It’s sometimes hard to tell if Elon Musk truly believes what he’s doing is good for Twitter or if the billionaire is purposefully trying to burn it into the ground for funsies.
Either way, he may have effectively started the social network’s sundown on Saturday when he announced new restrictions and limits on the number of tweets users can see in a given day.
On the same day that millions of Twitter users had trouble using the site due to access issues, the CEO announced that he’s making changes “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits.”
Moving forward, verified accounts “are limited to reading 6000 posts/day,” while unverified accounts are now limited to 600 per day. New unverified counts will have a daily cap of 300 tweets.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
UPDATE: Musk would later say that those totals will eventually be 8,000 tweets/day for verified accounts, 800 tweets/day for unverified accounts, and 400 tweets/day for new unverified accounts, which won’t really do much.
Ok everyone we get another 12 minutes of scrolling soon! pic.twitter.com/iN08AMtVcs
— amanda 🐢 (@noturtlesoup17) July 1, 2023
The goal here, presumably, is to force people to pay for verification at $8/month. However, it’s pretty clear at this point that most Twitter users will not pay for the service, either because they don’t feel like it’s worth it or because they simply want to spite Musk. Often, it’s both.
So knowing that most of us will be limited to 600 tweets a day moving forward, this will essentially kill the experience of watching live sports on Twitter.
600 tweets might sound like a lot but it adds up quickly during a football game or soccer match where so many people you follow are sharing live updates, reactions, exclamations, and memes. We can’t say for sure but we’d imagine that any unverified user watching a football game will hit that tweet limit by halftime, if not much sooner.
Imagine only seeing 600 tweets a day on a college football Saturday in the middle of October.
— Kevin McGuire (@KevinOnCFB) July 1, 2023
We started wondering about when Twitter would die almost as soon as Musk purchased the site. While the sky didn’t fall quite as quickly as some of us thought, the signs have been there as the integrity of the social media platform and its CEO have both crumbled in the months since. Musk has made it a priority to devalue Twitter for unverified users while encouraging them to pay for the full service, but he seems to have severely underestimated how little his user base cares about “saving” his $44 billion investment.
Musk has developed a reputation for launching draconian changes and then immediately reversing course when he realizes he didn’t foresee how dumb they were, so he might change course on this one by Monday as well. Or maybe not.
Regardless, it’s probably not a coincidence that Twitter alternative Bluesky was having server issues on Saturday as well. We may find out if Sports Bluesky can replace Sports Twitter sooner than later. Perhaps we here at Awful Announcing will see you there soon.
