Twitter has been a mess all weekend. The social media company, which has been a bit of a headache for all ever since Elon Musk acquired late last year, got even worse after Musk announced there were limits on how many tweets subscribers could see. Suddenly users found they were hitting their “view limit” — not great for a service whose entire allure is endless scrolling for content. Soon hashtags like “#RIPTwitter” were trending. So was Bluesky Social, the new Twitter alternative that features Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on the board. Speaking of Dorsey, he eventually weighed in on the debacle Musk helped create.
And I do hope they consider building on truly censorship-resistant open protocols like bitcoin and nostr to help ease that burden. Good for all, and critical to preserve the open internet.
— jack (@jack) July 1, 2023
“Running Twitter is hard,” Dorsey wrote. “I don’t wish that stress upon anyone. I trust that the team is doing their best under the constraints they have, which are immense. It’s easy to critique the decisions from afar…which I’m guilty of…but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will.”
He added, “And I do hope they consider building on truly censorship-resistant open protocols like bitcoin and nostr to help ease that burden. Good for all, and critical to preserve the open internet.”
On Saturday, as thousands of users reported problems accessing Twitter, Musk announced that, due to “extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation,” there were new, temporary limits on how many tweets people could see. “Verified” accounts could view 6,000 posts a day. Unverified would only get 600. New verified accounts, strangely, would get fewer than that: only 300.
Later in the day he upped those to 8,000, 800, and 400, respectively. Not long after that he upped it to 10,000, 1,000, and 500, respectively.
Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Inevitably Musk later mocked people complaining about how his service suddenly stank.
Oh the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 2, 2023
Dorsey left Twitter, which he co-founded in 2006, back in 2021. In April he admitted that Musk shouldn’t have bought his former company. But at least he isn’t going to beat the crap out of him in a cage fight.
(Via Deadline)