This morning, Elon Musk announced that Twitter is now limiting the number of tweets that you can read each day. The multi-billionaire said Twitter is creating these “temporary limits to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.” New unverified members of Twitter are now limited to viewing 400 tweets per day while existing unverified members can read 800 Tweets a day. Those who are verified and pay $8 per month to Twitter for verification can read 8,000 tweets every day.
This is actually an increase from earlier in the day when the limits were 300 posts for new unverified members, 600 tweets for existing unverified members, and 6,000 tweets for verified members. Once the criticism started coming in, Musk did what he has been prone to doing since taking over Twitter last October; he backs off his first proposal and makes adjustments.
Truthfully though, how many out there are going to be impacted by this cap? How many of you look at 400 tweets a day in the first place? And if Musk believes that he will get a deluge of subscribers willing to pay $8 per month for the privilege of reading 8,000 tweets a day, he is getting bad advice. The problem though is that the only voice that has Musk’s ears is his own.
Just a few days ago, Twitter announced that its $8 per month Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to write tweets containing as many as 25,000 characters. That is up from the previous limit of 10,000 characters and far more than the 280 characters that regular non-paying Twitter members are allowed to use in one tweet.
Musk tweets the original daily view caps which have since been increased
Ah Twitter, you could’ve been a contender. Now the platform is nothing more than a sad parody of itself. The only thing that we can think of is that Musk wants to run Twitter into the ground and take the huge tax write off. Or perhaps he is worried about the backlash against billionaires in the U.S. and wants to downsize back to a millionaire.
Look, there have been unorthodox executives before; former T-Mobile CEO and President John Legere comes to mind. But Legere wasn’t just crazy, He was crazy like a fox and he took T-Mobile from its position under Sprint as the fourth-largest wireless provider in the U.S. to become the most innovative and fastest-growing wireless carrier that is now second to Verizon. Ironically, Legere tweeted Musk last November saying that “maybe I should run Twitter.”
Maybe Legere should be running Twitter. At this stage, Twitter needs someone who knows what he/she is doing.
