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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...

SpaceX succeded with things where many others failed, did things considered basically impossible and Musk's takes on spaceflight seems to make more sense.

Maybe simply "disregard common opinion, order company to do weird stuff because you thing that it is a good idea and double down on everything" worked in case of SpaceX and imploded in case of Twitter? After all such strategy cannot work every time?

Or Musk started to believe fanboys, thinks he is smarter than God himself and stopped listening to others? Or is surrounded by bunch of sycophants?

Or for Twitter there is no way for profitability and task is impossible and Musk flails trying to achieve it?

A big part of it is Musk blew the first critical step in doing a leveraged buyout when he substantially overpaid for Twitter. He took a company that was losing money and added a ~$1 Billion interest payment it had to make every year. He had to do something drastic to make it more profitable than it ever has been. A typical LBO is done by private equity with a clear plan to do that but I think Elon mostly wanted to buy Twitter as a fun mildly money losing toy when Tesla stock was at an all time high and then tried to back out when the price of both collapsed.