what. the fuck.

This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.

The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.

These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.

Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.

Elon Musk, the latest billionaire owner of the online screaming match known as Twitter, sat slumped at his desk, staring at a wall of monitors blinking with a technicolor smorgasbord of error messages. The reason? He'd just let Twitter's hosting contract with Google lapse because he thought it'd be fun to see if he could migrate it somewhere else. The results? Not so fun.

A comment on Reddit had caught his eye, and he couldn't shake it. "Every now and then Elon must have a moment of clarity. Where it occurs to him 'Maybe I am just stupid?' But then he violently buries the thought."

"Stupid?" he scoffed aloud to his empty office, sending a mini landslide of Mars Rover prototypes tumbling off his desk. "I'm a genius."

He remembered how smart he'd felt when he decided to axe the account verification system, only to reinstate it after a week of high-profile mix-ups that included the Dalai Lama being mistaken for a llama enthusiast.

And the content moderation! Who needs it? Well, as it turned out, everyone. Without it, Twitter had turned into a feral wilderness of conspiracy theories, insult slinging, and more unsolicited pictures of eggplants than a greengrocer's catalog.

And then there was Kanye. "Free Kanye!" he'd declared one afternoon after one too many rocket fuel coffees. But after the notorious rapper had declared war on flannel shirts and clogged up the site with CAPS LOCK tweets, the ban was back on faster than you can say "Kim Kardashian for president."

"Stupid?" he muttered again, watching as Twitter spontaneously DDOS'd itself like a robotic bull in a digital china shop.

There was a pause. Then a grin spread slowly across Elon's face, as if he'd just understood the punchline to a particularly tricky joke. "Naaaah," he laughed, slapping the desk.

He looked at the chaos on the screens, the digital calamity his decisions had wrought, and couldn't help but chuckle. There was something amusing about being this absurdly, cosmically, hilariously brilliant.

"Back to the drawing board," he chuckled, picking up a Mars Rover and making it do little jumps across his desk.

As a former individual who understands the underlying systems, it seems like they botched deployment of a new feature causing issues and cannot figure out how to solve them.

Most of Twitter is and has been in maintenance mode since acquisition (think of 10 man engineering team and 1 left to handle maintenance).

That rate limit is insanely low, even for verified. I’m not verified, but I hit the limit in like 10 minutes of very distracted usage.

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.....

limiting engagement an app that RELIES ON ENGAGEMENT????? IT CAN'T POSSIBLY GET DUMBER THAN THIS???

Twitter and Reddit both dying at the same time was not what I expected in 2023

Transcription for the blind: Screenshot of a Twitter post from Elon Musk, Twitter handle @elonmusk, that says:

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

1:01 PM Jul 1, 2023 3.6M Views

-Transcription from a human volunteer. Let me know how I can do better.

Juli 1

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.

Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.

Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It's part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism's status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.

The specific moment we're in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn't be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.

Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.

Who would even read 300 a day?

Nevertheless, Twitter has fucking died. 😆

The sad part is that all the Musk evangelists (and there are a lot of them) will happily pay for a 'verified' account if they happen to exceed the limit.

I thought the end goal is to no more Twitter. And I'm here for it.

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...."

The Future

Maybe it was just me but Musk has never seemed like someone who actually understood tech. Just a rich guy who buys up other's work and talks a big game. I knew the second I heard he bought Twitter it was going to crash and burn. He's doing it way faster than I thought possible.

Of course he will eventually say this was all on purposes and not that he is crap at business and tech.

This isn't mildly infuriating, Musk is being the biggest fedi advocate out there! He's selflessly nuking his own site so he can drive traffic to decentralized alternatives. This is a good thing lol, and should be an important lesson on link rot, and that social media should never be the primary method of communication.

Therefore any company that puts out notices or alerts via Twitter should immediately exit the platform. Running their own server on mastodon would be a better bet

And it only cost $44 billion.

Why are so many people suddenly against Twatter burning? I thought we all wanted that?

He'll probably get some total write-off when it fails and get $44B returned to him (from the tax payers, of course)

Let me get this straight… paying verified members have limits on how many tweets they can read