Today, I woke up and tried to hop onto Tweetdeck and I discovered that it is now down.  I usually have 10 open columns on my Tweetdeck and, as of right now, only two of them are loading.  I can check my DMs and I can see tweets from people I follow but I can’t check my lists, I can’t check my hashtags, and I can’t see my replies on Tweetdeck.  For that, I have to go straight to Twitter.

(Oddly, I can still tweet from Tweetdeck.)

Following yesterday’s rate-limit announcement, it’s hard not to assume that the limits that Elon Musk instituted also broke Tweetdeck.  It’s like he’s just looking for ways to make those of us who encouraged others to give him a chance feel foolish.

Don’t get me wrong.  There are some thing that Elon Musk has done that I agree with.  I agree with the idea that free speech should be Twitter’s number one priority.  I agree with the release of the Twitter Files, which did show just how much the government and other wealthy players manipulated the news.  I agree with bringing back the previously banned accounts.  In fact, I think he didn’t go far enough where that’s concerned because, as far as I know, the Trashfilm Guru’s original account is still suspended.  And I even agree with doing away with the legacy blue checkmarks because the verification system had itself become corrupted.  After Musk took over the site, I had a lot less annoying people showing up on my timeline as recommended follows and I appreciated that.  Plus, Elon Musk drives my commie friends crazy and I appreciated that even more.

But none of that matters if people cannot actually use the site!

The official story is that the rate limit was instituted to combat data scraping.  Data scraping is something that has been going on since the day Twitter was founded and it’s never been a big enough problem to require destroying people’s ability to use the site.  If the problem was suddenly so bad that emergency measures were needed, why not take Twitter offline for maintenance instead of making an announcement that everyone would be restricted but that subscribers to Twitter Blue would be restricted less?  If the problem was so bad that unverified users could only read 600 tweets a day, why then change that to a thousand tweets a day in response to people getting pissed off?  If it’s that huge of a problem, you don’t say, “Okay, sorry, here’s an extra 400 tweets.”  What you do is apologize and promise to fix things as quickly as possible.  The rate limit is obviously just a scheme to convince people to subscribe.

At this point, I think everyone just has to hope that Joe Rogan or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will declare rate limits to be a conspiracy because they seem to be the only people that the Silicon Valley tech bros are interested in listening to.

In the end, this is all a reminder of the outsized role that social media (and Twitter, in particular) play in our lives.  Is it too late to return to the blogging era?