There are signs of change at Twitter under all-seeing Dogecoin CEO Elon Musk.
More than just piddling operational updates or staff redundancies, these signs seem to suggest that Musk sees Twitter’s future locked behind a paywall, frequented only by a few elite blue checkmark-paying subscribers.
The first obvious sign of change came on June 30, when Twitter implemented a new rule allowing only logged-in users to read Tweets.
Visitors without an account are now requested to create one.
The following day, on July 1, one of the most bizarre decisions from a social media company was made: Twitter started limiting the number of posts that account holders could read.
Post limits are commonplace to prevent spam, but never has a major social media platform limited views.
To start with, unverified accounts (i.e. users unwilling to fork out US$11 per month for a blue badge), were limited to viewing 600 posts per day, with new unverified accounts limited to 300.
As for users willing to spend money on a blue badge, Musk gave them a daily allowance of 6,000 posts per day.
After realising this allowance could be gobbled up in a matter of seconds, Musk increased the stipend a few hours later to 400/800/8,000, then again to 500/1,000/10,000 a few more hours later.
Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified https://t.co/fuRcJLifTnApparently, this was due to “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
What was to blame for this offensive collation of publicly available data? AI, of course.
"Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation," Musk said in a Tweet.
Sam Altman, chief executive of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, was a main offender. “Sam Altman was trying to suck us dry," said Musk.
Those “temporary” limits were still in place at the time of writing.
Those “temporary” limits were also likely to force some users to pay for a blue badge.
The BBC reported that journalists were unable to keep abreast of police updates while covering a shooting in Baltimore, US.
The limits are also likely to strain Twitter’s relationships with advertisers who have suddenly seen their reach significantly pared down.
Musk has made building relationships with advertisers one of his primary goals to stop Twitter from burning cash.
Twitter has never made a profit; In November 2022, a few months after Musk officially took the reins, he stated that the website was losing as much as US$4mln per day.
It begs the question: Is Twitter about to go fully paywalled?
Which begs even more questions: Would a paid-only Twitter work? According to reports, Twitter Blue subscriptions brought in just US$11mln within the first three months of relaunching.
Who’s willing to pay for the benefits of a blue tick next to their name? Or will they move on to the exponentially increasing number of alternatives, including facebook parent Meta’s imminent Threads launch.
Is it all an elaborate ploy to get Twitter addicts outside in the fresh air?
Perhaps it’s not a bad idea after all.