Twitter seems far from the normal micro-blogging platform which it used to be. With constant new updates and announcements since Elon Musk's takeover in October 2022, the social media platform has been at the receiving end of criticism from users.
While users have been trying to wrap their heads around Twitter Blue and its 'perks' for some time, the Musk-owned platform has now started putting limits to how many tweets its users can read, curtailing users’ ability to track new posts. Apart from this, TweetDeck is back with a twist and now a compulsory sign-in is required to view tweets.
Here's a roundup of what has changed for Twitter users in the past few days.
- 'Temporary' cap on the number of tweets users can read in a day
Last week, Musk announced that the social media company has put a "temporary" limit on the number of tweets users can read on a daily basis, in a bid to address "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation". He had previously said that he was not happy about artificial intelligence (AI) firms using Twitter's data to train their large language models.
According to the initial usage quota, verified account holders can read up to 6,000 posts each day, whereas unverified users have a much lower restriction of 600 posts. The newly registered, unverified users face even stricter restrictions, with a daily limit of scrolling through 300 posts. These limits have now been extended to 10,000, 1,000, and 500, respectively.
- Compulsory sign-in to view tweets
Twitter will now require users to have an account on the social media platform in order to view tweets. Users who try to view content on the platform are prompted to create an account or log into an existing account in order to see the tweets.
Musk called this move a "temporary emergency measure". "We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!" Musk said in a tweet. Adding on to that, he said that hundreds of organisations, if not more, were scraping Twitter data "extremely aggressively," thereby, negatively impacting user experience.
-TweetDeck only for verified users
Twitter started rolling out a new version of TweetDeck for users on Monday. The company also added that in 30 days, users will have to be verified (which means availing Twitter Blue subscription), to access the web app. TweetDeck is a tool that allows users to monitor multiple Twitter accounts at the same time. It helps in categorising and consolidating conversations, topics, groups and threads on a potentially overwhelming social media platform.
As Twitter limited the number of tweets users can read in a day, the TweetDeck users in particular reported major problems, including multiple errors and entire columns failing to load.
Twitter announced that all saved searches and workflows from the previous TweetDeck version will be carried over to the new version. It was also stated that users migrating to the new version will be able to import their columns as well.
How did Twitter users react to these changes?
Twitter, as we know it, gets flooded with varied sorts of reactions on any trending topic from random to crucial, in no time. While some prefer to voice their dissatisfaction whole-heartedly, others try to find humour in it. The multiple changes on Twitter, one after the other, has managed to garner one such diverse set of reactions from Twitter users.
The changes introduced by Twitter did not go well with many users who took to the platform to show their outrage.
Many others resorted to poking fun at the revamped Twitter while reminiscing the older simpler version of the platform.
