalamp@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

          • ArghZombies@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Sure, that’s easy to say. But name another free, publicly available, instant mass message delivery system they could also use?

            • Rivers@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Yeah exactly, and Twitter was the first of its kind. It was the platform to introduce @tagging usernames, hashtags, micro blogging and was very accessible. There are lots of other social media platforms, but none of them are like twitter with exception now of Mastodon, but even mastodon has a small barrier, twitter you visit an url and have access to all the content on that account immediately, just by visiting an url. This is fundamentally why it was adopted along side Facebook and not to replace it. It had a function, still does really, even tho it’s on fire.

    • PoppinKREAM@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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 :(

      • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • 429@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • scarrtt@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

    • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • dylcarinc@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • NightOwl@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • EuphoricPenguin@normalcity.life
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Powerpoint@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It helps when he doesn’t pay the bills due as well and then is forced to do things like this

  • gon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • terrapin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • macintosh@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Can confirm. I scroll past blue checks when I read comments and I had run out my post limit in under 20 minutes today.

        • AwakenedFinn@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • lycanrising@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            i think you’ve got it to be honest, there’s no way this was anyone’s first choice and is the best worst way to get users of the platform for “just a bit”.

          • I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Does it cost money to “verify” your account? I assumed they were just trying to force people into verifying since the limit is 10x higher for verified users.

    • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It’s not just reading. Any tweet that loads as you scroll past it on your feed counts towards the limit.

  • SJ_Zero@lemmy.fbxl.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Under_enrage@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

  • thehatfox@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.