– What is really behind the Twitter change
The Twitter boss has limited the number of tweets per user and day. His justification – artificial intelligence – is only a pretext.
Adrian Created
Posted today at 12:38 p.m
Elon Musk wants to ban blue ticks, so he introduces a post limit on Twitter.
Photo: Michel Euler (Keystone)
On Saturday, Twitter was suddenly closed. Only the layout was visible. The boss personally ordered it. Now you have to imagine Elon Musk as a mixture of Gyro Gearloose and Karlo the Cat from the Disney comics. Every now and then a lightbulb will appear over his head. Then he sends his little helpers to the workbench, and already (screw, fiddle, hammer) a rocket lands upside down, a car drives through the desert as if by magic, or all houses get a nice battery so that the solar power doesn’t go flat.
But sometimes Elon Musk looks really mean and chews on a stump. Then he thinks about who should really get a smack in the face, buys Twitter, insults people there who already have it hard enough in life, or he arranges to meet Mark Zuckerberg for a cage fight in the Coliseum. Which probably wasn’t a good idea because Mark Zuckerberg looks like he’s working out his many troubles at CrossFit. (Read also: Male Fitness Craze: Pump up the Volume.)
AI is just pretense
On Saturday it was time again. A lightbulb appeared over Elon Musk’s head, he chewed on his cheroot for a bit, and before long (screw, mean, hammer) his Twitter account was no longer accessible. The explanation was found in a tweet from him, in which he told the world on Saturday morning around 10 a.m. EST (he likes to watch “Cocomelon” videos with his son X on Saturday mornings) that it’s over now Paramour of data mining and system manipulation.
This obviously meant the artificial intelligences that have been greedily scouring the internet for some time so that they know what’s going on in the world. It could be the books that Google lugged in crates from the library to its scanner rooms a few years ago, all the free information services, or the social networks. Musk wrote down the new rules right away. If you have a new, unverified account, you can only see 300 posts a day, existing customers without a subscription with the blue tick can see 600 posts, and anyone who pays just under ten euros a month for them can see 6,000 entries. (More on Elon Musk: The Twitter boss apparently takes ketamine for depression.)
Tricks have never been his forte, so it was very obvious on Saturday that there was once again a villain behind the artificial intelligences. It was similar to how the bargain hunters from Springer-Verlag recently wanted to blame their dismissal massacre on the AI or the two New York lawyers their bungling on Chat-GPT. It is now impossible to say with certainty that Elon Musk knows what a pusher column is. In pre-digital times, these were packs of mostly young men who went from door to door and used all sorts of unfair methods, including open threats, to sell magazine subscriptions, electricity contracts or memberships in charities.
So now Musk is pushing his way into the digital living room and wants to shy away from blue ticks. He has reason enough. Despite reporting $4.4 billion in annual revenue in 2022, Twitter has never been profitable since its inception in March 2006. Ever since Musk bought the service and made it his personal mess, advertisers have been running away from him. But they still account for 90 percent of income. So far, the subscription model for the blue ticks was one of the few ideas he had for making money in some other way.
Ever since they cost money, nobody wants the blue ticks anymore.
The bill won’t quite add up. Since they cost money, nobody wants the blue ticks anymore. Originally they were only given to people who were famous or otherwise important. Superstars, scientists and newspapers, for example, so that the Twitterati could be sure that a troll farm was not hiding behind the name. Since April 1st you have to pay for it. As a result, the troll farms bought heaps of such blue ticks and even caused stock prices to collapse.
The long-established Behakten, on the other hand, usually refused to pay, although it wasn’t about the money for them, it was about the fact that the status ticks had turned into digital suitors. Apparently whoever has it pays. A few celebrities got them without wanting them, such as Stephen King, William Shatner and LeBron James. There were a few more as long as they only had at least seven-digit followers. Some complained. They didn’t want the tine.
Will Musk lift the restriction again?
But if you want to continue using Twitter, for example as a journalist, because the short message service is still an important source of news, you will inevitably have to buy a ribbon like this. Even if the bill still doesn’t add up. Because even 6,000 posts in the whirlpool of a news feed are as if someone had connected the computer to one of those dial-up modems that sucked the Internet drop by drop from the telephone cable in the 20th century with a lot of squeaking.
It is quite possible that Musk will immediately call off his push action. In Silicon Valley, this is called “rapid prototyping” or “real word beta testing”. You can’t do that in other industries because of rockets exploding, cars crashing into walls, or batteries bursting into flames (yes, yes, Musk has done it all, but all within error rates they can only dream of in the digital world ).
On the other hand, one can only hope that his brakes on the artificial intelligence really work, even if they are only an excuse. I can’t imagine what will happen if Chat-GPT continues to study Twitter this weekend and realizes that it doesn’t even have a business model yet. Maybe people should be put under quite different pressure after all, the AI could consider. Not just throttle digital access, there are still a few other basic services that are connected to the Internet. Everything else can be found in the countless sci-fi books and movie descriptions that the AI has read. And in the manuals of the troll farms.
Too many Nazis, mobsters, know-it-alls
But it’s not as if nobody will benefit from the fact that Elon Musk has throttled the 14th largest short message service in the world. The advertising industry should be happy, although they didn’t get much sales on Twitter, but because the service sets the tone in the western world, the inflated prices had to be swallowed.
Secretly, after Musk’s takeover eight months ago, the advertising industry soon had enough of the stag booth. Too many Nazis, mobsters, know-it-alls. Then came the waves of layoffs, in which all those who are considered systemically important employees in the digital space had to leave. Security specialists, analysts, engineers, programmers. Twitter has long been a half-burned-out spaceship that only races through space because at some point a thrust determined the trajectory and most of the screws are still holding.
Twitter employees learned via email in November 2022 that they had been fired.
Photo: Jeff Chiu (AP Photo)
The competition is already there. Meta is preparing a Twitter-like short message service. Think what you will of Zuckerberg, but his membership numbers for Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram are still the world‘s largest.
Yes, and then there’s Blue Sky, the new network from paid-up Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. So far it has been very difficult to get in, which is why a Blue Sky address is currently about as popular as a Birkin bag or a Rolex Daytona, and not only in digital circles. Sometime shortly after his presumed lunch in California, Dorsey tweeted a photo of nothing but green grass without comment. Not a very subtle reference to the saying about the grass always being greener on the other side of the fence, but definitely a lot friendlier than the one-man pushers from San Francisco.
Musk’s reply a few minutes later: “The maximum rates will soon increase to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified.” Very rapid prototyping.
Twitter and Elon Musk buzz
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