Twitter Limitation: Elon Musk's Dilemma with Breaking His Toy

Twitter Limitation: Elon Musk's Dilemma with Breaking His Toy

Elon Musk persistently engages in dubious decision-making for Twitter! Now, in order to peruse tweets and gain access to over 500 daily messages, an account is a prerequisite, and subscribing to the paid membership is imperative.

Twitter has undergone a multitude of transformations ever since Elon Musk's acquisition of the platform, and not all of them have resulted in positive outcomes. The idiosyncratic billionaire exhibits a tendency to experiment with his ideas directly on users, bypassing the customary testing phases, and frequently altering his stance. 

Despite our apprehension with each new announcement, he continues to astound us! Recently, Elon Musk has made the decision to impede access to tweets for non-logged-in users, colloquially referred to as tourists lacking their own personal accounts. Moreover, during the weekend of July 1st, users encountered an enigmatic message stating "Rate limit exceeded," preventing them from loading tweets in their timelines, thereby prompting them to wait momentarily before refreshing the application.

In actuality, the platform has implemented a daily tweet cap. Elon Musk elucidated that verified accounts, signifying users who have subscribed to Twitter Blue, enjoy the privilege of perusing 6,000 tweets per day. Conversely, unverified accounts are subject to a maximum threshold of 600 tweets, while new unverified accounts face restrictions, allowing them to read only 300 tweets per day. Since then, these figures have been revised upwards, expected to ascend to 10,000, 1,000, and 500 daily tweet readings, respectively. Evidently, Twitter's utility diminishes significantly for those who remain unsubscribed to Twitter Blue!

Twitter Limitation: An Encouragement to Embrace Twitter Blue?

But why such a decision? According to Elon Musk, it serves as a preemptive measure, owing to Twitter encountering an inundation of requests emanating from start-ups that train their artificial intelligence. He accuses them of inundating Twitter's servers with requests to obtain data, which is subsequently exploited to train their AIs, in an extremely aggressive manner, to the point of adversely affecting the genuine user experience. Well, that's his claim, at least. Nevertheless, alternative, less laudable motives might underlie the implementation of this measure.

According to The Platformer, Twitter simply neglected to settle the outstanding bills for some of its servers. Reportedly, the company endeavored to renegotiate its contract with Google Cloud at the outset of March, with which Twitter had established a partnership in 2018, in an attempt to curtail the exorbitant costs associated with the infrastructure, amounting to millions of dollars per day. Regrettably, the bills remained unpaid, and the contract expired on June 30. It is also worth noting that upon Elon Musk's arrival, he terminated the employment of numerous individuals, including those pivotal to the maintenance of the infrastructure. 

Consequently, the new technical team appears bewildered when it comes to operating certain tools on the platform. Sheldon Chang, a developer on Mastodon, a competitor of Twitter, disclosed the discovery of a bug in the Twitter application that incessantly dispatched requests to the social network. In essence, Twitter was subjecting itself to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. It's quite amusing. It appears Twitter is 'DDoS-ing' itself, he jests. Amateurish, to say the least.

However, an alternative perspective posits that this decision aims to compel users to embrace Twitter Blue. The novel verification system receives an extensive promotion from the platform, endowing subscribers with an increasing array of privileges such as tweet highlighting and limited advertising. One cannot help but wonder if registration on the social network will eventually become obligatory for anyone seeking a mere glimpse. 

Nevertheless, imposing limitations on the time users spend on a platform whose survival hinges predominantly on advertising revenue carries significant risk. In any case, this predicament proves advantageous for Twitter's competitors. Since encountering these inconveniences, Mastodon has witnessed an influx of 110,000 new accounts. Threads, Meta's forthcoming social network, and BlueSky Social must certainly be relishing the turn of events!