It seemed strange that Twitter posted this update on its business blog until the company mentioned that rate limiting has had a “minimal” effect on advertising. Many pointed out that limiting the number of tweets users could read per day would make it harder for advertisers to reach users and for Twitter to make money.
…oh, ok.
And no, I don’t really buy their excuses.
I mean I find it mind boggling that people aren’t noticing yet, that Elon has basically pulled a bait and switch. Especially now that it is becoming even more obvious. Take a product that everyone is using, and degrade the free aspects of it to the point that the only way for people to be able to continue using it - is by paying for it.
His excuses are ludicrous, that he thinks that advance notice would let “bad actors” change the way they operate, as if those bad actors wouldn’t have just changed the way they operate as soon as it started being limited anyway.
Hell there is a thread floating around somewhere which shows that you can just reverse engineer the app and get the API key that way. The bots and “bad actors” will therefore continue, and legitimate users will be the only ones impacted.
Elon’s going to learn the hard way that destroying a free tier that has been available for years is the quickest and most effective way to suicide his product.
It’s not that people aren’t noticing, it’s that for most people Twitter is just not worth paying for. This is not a masterplan, it’s a stupid idea. He’s alienating advertisers and many of the free users whose eyeballs the advertisers were chasing, and he might not even make up for the lost money with that, nevermind pay for the debt he saddled the company with and make it profitable.