As of the time I’m composing this article on Sunday, July 2, 2023, Twitter appears to be almost (although not entirely) broken. I use Tweetdeck on my laptop almost exclusively since I find the default basic Twitter interface basically useless. And I’m not the only one. I noticed that #TwitterDown has been trending for a while. This appears to be a phenomenon that’s being driven by changes that Elon Musk instituted last night, imposing “limits” on how many tweets any individual account can view per day. Describing it as a “temporary emergency measure,” Musk claimed in a tweet that this was being done because so much of Twitter’s data was being “pillaged,” but the real reason became obvious almost immediately. (AP)

Thousands of people logged complaints about problems accessing Twitter on Saturday after owner Elon Musk limited most users to viewing 600 tweets a day — restrictions he described as an attempt to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the site.

The crackdown began to have ripple effects early Saturday, causing more than 7,500 people at one point to report problems using the social media service, based on complaints registered on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages. Although that’s a relatively small number of Twitter’s more than 200 million worldwide users, the trouble was widespread enough to cause the #TwitterDown hashtag to trend in some parts of the world.

The service disruptions cropped up a day after Twitter began requiring people to log on to the service in order to view tweets and profiles — a change in its longtime practice to allow all comers to peruse the chatter on what Musk has frequently touted as the world’s digital town square since buying it for $44 billion last year.

Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023

To see what’s going on here, look no further than the details of the “limits” that Musk imposed. He initially set the figures at 600 tweets per day for unverified accounts and 6,000 for “verified” (meaning paying blue check) accounts. After widespread protests, he raised it to 1,000 and 10,000 tweets respectively that can be viewed. This was a poorly disguised effort to drive more people to sign up for paid accounts.

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m a capitalist and I understand that Musk needs to find ways to drive revenue if he’s going to make his investment profitable. But this seems like a poor and frankly dishonest approach. If people are “scraping” data from Twitter, that’s just because it’s the world’s public town square, and what users are saying is of interest to everyone from advertisers to media outlets. It’s always run that way.

It’s very unlikely that this is creating strains on the system in terms of either usage limits or operating costs. Twitter actually has fewer users than when Musk bought it and presumably fewer tweets. The actual costs of operating Twitter center mostly around the server farms that it runs on. It’s unlikely that has changed much.

The current limits make the system particularly unhelpful for Tweetdeck users like me. Tweetdeck is always running in the background and the ten columns I have set up are “viewing” tweets all day long without my seeing most of them. I’m sure I burn through more than 10,000 tweets by the time I finish work on any given day. This system makes me even less likely to sign up and start paying for a meaningless blue check.

This has been an unpleasant reminder of how deeply Twitter has ingrained itself into my daily life. I “talk to” and “hear from” a vastly larger number of people every day via Twitter than I do in real life or even via other means of communication such as phone calls or video conferences. Outside of Twitter, I’m essentially a hermit. I literally say more to our pets than I do any other human beings (aside from my wife) on an average day. Who knows? Perhaps glancing at it and interacting with other users less frequently will actually improve my life.