Elon Musk is putting up a paid wall of reading on Twitter

Elon Musk continues to blame Twitter’s new restrictions on AI companies scraping “massive amounts of data” as he announced new “temporary” limits on the number of posts people can read.

Now unverified accounts will only be able to see 600 posts per day, and for “new” unverified accounts only 300 per day. Verified account limits (most likely whether purchased as part of a Twitter Blue subscription, given through an organization, or verification imposed by Elon on people like Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone else with over a million followers) still allow Maximum of reading no more than 6,000 posts per day.

A little later, Musk chirp that the rate limits would rise “soon” to 8,000 tweets for verified users, 800 for unverified tweets, and 400 for new unverified accounts.

The restrictions arrived one day after Twitter suddenly began blocking access to anyone who wasn’t logged in, which Musk claimed was necessary because “several hundred organizations (maybe more) have been scraping Twitter data so aggressively, that it affects a real-world experience.” the user.”

The change is just one of several ways Musk has tried to monetize Twitter in the past several months. The company announced a three-tier API change in March that will start charging for use of its API, just three months after it rolled out its revamped $8 per month Twitter Blue verification pay system. Musk has also replaced himself with a new CEO, Linda Iaccarino. The former NBC Universal advertising executive has been hired to restore relationships with advertisers who cut their spending on Twitter.

As a private company, we know less about Twitter’s financial condition than we did before Musk was bought, but Yaccarino’s hiring reflected just how important advertising revenue was to the company. Limiting site access is directly inconsistent with the goal of creating opportunities to see advertising sites that companies pay for, but Musk monopoly mind Twitter’s view may obscure that.

When YouTube personality MrBeast answeredsaying he was going to see how long it takes him to look through 6,000 posts, Musk answered“It must be less than 1 hour and 9 minutes!”

But he did not mention his decision to lay off more than half of Twitter’s employees since he took over the company last fall, including people important to maintaining its infrastructure. Random layoffs led to the company even having to rehire some engineers who had been let go, and people had repeatedly warned that firing so many people would affect the stability of Twitter.

Last November, a Twitter engineer interviewed MIT Technology Review After staff reductions, he said, “things will break more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in much harsher ways … It will be small inconveniences to start, but as rear repairs are delayed, things will pile on until they give in.” people in the end.” In the same article, site reliability engineer Ben Kruger said, “I expect to start seeing significant public facing issues with the technology within six months.” It was the seventh.