Elon loves burning equity. TechCrunch: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/07/01
In other news since yesterday [Wayback/Archive] Twitter now requires an account to view tweets | TechCrunch
Like many of Twitter’s recent changes, this could easily backfire. If tweets aren’t publicly accessible, search engine algorithms could rank the site’s content lower, meaning that fewer people would be directed to the site from Google.
This not only hampers SEO, but any anonymous access to tweets resulting in Twitter to have become a walled garden without any prior announcement.
As of yesterday, this for instance makes it way harder for researchers to access Twitter in a non-biased way (the Twitter Algorithm will always bias the timeline for an account). It also prohibits the Wayback Machine from archiving Tweets (which I rightnow cannot archive):
Twitter is now more restricted than LinkedIn or Facebook, so I think it is a next step of burning the Twitter Equity to the ground followed after many other steps scaring Twitter users away, for instance as of:
- 2 months ago [Wayback/Archive] Twitter search is now only available to registered users | Mashable
- 3 months ago [Wayback/Archive] Twitter’s new API pricing is killing off many Twitter apps | Mashable
- 5 months ago [Wayback/Archive] The third-party apps Twitter just killed made the site what it is today – The Verge
If three or more is a pattern, than these changes always occur towards the end of a month.
Via: [Wayback/Archive] Kate-Madonna Hindes on Twitter: “Well, that’s the final nail. Twitter is meaningless to SEO now. Your tweets remain in the Twitter-verse and have NO viewability outside the platform. I don’t understand shooting your own platform to death.”
The above Wayback link indicates Twitter responds with a HTTP 404 to them when not authenticated, although others seem to get different HTTP responses:
- HTTP 302 looping to itself: [Wayback/Archive] Trace Results | WhereGoes
- HTTP 403: [Wayback/Archive] Redirect Checker Result
So all in all Twitter is returning different HTTP codes depending on the places where it being accessed from. To me that feels it is even more broken than at first sight.
Edit: the $44 billion does not evaporate fast enough, so Elon went in overdrive [Wayback/Archive] Fz98TTRakAML_a6 (732×900)
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675187969420828672
[Wayback/Archive]
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day
Some people even were happy:
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
Leave a comment