Over at The Verge, Wes Davis and Richard Lawler are reporting on the new paywall that has been erected around Twitter:
Elon Musk continues to blame Twitter’s new limitations on AI companies scraping “vast amounts of data” as he announced new “temporary” limits on how many posts people can read.
Now unverified accounts will only be able to see 600 posts per day, and for “new” unverified accounts, just 300 in a day. The limits for verified accounts (presumably whether they’re bought as a part of the Twitter Blue subscription, granted through an organization, or verification Elon forced on people like Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone else with more than a million followers) still allow reading only a maximum of 6,000 posts per day.
Shortly after that, Musk tweeted that the rate limits would “soon” increase to 8,000 tweets for verified users, 800 for unverified, and 400 for new unverified accounts.
Ah yes, the classic “AI is digesting our data so we should punish our best users” move.
This comes on the heels of Twitter cutting off all access to people who are not logged into the site, but there is probably even more to this 4D chess move by Musk. A few weeks ago, it came out that Twitter had stopped paying it Google Cloud bills. As today is the first of the month, it’s not hard to assume that the paywall changes — in addition to the outages being reported by users — are at least in part because of Google pulling the plug1 on something important.
Or maybe the DDOS is coming from inside the house. It’s hard to tell.