Twitter just made history. And no, I’m not saying that sarcastically, far from it. Of course, I’m not saying that he did it for the better, or at least for the better for his own interests. And as usual in this hectic journey of Elon “The Honest” Musk, once again we find ourselves with a half explanation, which is only slightly better than the overdoses of verbiage with which he punishes us from time to time. Of course, not giving explanations is not good either.
Since he took control of Twitter, Elon Musk has acted stumbling, despite whoever weighs him down, and although some of the decisions he has made have been correct, the common denominator of the vast majority is that they seem more like impulses than business decisions. Of course, we must not forget that it is probably one of the most overrated purchases (in terms of purchase value, you know what I mean) in the history of the Internet and the field of technology.
Musk needs Twitter to make as much money as possible, because it depends on that it can make such an investment profitable. This explains, for example, why the reach of Twitter Blue has increased rapidly since it took control, a quite logical move in contrast to the exasperating slowness with which previous managers acted in this regard. However, in its desire to make the payment method of the social network more attractive, on more than one occasion it has acted underestimating the free accounts, which are the ones that generate a large part of the income from advertising viewing. Not to mention the commercialization of the verified.
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
Well, now we find another movement, which undoubtedly deserves to be in the top 3 of the most controversial. And it is that, as Musk himself has communicated in a tweet, Twitter has imposed limits (in principle temporary) on the number of messages we can see per day. And yes, of course the limitation varies substantially depending on whether you are a Blue user or not.
- Verified accounts: 6,000 posts per day.
- “Old” unverified accounts: 600 posts per day.
- Recent unverified accounts: 300 posts per day.
And what reason does Musk give for this limitation? «To address extreme levels of data mining and system manipulation«. For some time now, it seems that Twitter intends to severely limit large-scale access to the data hosted by the social network, something that has been used by all kinds of researchers for the most diverse purposes. We saw the first move in this direction with the removal of the free API, and it continues now with this new hack to free access to content.
And why do I say that, with this movement, Twitter is acting against its interests? Currently, its main source of income is the advertising that is shown to users when they review the publications of the social network. Thus, if you impose a limit on the maximum daily number of messages that can be viewed, de facto it is also being put to the amount of publicity that it will be able to serve. And I don’t know, I may be wrong, but at least at first glance it looks like a shot in the foot… ahhh, and a way of limiting free access to information, which is precisely what one would expect from the main defender of freedom of expression. expression (yes, now I’m being sarcastic).
