Elon Musk places a studying paywall on Twitter

Elon Musk continues guilty Twitter’s new limitations on AI corporations scraping “huge quantities of information” as he introduced new “non permanent” limits on what number of posts individuals can learn.

Now unverified accounts will solely have the ability to see 600 posts per day, and for “new” unverified accounts, simply 300 in a day. The bounds for verified accounts (presumably whether or not they’re purchased as part of the Twitter Blue subscription, granted by a corporation, or verification Elon compelled on individuals like Stephen King, LeBron James, and anybody else with greater than one million followers) nonetheless enable studying solely a most of 6,000 posts per day.

Shortly after that, Musk tweeted that the speed limits would “quickly” enhance to eight,000 tweets for verified customers, 800 for unverified, and 400 for brand new unverified accounts.

The constraints arrived someday after Twitter instantly began blocking entry for anybody who isn’t logged in, which Musk claimed was obligatory as a result of “A number of hundred organizations (perhaps extra) had been scraping Twitter knowledge extraordinarily aggressively, to the purpose the place it was affecting the actual person expertise.”

The change is only one of a number of methods Musk has tried to monetize Twitter within the final a number of months. The corporate introduced a three-tier API change in March that will start charging for using its API, simply three months after lastly rolling out the revamped $8 monthly Twitter Blue pay-for-verification scheme. Musk has additionally changed himself with a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino. The previous advert exec from NBC Common has been employed to revive relationships with advertisers that had slashed their spending on Twitter.

As a personal firm, we all know much less about Twitter’s monetary scenario than we did earlier than Musk’s buy, however the hiring of Yaccarino mirrored how vital promoting income is to the enterprise. Limiting entry to the positioning cuts immediately in opposition to the objective of making alternatives to see the advert spots corporations are paying for, however Musk’s monopoly mind view of Twitter could also be obscuring that.

However he didn’t point out his resolution to put off greater than half of Twitter’s workers since taking on the corporate final fall, together with individuals crucial to sustaining its infrastructure. The haphazard layoffs meant the corporate even needed to rehire some engineers who had been let go, and folks have repeatedly warned that firing so many individuals would have an effect on Twitter’s stability.

Final November, an unnamed Twitter engineer interviewed by MIT Expertise Overview mentioned that after the workers reductions, “Issues will likely be damaged extra usually. Issues will likely be damaged for longer intervals of time. Issues will likely be damaged in additional extreme methods… They’ll be small annoyances to start out, however because the back-end fixes are being delayed, issues will accumulate till individuals will ultimately simply quit.” In the identical article, web site reliability engineer Ben Kreuger mentioned, “I’d anticipate to start out seeing important public-facing issues with the expertise inside six months.” It has been seven.

Correction July 1st, 2023 4:55PM ET: A earlier model of this story talked about a response to Mr. Beast as being from Elon Musk himself. Actually, it was from an Elon Musk parody account. It has been eliminated. We remorse the error.