On June 2, Twitter owner Elon Musk introduced limits on viewing tweets: 500 posts per day are available to new users, 1,000 to old users, and 10,000 to Twitter Blue subscribers.
According to the businessman, the decision is “temporary” and is associated with an “extreme level” of data parsing and system manipulation. He did not name the timing of the lifting of restrictions, but allowed their increase in the near future.
At the same time, in technical documentation The platform still says that “tweets are public by default” and “anyone can view and interact with private posts”.
In the meantime, regular users started to experience a lot of problems, including a broken feed and comments feature. And the hashtag #TwitterDown (“Twitter down”) has become one of the most popular in recent days.
“Does this app make sense now?” wondered one of the users.
There is speculation that Musk’s solution is aimed at combating artificial intelligence language models that learn from publicly available data on social networks like Twitter.
Another reason for limiting views could be Twitter’s strained relationship with Google. Earlier, Bloomberg reported that the platform had stopped paying for the corporation’s cloud service. The company used it for data analysis and machine learning. According to experts, before Musk, the social network spent about $ 200-300 million on such services.
There are also rumors in the community that Twitter’s technical problems are due to its poor software architecture. According to the developer of the rival decentralized platform Mastodon, Sheldon Chan, Musk’s social network is “exposing itself to DDoS attacks.”
He noticed that Twitter was down all morning after the update. Chan tried to “break” through the constant errors and wait for the download, but the site automatically resubmitted requests.
“Twitter is sending itself about 10 requests per second to try and get content that never loads because Elon’s latest ingenious innovation blocked people from being able to read tweets without being logged in. This probably created hellish conditions that the developers never imagined, and therefore we got this comedic series of errors that caused the most epic DDoS attack on ourselves, ”the developer explained.
Reddit is also experiencing internal difficulties – more than 6,000 communities have gone offline in protest of the company’s monetary policy towards developers. The platform management announced that it will start charging third-party applications for the use of API.
The company’s CEO, Steve Huffman, told The New York Times that the move is partly motivated by a desire to restrict AI corporations.
“We don’t have to give all the value [данных] some of the largest companies in the world for free,” he said.
The billionaire’s previous initiative to rid Twitter of bots with a paid subscription for $8 a month did not bring significant results. A study by dappGambl showed that about 10% of the followers of popular cryptocurrency-themed accounts are still fake.
According to Dewey Square Group, with the arrival of a new CEO, Twitter is seeing a monthly churn of users. In March, the decrease in traffic on the social network was 7.7% compared to the same period last year.
In parallel, competitors record an increase in new accounts and even face congestion. Representatives of Cohost reported a drop in servers due to an “unprecedented number of registrations.”
BlueSky, a decentralized social network run by ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, had to suspend new user registrations amid performance issues.
Shortly before the restrictions were introduced, the alternative microblogging platform Spill, also created by ex-Twitter employees, launched a beta version of the application in the AppStore.
Recall that in April 2022, Musk became the largest shareholder of Twitter after acquiring a 9.2% stake for $2.89 billion. Later, he offered to buy the social network for $43 billion to create “an inclusive arena for free speech.”
The $44 billion deal closed in October. The company’s previous CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal left the headquarters.
In May 2023, Musk announced that he had found a replacement as CEO of Twitter. Linda Iaccarino, ex-head of advertising at NBCUniversal, has become the new CEO.
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