You know, I have really been pretty open-minded when it comes to Elon Musk’s twitter but the announcement, made about an hour ago, that there are going to “temporarily” be limits on the number of tweets that you can read during a day may be the announcement that breaks me.

I’m not going to share the tweet here because I’m not sure if someone seeing an embedded tweet on a website counts towards the new read limits but basically, Elon Musk announced that verified users are now limited to reading 6,000 tweets “a day”, unverified users (i.e., those of us who don’t want to spend money to do something that we spent 14 yeas doing for free) can read 600 tweets “a day,” and new users can only read 300.  Elon says that this is being done as a temporary measure to battle spam on the site.

(It is true that there is a lot of spam on twitter now.  Recently, a bunch of obvious bots — i.e., bios that read, “I’m just looking for love!” and such — lay siege to a live tweet that I was taking part in.  It got annoying pretty quickly.  That said, I’ve got a block button and I’ve got a mute button and that’s really pretty much all I need to battle them.)

Elon’s tweet was frustratingly vague.  How temporary is temporary?  By day, does he mean a day per sunrise to sunset or does he mean that you’ll be limited by the number of tweets that you looked at over the previous 24 hours?  If I scroll my timeline, does that count as reading every single tweet that shows up on it, regardless of whether I stopped to look at the tweet or not?  If I see a tweet embedded in a news story, does that count?  If I go back and read my own tweets, do those count?  If I re-read a tweet, does that count as two tweets?  If 600 strangers all reply to a tweet, does that mean that I’m screwed as soon as I click on my notifications?

It’s frustrating.  Hopefully, the backlash — and there is a big one — will lead to twitter backtracking.  Twitter’s habit of replying to the press with the poop emoji was cute at first but now, users have serious questions about their experience and Twitter’s refusal to be clear is no longer amusing.  This isn’t a case of some whiny reporter throwing a fit and demanding to know why Elon refuses to suspend anyone who tells them to learn to code.  This is a case of real users having legitimate questions about something that feels very arbitrary.

If this policy continues, it’ll be the death of live tweeting.  I’m going to continue to try to keep my live tweets going for as long as possible.  I don’t want to have to move everything over to Mastodon, where it seems like 90% of the users are competing to see who can virtue signal the loudest.  But, if it has to be done, it’ll be done.

For now, I will no longer be embedding tweets in my posts here at TSL.  I don’t want to accidentally send anyone over their limit.

Let’s hope this is resolved soon.

I miss the Fail Whale.