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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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Twitter's been acting weird for several hours. Turns out that Musk has done something extraordinary:

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

  • Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
  • Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
  • New unverified accounts to 300/day

Of course everyone on Twitter knows that 600 posts/day is basically nothing, so it's basically something to get people to pay for Twitter and get that blue check, but even then it's not an unlimited offer.

Is Musk knowingly just trying to run the website down, or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing? Is this, finally, the much-predicted Death of Twitter?

This is the first change that is actually going to majorly impact my Twitter use. Only being able to load 600 posts a day is about 5 minutes of activity on Twitter. There’s so many replies that get loaded every time you click on a tweet, and even refreshing your timeline probably results in loading several hundred. Even the paying users will be severely throttled. Between this and Apollo for Reddit shutting down today, I might have a lot more free time!

Does Twitter not do infinite scrolling for you? Whenever I am baited into clicking a post, it only loads like 20 replies max unless I am foolish enough to scroll down farther than that.

For some anecdata, I guess I am what you would call an unverified registered user, and have noticed no change in my (regrettable enough as it is) use case.

Have you considered that you might be spending too much time on Twitter if this is a problem for you?