Why is Twitter limiting how many tweets you can see? – Fiat 2 Coins

On Saturday Twitter started to limit what number of tweets its customers might learn.

Elon Musk tweeted that unverified customers might learn 1,000 tweets, and verified customers 10,000 per day.

Individuals started to share screengrabs of messages that they’d “exceeded” their each day allowance of tweets.

Elon Musk was doing one thing that appears unfathomable for a social media firm – he was limiting consumer exercise.

The transfer has baffled promoting executives.

Nevertheless that is a part of a for much longer sport that Elon Musk is taking part in – a battle with AI corporations.

Let’s first begin off with how Twitter truly makes cash. The overwhelming majority of its income comes from promoting, similar to Meta and Google.

When customers go onto the platform, they’re served advertisements. The extra time they spend on Twitter, the extra advertisements they see. The equation is fairly easy. That’s the enterprise.

Nevertheless, Elon Musk has historically eschewed promoting. Tesla famously doesn’t do advertisements.

In 2019 he tweeted “I hate promoting”.

And but he’s purchased an organization that’s completely reliant on it.

So, Elon Musk is determined to generate totally different income streams.

This isn’t only a enterprise determination. He believes that advertisers maintain an excessive amount of energy over social media corporations relating to moderation.

Advertisers can, and have, pulled their cash from Twitter.

Advertisers don’t need their advertisements positioned subsequent to racist or extremist content material. And so Twitter’s most important income stream additionally has an affect over how a lot “free speech” is allowed on the platform.

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Mr Musk instructed me in April that “most” of the advertisers had returned after initially pausing their advertisements from Twitter after his takeover.

Nevertheless Mr Musk has one other plan to show Twitter right into a worthwhile firm.

He needs Twitter to earn cash out of the huge quantity of knowledge it holds.

Platforms like Twitter and Reddit maintain a treasure trove of a whole bunch of billions of actual human conversations – an unbelievable useful resource for AI corporations.

Massive language fashions (LLMs), can study from these interactions, and work out how to reply to questions in additional human-like methods.

However platforms like Twitter and Reddit wish to be paid for using their knowledge on this approach.

In April, Reddit’s chief govt Steve Huffman instructed the New York Instances that he was sad with what AI corporations had been doing.

“The Reddit corpus of knowledge is basically helpful,” he mentioned. “However we don’t want to offer all of that worth to among the largest corporations on this planet without spending a dime.”

At across the identical time, Elon Musk mentioned that Microsoft was “ripping off the Twitter database, demonetizing it (eradicating advertisements) after which promoting our knowledge to others”.

On Saturday it turned clear how pissed off Mr Musk was getting.

“We had been getting knowledge pillaged” he mentioned.

“Virtually each firm doing AI, from start-ups to among the greatest firms on Earth, was scraping huge quantities of knowledge,” he mentioned.

And so, by proscribing utilization, Elon Musk is hoping to forestall its knowledge from being pulled into LLMs. He needs to barter with AI corporations and receives a commission for the content material that they take.

However there may very well be different elements at play too, and it goes again to a different one among his makes an attempt to lower Twitter’s reliance on promoting income.

Mr Musk is determined for individuals to pay for Twitter.

For months, he’s been attempting to push individuals in the direction of Twitter Blue. There’s been some carrot, giving Twitter Blue members a blue tick and verification, and a few stick – eradicating verification from customers that don’t pay.

However Twitter Blue has not been what Elon Musk had hoped. Individuals aren’t paying up of their droves.

Maybe he’s taking a look at one other method to get customers to open their wallets. In future, if need entry to limitless tweets, maybe you’ll must pay a month-to-month charge?

No matter Mr Musk is considering, one factor is evident although. Limiting tweets just isn’t good for advertisers.

The bounds are “remarkably unhealthy” for customers and advertisers already shaken by the “chaos” at Twitter, Mike Proulx, analysis director at Forrester, instructed Reuters.

That is maybe probably the most perplexing a part of Elon Musk’s restrictions. He has just lately employed Linda Yaccarino to be Twitter’s chief govt. She’s a former promoting govt.

She reportedly has grandiose concepts for the way Twitter can make more cash – together with full-screen video advertisements and attempting to persuade extra celebrities to make use of the app.

Her job is made far tougher by having restricted tweets. Fewer eyeballs on posts means advertisers might be much less excited by spending cash.

Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly launching a Twitter clone, known as Threads, sooner or later this summer time. The probabilities that there might be restrictions on its feed, on what number of posts you possibly can learn, are zero. That isn’t the Meta approach.

Elon Musk is an awfully profitable businessman, and he has a real gripe relating to AI corporations ripping off its knowledge. However this weekend’s occasions have been one other head scratcher.

Watch: Elon Musk’s sudden BBC interview… in 90 seconds

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Social mediaElon MuskArtificial intelligenceMetaTwitter