To say that Twitter is on the brink of collapse may not be entirely false. Since Musk's acquisition of the social media company, Twitter has been hopping from one issue to the next. The latest one with users fuming is the newly implemented limit on reading tweets.
No More Unlimited Browsing for You
When the bird app was not yet purchased by the Tesla CEO, anyone could read as many tweets as they can and even do so without signing up for an account. Now, both are no longer an option and Elon Musk says it's because of AI companies using Twitter data.
Initially, users who don't have a Twitter Blue subscription are limited to seeing only 600 posts a day, even fewer for "new" verified accounts with just 300. Even those who have verified accounts have a limitation of 6,000 tweets a day.
Musk changed the numbers to 800 tweets a day for unverified accounts, 400 for new unverified accounts, and 8,000 tweets for Twitter Blue subscribers, as mentioned in The Verge. It's a far cry from the old policy where anyone can read as many tweets as they want.
According to the tech billionaire, the restriction was brought by "several hundred organizations" scraping Twitter data aggressively, so much so that it was already affecting user experience. Some speculate that these companies are actually dealing with AI.
It could also just be a scheme to push users to subscribe to Twitter Blue to be able to see more tweets. It probably would've been more encouraging if getting past a paywall meant that you'll get an unlimited number of views for posts, but that's not the case.
This all boils down to Twitter's efforts to remain profitable. If you've been reading reports on the company's recent affairs, you'd know that it's in trouble financially. It has lost big advertisers, which spells trouble since it's Twitter's main source of revenue.
The company has lost two-thirds of its value ever since Musk purchased it based on its $44 billion price tag. It's safe to say that the acquisition may have been a mistake. The company has since been linked to other issues like Twitter not paying its debts.
A Similar Case with Reddit
Reddit is still suffering the effects of the protests against its API pricing. Thousands of moderators participated in the blackout which resulted in more than 8,000 subreddits going private in over two days.
While the majority of the groups are already public, the social networking company is still experiencing some pushback from its moderators and users. Reddit reasoned that the pricing is a way for them to bill AI companies that use its data to train their AI systems.
AI companies used Reddit's content such as conversations before for free, and that's made possible due to their API access. As the company puts access behind a paywall, either the AI companies will keep off or pay in order to use Reddit's data.
According to The New York Times, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says that "the Reddit corpus of data is really valuable," but that the company doesn't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.
