Like it or not, Twitter is one of the biggest social media platforms to ever dominate the internet, and it has held that position for such a long time for good reason. It has been the ideal information-distribution platform because of the short bursts of information that can be outputted to quickly spread news for everyone to see.
However, Since Elon Musk has taken over the platform, Twitter has been through one hellish rollercoaster ride after another because of the ludicrous changes the billionaire has been making. From monetising verification to mass firing his employees, Musk has made the lives of Twitter users harder. And with his most recent implementation of rules, Musk has removed the “social” part of “social media.” Here’s how he did it:
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
The problem began on Sunday, 2nd July, at 1:01am Malaysian time, when Musk tweeted a jarring announcement stating that users will now only be able to read a certain number of posts. Without prior warning or preparation, users are suddenly limited in the number of posts they can read per day. Verified users can browse and view up to 6,000 posts, unverified accounts can only read 600 posts, and new unverified accounts will only have 300.
This is ostensibly being done to prevent data scraping, commonly done by A.I. tools such as ChatGPT, in order to prevent what he calls “data pillaging” which is “degrading service for normal users”. As a result of this, you can no longer browse Twitter anonymously, as you are now required to login before any interaction can be made. Musk has gone on record to say that these changes are “temporary emergency measures” and will be removed once the problem has been resolved. When that will be is anyone’s guess.
Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023
However, the controversial billionaire’s decision was still met with incredible backlash from the general public, as, due to the platform’s short-form information dissemination, people are reaching their daily limits pretty quickly, regardless of whether you were simply scrolling across posts without reading them. Once this limit is reached, you are no longer able to view any post (including your own past tweets) regardless of whether you are a new or old account. Many concluded that this act has single-handedly killed Twitter. Unfortunately, it’s hard not to think that.
As a result, Musk has updated the limit to 8,000 posts for verified users, 800 for non-verified users, and 400 for new non-verified accounts. He made a follow-up post, updating it to 10,000, 1000, and 500 posts for each type of user, respectively.
No matter how temporary they may be, these changes still hurt the social media platform badly, as they ruin the overall Twitter experience. Hopefully, the problems surrounding data scraping and A.I. will come to pass so that things will go back to normal like before and that this does not become the new normal.
