Twitter 'limits' the number of tweets viewed by users and its a "GREAT" move
What was your reaction when you saw this tweet:
Mine was something like this.
“That’s just outrageous?! Why should we be limited to the number of tweets we see per day? Won’t that be counter-intuitive for any company to hard limit a product usage? Does Elon Musk surely know how to run Twitter?”
Well I am sure its the same for many of us, because we were not expecting something like this at all.
But let’s look at the timeline of why this is happening with Twitter, and dissect whether this is a strategically a good call or not!
Main reason behind this
Twitter data is being scraped
That’s the main cause behind all of this.
In simple terms, data scraping is a process where you pull large amounts of information from a website and you use them to collect business intelligence. And Twitter data can be easily used for brand monitoring, sentiment analysis, consumer research etc.
Is data scraping legal?
Well its somewhere in the ‘gray area’ so anyone who is scraping data can easily get away from it.
As we can understand from this article from understandingdata.com,
“Scraping publicly accessible data is generally legal and permitted so long as you obey the robots.txt file.
Twitter’s terms forbid non-permitted web scraping; “scraping the Services without the prior consent of Twitter is expressly prohibited,” but breaking these terms is a civil matter, so it isn’t illegal.”
And guess what, scraping is not allowed as per Twitter’s T&C:
Impact on Twitter
There are several reasons behind Twitter decision to try to prevent data scraping. Lets look at them below:
#1 User Privacy
It is highly likely that those who engage in data scraping will also mine the personal data of users, and this easily compromises the privacy of user’s data because its done without consent.
#2 GDPR
Data scraping can easily invoke GDPR because these sites have the ability to mine PII (Personally Identifiable Information) such as names, phone numbers, addresses, dates of birth etc.
#3 Competition taking advantage
Think about it. If you want to start a company that requires you to create a LLM (large language model), but this in turn requires you to train the model with data. Where do you go? You can go through legitimate ways to get the data through APIs however its expensive. The other way is through data scraping.
So after these new companies create their product, they enter the market with a immense competitive advantage, but Twitter does not benefit from this.
#4 Losing Potential API revenue
If there is a proper infrastructure in place to handle these data scrapers, think of the potential revenue increase that Twitter can gain.
#5 Promoting Twitter Blue
The only way you can get verified on Twitter is if you purchase Twitter blue subscription. And one of the advantages of this subscription is to see 10 times more number of posts per day when compared with a nonverified user.
Why is this a good move
Ads are the primary source through which Twitter is getting its revenue. So when you reduce the number of posts that a person can view, it in turn also reduces the number of ads that can be viewed.
More Tweets = More Ads = More Revenue
So do you think Elon didn’t know about this. Surely he does. He bought Twitter for 44Bn dollars!
Then it begs the question as to why did the CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk, take this decision? He has two options to decide on:
Option 1: Devise a proper solution to this, and rate limit the users for a indefinite period of time.
Option 2: Allow the competitors to train their AI models, and in turn gain a massive market share, with no benefits for twitter.
So surely Elon will chose the first option because that’s practical, and that’s what he did.
However does limiting the usage of twitter pushes people to move to threads? Definitely Not.
Only the power users of Twitter, people who spend a lot of time scrolling on the platform will feel the limitations of this decision, however the same will also push them into purchasing the Twitter Blue subscription. Why? because they are power users, and they have the cognitive motivation to do that.
However only time will tell what kind of solution Elon and his team is devising to handle this situation.
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