Twitter imposes an additional restriction on its users, and you’ll never guess whose fault it is

The technical infrastructures of the social network could be in poor condition, and one of the good ideas to solve this problem would be to limit access to users. But, of course, not fairly.

A lot has changed in recent months on Twitter, bought by Elon Musk for 44 billion dollars last October. With the ambition to make his acquisition profitable and the desire to impose his personal vision of the social network, the businessman is shaking up a platform that seems to be going from bad to worse.

Say goodbye to frenetic scrolling

While Twitter has just restricted access to publications to its users only, the company has just announced that they no longer have the possibility of unlimited browsing. This is because they can now only see 600 tweets per day, while new accounts can only read 300. Twitter Blue subscribers, meanwhile, have daily access to a maximum of 6,000 posts. However, according to Elon Musk, these limits will be “ Soon expanded to 1,000, 500, and 10,000 respectively.

The latter also spoke about the significant impact of generative AIs such as Google Bard and ChatGPT on the infrastructure of his company. Indeed, they must collect a phenomenal amount of data to train and function, and the content published on Twitter does not seem to be spared. The platform would not be able to support the weight of such “ extreme levels of data collection and system manipulation Musk asserts, to the point of affecting the actual user experience “. Thus, after the decision to restrict access to the platform to non-subscribers, the restriction of the number of messages consulted would be another measure to limit damage.

Do we lack sleep at the head of Twitter?

However, the reality could also lie elsewhere. While the layoff of thousands of company employees had a significant impact on moderation, it could also have an effect on its technical infrastructure. According to an anonymous Twitter engineer interviewed by MIT Technology Reviewthese staff reductions mean that “ things will be broken more often “. The fault would therefore not lie with Google or OpenAI, but rather with the catastrophic management that Twitter has experienced since its takeover by the South African billionaire.

Of course, this can also be seen as another attempt to entice users to subscribe to Twitter Blue. Indeed, the new verification system is highly promoted by the platform, to the point of being granted more and more privileges. However, limiting the time spent on a site whose survival also depends on advertising revenue does not seem like the best calculation. Especially since the new boss of the company, Linda Yaccarino, has the mission of restoring relations with advertisers, who have reduced their spending on the platform.

Next episode in a few days… or a few hours?

Source : The Verge