It’s almost become cliché to say that Elon Musk has made a change to Twitter and many of its users are up in arms. But the latest snap decision from the billionaire social media owner constitutes such a big change, and seems so antithetical to the idea of Twitter from both a consumer and business point of view, that it feels as though a threshold has been crossed.
Like most other changes it may all be reversed in due course, but for now, Twitter is at its lowest point in terms of providing a functional and accessible town square, and a number of high-profile accounts have indicated that they’ll either be leaving Twitter or using it less.
Twitter has hit a new low with the introduction of daily tweet-reading limits.Credit: Getty Images
What happened to Twitter over the weekend?
Many users were unable to view new tweets for an extended period of time as the app and website displayed errors, and it was unclear whether newly composed tweets were being sent or viewed.
In a post on Sunday, Musk attributed the issues to “extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”, which may be a nod to his prior complaints that companies including Microsoft and OpenAI use Twitter illegally to train chatbots.
The company had already made a controversial change to only let logged-in Twitter users view tweets, but to further combat the issue Musk announced every user will have a limit on the number of tweets they can see each day.
Originally, he said new unverified users could see 300 tweets per day, older unverified users could see 600, and verified users could see 6000. The announcement did not go down well with the bulk of users, especially given verification is locked behind a paid Twitter Blue subscription. Musk later revised the limits to 500, 1000 and 10,000.
The Twitter owner would go on to jokingly imply that limiting Twitter use was good for people’s health, and that those complaining were wasting their daily tweet rations.
How do these changes impact Twitter’s users?
On its own, reading only 1000 tweets per day might not sound too limiting, but it’s also just the latest in a six-month streak of changes and controversies.
The service is currently swamped with low-quality ads, promoted tweets and automated accounts, not to mention crowds of verified users whose posts and replies show up regardless of whether you follow them, meaning scrolling to find interesting conversations or posts from your friends could exhaust your limit faster than you might think. For example, you could look at 50 posts, with 20 replies each.
Basic features like searching for phrases or hashtags have been hijacked by endless cryptocurrency scams and TikTok reposts.
The fact that such measures are even necessary has also further eroded user confidence in the fact that Twitter will ever again be as relevant as it once was.
The company’s attempts to recover its ailing advertising revenue will not be improved when users are limited in how much they can use the service. And recent events in Ukraine and the search for the missing Titan submersible have demonstrated that Twitter is almost useless for following real-time news, which used to be its strength.
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Could Twitter still recover?
It’s possible, but things are starting to look dire. Basic features like searching for phrases or hashtags have been hijacked by endless cryptocurrency scams and TikTok reposts. Service performance is degraded often, and reactive fixes (like the ban on non-signed-in users) are rolled out hastily and with no regard for whether other parts of the site will break.
APIs that power accessible versions of Twitter have been revoked. TweetDeck, the popular platform for keeping track of multiple specific topics on Twitter, is broken. Its replacement, which is currently in preview, will be changed next month so only verified accounts can access it.
Even putting aside the technical issues, it’s easy to understand why some people who have used Twitter for a long time aren’t pleased with the direction it’s headed. It used to be simple to use the service to keep tabs on your friends or areas of interest, while also being able to see a point of view from anywhere in the world when something important happened, but the site has become increasingly hostile.
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The benefits of becoming verified, like the ability to make 25,000 character posts and two-hour videos, have been used to positive effect by some or as part of their business. But they’ve also been abused by many to swamp replies and target abuse. Musk has repeatedly taken the side of those engaged in misinformation and harassment against transgender users specifically.
Where will users go?
Remarkably, Musk’s attempts to reinvent Twitter may lead to the reinvention of the entire social internet, as the constant trickle of refugees from the service have driven a boom in the development of decentralised social platforms.
Protocols like ActivityPub and ideas like the Fediverse, which are essentially infrastructure to make social platforms more like email, where you can interact with any other person and keep your contacts and data no matter which service you choose to use, are old, but are now seeing exciting growth. Mastodon, for example, an early favourite for those leaving Twitter, is built on them.
And then there are projects like BlueSky, originally a team within Twitter but now independent, which is a popular app on its own but also building towards an open future where no one person or company controls our online communication.
Elon Musk’s latest changes to Twitter are hugely unpopular.Credit: AP
And, of course, Twitter’s fumble has opened the door for tech giants to step in with their own alternatives. This week Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, is expected to unveil its long-awaited Twitter alternative which may be called Threads. Though it will be run by the company that brought us one of the biggest and most abused closed social platforms we’ve ever seen, Meta has also been big on open-source talk as of late and may take some lessons both from Facebook and Twitter with this new service.
Threads will reportedly ingest each user’s data from their Instagram account to get them started, while also supporting the ActivityPub protocol, which would make it compatible in the future with the likes of Mastodon and others.
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