So with Spez having a hard on for Elon and how he runs Twitter, how long until we see this on Reddit? Premium members can view 1000 posts/day and regular members can only view 100 posts/day. Similar rule will apply to comments too.

This truly is a genius level move. If users are using your site, they are contributing to your hosting costs. You don’t want that.

"To address extreme levels of failing to pay our bills & firing every competent person at Twitter, we've applied the following temporary limits:"

It must be nice to be able to waste 44 billion dollars and not miss it.

I could live comfortably for the rest of my life on 1/10,000th of what Elon spent.

Things like Reddit and Twitter are bad for billionaires. It makes it harder for them to exploit you when there is a public place to talk about their bullshit.

Brilliant move to help sell more ads on the platform: limit how many people will even be able to see those ads

Between this and reddit going "down" yesterday, the internet just sucks right now.

Elon is so damn transparent. I NEVER remembering anything like this happening before Elon. Dude is running this like a moronic mob boss.

"Hey..it'd be a shame if you could only view 600 tweets. I have this Twitter Blue that might be able to help...."

I always held out hope that Musk was going to be the one to destroy Twitter. I’m still hoping that’s his ultimate goal.

To buy Twitter just to destroy that cesspool and Musk will always be the hero we needed

I gave up on Twitter when this turd took over but holy shit...

Almost certainly this isn't anything to do with scraping. Like with Reddit, those with a stake in Twitter stand to benefit from AI and, as far as I know, there's no mass reposting (retweeting?) effort to something like Mastodon.

That would be trivial to block anyway, since it would be easy to identity the service accounts and source IP's of the requests. No need to impact average users.

What's more likely is he hasn't paid the bill for his cloud infrastructure and no longer has the capacity to serve so many users.

IMO, that's what you get when you fire half of your staff.

At the risk of sounding tin-foily...

Twitter's financials for server costs have never made sense - the amount of money required to serve the sheer volume of engagement can't possibly have been resolved by ads that Elon is somehow refusing to keep tapping into.

I'd wager that some other interested party engaged in some type of private-public partnership was floating costs for (let's call it "privileged") access to the backend of Twitter -- granting a bottomless pit of funding to keep the platform running no matter the cost.

Once Twitter left the hands of someone deemed trustworthy, that life support doesn't stick around -- leaving Twitter facing complete insolvency by October of this year unless Musk literally does whatever he can to reduce engagement to save on costs.

Twitter loses more money when it has more engagement. If you have 100k users and add a new one, every interaction that additional user makes with tweets viewed by those 100k existing users requires 100k updates pushed to those 100k users' pages. Every like sends an update of +1 like on the tweet to every one of the 100k users. It becomes significantly more expensive per user engagement.

The ads being seen by additional users don't cover that constantly-compounding cost to keep engagements up to date across the platform. Musk isn't being honest about the reasoning (web scraping issues my ass) and is scrambling to buy desperately-needed to keep the platform up past October.

I think this goes to show just how impossible a business model like Twitter's was from the jump and shines a light on the absurdity of it being self-sustaining without a massive source of reliable external funding.

Edit: fixed typo

I think it's important to remember that these companies DID NOT CREATE THIS DATA! They are protecting things that are not theirs.

That has been his goal since he got forced to actually buy it rather than just boosting the stock so he could make a profit, which like most of his antics was really the only goal (publicity and money)

There’s a golden rule: don’t make big changes on an app on Friday because if it fails people are going to have to work during the weekend.

This asshole made the changes on a Saturday

It must have taken all of Elon's willpower to not make the limits:

• Verified accounts are limited to reading 6969 posts/day
• Unverified accounts to 420 posts/day
• New unverified accounts to 69/day

This seems extremely low for all categories. Good for getting people unaddicted though

My pet theory...... Though I don't believe it.

Musk and u/spez are playing 4-dimensional chess. The end goal is to increase freedom and user choice. By slowly destroying their respective platforms, people are driven to the fediverse, the idea of centralised platforms is tainted, power is shifted back to the user and long term everyone is better off.

It is a nice thought experiment.....

Great for the fediverse! I suspect that these changes to twitter and reddit are mainly a response to the growing hunger of generative artificial intelligence companies who are hoovering up data, basically for free. Change is never easy, but i'm optimistic that this is the break open source and federated communities needed to start taking off. I hope people can see the value in decentralizing and help support these open source projects financially so that they can really start to scale. The reality is, scaling is expensive, and we all need to help where we can. These Ai companies will not hesitate to suck up federated data also. If we want to live in an ad free world its gonna cost us.

There are rumors that Twitter is having a dispute with its cloud providers, that is why they need to limit bandwidth.

Hopefully this leads to Twitter not being the public square of the internet anymore at least mainstream wise. The man is doing everything to make the site worse.