Elon Musk puts up a reading paywall on Twitter

Elon Musk continues to blame Twitter’s new limitations on AI firms removing “vast amounts of data.” declared New “temporary” limits on how many posts people can read.

Now unverified accounts can only see 600 posts a day, and for “new” unverified accounts, just 300 a day. Limits on verified accounts (presumably whether they’re purchased as part of a Twitter Blue subscription, provided by an organization, or mandatory verification for Elon Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone else with over a million followers) still only allow a maximum of 6,000 posts to be read per day.

After a while, the musk Tweeted The payment limits will increase “soon” to 8,000 tweets for verified users, 800 for unverified users, and 400 for new unverified accounts.

The limits came a day after Twitter suddenly began blocking access to anyone who didn’t log in, which Musk said was necessary because “several hundred companies (and more) scraped Twitter data so aggressively that it affected the real. User Experience.”

The change is one of several ways Musk has tried to monetize Twitter over the past several months. The company announced a three-tier API change in March that will begin charging for use of its API, three months after finally unveiling the updated $8-per-month Twitter Blue Verification plan. Musk has appointed himself a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino. A former advertising executive at NBC Universal has been hired to restore relationships with advertisers who have cut their spending on Twitter.

As a private company, we know less about Twitter’s financial situation than we did before Musk bought it, but Yaccarino’s hiring reflected how important ad revenue is to the business. Restricting access to the site directly undercuts the goal of creating opportunities to see advertising spots that companies pay for, but Musk’s Monopoly brain Twitter’s view can hide it.

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But he did not mention his decision last fall to lay off more than half of Twitter’s employees, including those critical to maintaining its infrastructure. The flurry of layoffs has forced the company to rehire some of the engineers it let go, and people have repeatedly warned that laying off so many could hurt Twitter’s stability.

Last November, an anonymous Twitter engineer gave an interview MIT Technology Review After the layoff, “things will break more often. Things will break longer. Things will break in more drastic ways… They’ll be minor annoyances to begin with, but as back-end fixes get delayed, things will pile up until people eventually give up.” In the same article, site reliability engineer Ben Krueger said, “I expect to start seeing significant public-facing issues in the technology within six months.” It’s been seven.

Correction July 1, 2023 4:55PM ET: An earlier version of this story, Mr. The answer to the Beast is said to come from Elon Musk. Actually, it’s from an Elon Musk parody account. It was removed. Sorry for the mistake.

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