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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?

updates:

It gets better

Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754

Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675260424109928449

all within the span of a few hours

I saw someone semi-jokingly say that the rate limits were increasing as Elon ran into them himself, and at this point I find that distressingly likely.

Man should have stuck to rockets and electric cars, though a more based Twitter is still nice to have.

Man should have stuck to rockets and electric cars

Consider the idea that he's not actually running the rockets and electric cars any better...

Tesla is worth over 800 billion so he has certainly done something right there. To your point it is pretty crazy that the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world is a full blown/terminally online twitter addict.

Tesla is worth over 800 billion so he has certainly done something right there.

That's actually an argument against him. There's no way Tesla is worth more than all other car companies combined.

There is very much a way because thats currently what it is.

Are you saying Elon is a bad CEO because the market places such a high valuation on Tesla?

There is very much a way because thats currently what it is.

Nah, stock market prices can get wild, and end up not indicative of actual value of the company.

Are you saying Elon is a bad CEO because the market places such a high valuation on Tesla?

Not directly, but sort of yes. It's more that when a company's valuation is so out of whack with it's fundamentals, it's a good indication the company is running on pure hype, and when that happens it's not uncommon for companies to crash and burn when the hype runs out.