So long Twitter... Nice knowing you

[phenomlab]

Seems the latest “move” by twitter to prevent bot data scraping hasn’t gone down well at all with those who have unverified accounts. They are now being restricted to being able to read either 300 or 600 posts per day.

With charging for a verified account, Twitter is going to see it’s user based significantly deteriorating unless it stops trying to monetize literally every aspect of it’s platform.

Already, the hashtag #RIPTwitter is trending. Not a wise move. I have an account, but hardly use it and it’s only maintained for SSO purposes here.

https://news.sky.com/story/twitter-applies-temporary-reading-limits-for-all-users-elon-musk-announces-12913108

See below for the inevitable user response

https://twitter.com/search?q=RIPTwitter&t=wqCtC0uO9uZQ7P31a9syJw&s=09

[crazycells]

@phenomlab good… another reason to motivate people to migrate to mastodon

https://mastodon.social/home

[phenomlab]

@crazycells seems that Twitter have since relaxed the restriction, but not removed it entirely.

The verified accounts are now able to read 10,000 posts per day, with unverified accounts able to access 1,000.

Seeing as you have to pay for verified status by monthly subscription, it’s clearly a monetisation effort by Twitter. From my understanding, there are a number of entities that are scraping data from Twitter (and it appears Reddit is experiencing the same) - possibly language models that are being trained to enhance the capabilities of AI engines.

It’s blatantly obvious that this isn’t about them consuming content, but the fact that they aren’t paying. Twitter recently introduced a charge to use its API service that was historically free, and it looks like this is the next money spinner.

[crazycells]

@phenomlab clearly, musk is testing the water and will get away with anything people do not react…

I never liked him anyway, but have been hating him after he confessed that he was advertising and backing up “hyperloop” mode of transportation (it is basically tubes with vacuum and magnets) so that municipalities and local governments do not invest in their railroad infrastructure and people buy more car for themselves (hence elon is profiting).

[phenomlab]

@crazycells I’m totally unsurprised by any of this. Musk is well known for creating schemes meaning that he profits out of pretty much anything these days.

Whilst I admire the business acumen, I certainly don’t agree with the ethics.