Category: Social Media

Twitter Pulls Redditesque Move That Itself Was Inspired by Reddit Wanting to be Like Twitter →

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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.

  1. As is the tradition at Twitter now. ↩

Steve Huffman’s Inspiration in Ruining Reddit: Elon Musk →

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David Ingram of NBC News:

In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted “a handful of times” with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform.

Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.

“Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said.

“Now, they’ve taken the dramatic road,” he added, “and I guess I can’t sit here and say that we’re not either, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity here.”

Apollo Shutting Down June 30 →

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Christian Selig, writing on Reddit:

Eight years ago, I posted in the Apple subreddit about a Reddit app I was looking for beta testers for, and my life completely changed that day. I just finished university and an internship at Apple, and wanted to build a Reddit client of my own: a premier, customizable, well-designed Reddit app for iPhone. This fortunately resonated with people immediately, and it’s been my full time job ever since.

Today’s a much sadder post than that initial one eight years ago. June 30th will be Apollo’s last day.

I’ve talked to a lot of people, and come to claims with this over the last weeks as talks with Reddit have deteriorated to an ugly point, and in the interest of transparency with the community, I wanted to talk about how I arrived at this decision, and if you have any questions at the end, I’m more than happy to answer. This post will be long as I have a lot of topics to cover.

There is no way around it: this sucks. Reddit leadership showed its true colors here: dishonesty, ugliness and greed.

Reddit’s API Pricing is Ridiculous →

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Christian Selig, the developer behind the Reddit client Apollo got some shockingly bad news from Reddit today:

Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month.

I’m deeply disappointed in this price. Reddit iterated that the price would be A) reasonable and based in reality, and B) they would not operate like Twitter. Twitter’s pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit’s is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur, a site similar to Reddit in userbase and media, $166 for the same 50 million API calls.

Holy moly.

NPR Leaves Twitter →

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David Folkenflik:

NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.

The decision by Twitter last week took the public radio network off guard. When queried by NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn, Twitter owner Elon Musk asked how NPR functioned. Musk allowed that he might have gotten it wrong.

Twitter then revised its label on NPR’s account to “government-funded media.” The news organization says that is inaccurate and misleading, given that NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

This is the way.

Twitter Circle Tweets Surfacing on For You Timeline →

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Amanda Silberling at TechCrunch:

Numerous Twitter users are reporting a bug in which Circle tweets — which are supposed to reach a select group, like an Instagram Close Friends story — are surfacing on the algorithmically-generated For You timeline. That means that your supposedly private posts might breach containment to reach an unintended audience, which could quickly spark some uncomfortable situations.

I observed this bug when a tweet from someone I follow appeared on my For You timeline, but the retweet button was disabled, despite the person’s account being public. When I clicked on the tweet, it disappeared. I asked the tweeter if that post was intended for their Circle — which I am not in — and they confirmed this was the case.

I’m starting to think the folks running Twitter don’t really know what they’re doing.

Twitter Labels NPR as ‘US State-Affiliated Media’ →

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Kris Holt, writing at Engadget:

Twitter has added a label to the main account of NPR to designate the public broadcaster as “US state-affiliated media.” Until now, such labels have typically been reserved for state-run organizations such as RT and Sputnik in Russia and China’s Xinhua News Agency. The labels appear on every tweet from accounts they’re applied to.

“We were disturbed to see last night that Twitter has labeled NPR as state-affiliated media,” a description that, per Twitter’s own guidelines, does not apply to NPR,” the broadcaster’s CEO John Lansing said in a statement. “NPR and our member stations are supported by millions of listeners who depend on us for the independent, fact-based journalism we provide. NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable. It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy.”

Meanwhile, I’m not paying for Twitter Blue but am still verified. I’m starting to think the folks running Twitter don’t really know what they’re doing.

The White House Won’t Chip in for Twitter Verification →

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Sara Fischer:

The White House will not pay to have its staff’s official Twitter profiles continue to be verified, according to guidance issued to staffers via an email obtained by Axios.

Official White House staffers rely on their verified accounts to inform the public on behalf of the administration. Verification, combined with the designated Twitter profiles, helped to ensure the public could trust those messages.

“It is our understanding that Twitter Blue does not provide person-level verification as a service. Thus, a blue check mark will now simply serve as a verification that the account is a paid user,” White House director of digital strategy Rob Flaherty told staffers in an email sent Friday afternoon.

Under the current scheme, official government accounts carry a gray check mark, media outlets and companies get gold ones and suckers get to show a blue one, perhaps optionally.

I expect mine will go away very soon.

Meta Announces Verification Program, Complete with Blue Badges →

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Mark Zuckerberg:

Good morning and new product announcement: this week we’re starting to roll out Meta Verified — a subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID, get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you, and get direct access to customer support. This new feature is about increasing authenticity and security across our services. Meta Verified starts at $11.99 / month on web or $14.99 / month on iOS. We’ll be rolling out in Australia and New Zealand this week and more countries soon.

At least you won’t have to pay to use SMS 2FA.

Twitter Blue Customers Can Send Tweets up to 4,000 Character in Length →

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Huge news for those paying for Twitter Blue:

Twitter has launched a longer tweet feature, giving Blue subscribers in the US the ability to post up to 4,000 characters at once. If someone you follow uses the feature, the tweet in your timeline will have a “show more” button to keep it from taking up your entire screen.

Currently, there are a few limitations to the feature (besides the big one that it’s behind a paywall). If your tweet is over the standard 280 characters, you can’t save it as a draft or schedule it for later. However, most other normal features should work as usual — you can add hashtags or pictures, and non-Blue subscribers will still be able to interact with the posts as normal.

There’s some irony in Twitter becoming like a smaller, more poorly-designed Medium.