 Well guys, the bird had a good run but now it looks like Twitter has officially become a walled garden. The only way that you can even view tweets on Twitter right now is by creating an account on the site which means you've got to give them your email and your phone number. Anytime you go to Twitter, even if you're following a direct link to a tweet, you're going to end up on this page telling you to sign in or create that account assuming that you aren't signed into Twitter in your browser or within an app on your phone already. So this is a complete 180 from the openness that Elon was promising when he first took over the platform. As some of you may remember, Elon was basically presenting himself as the new benevolent owner of Twitter. We thought that the censorship was going to be over because he was saying that he wanted the platform to adhere to free speech principles and he even said that that was necessary since Twitter serves as the de facto public town square and it makes a lot of sense to see Twitter that way in our always connected digital world. Sending out a tweet does a whole lot more in 2023 than standing on a soapbox near the corner of a busy intersection and screaming at the top of your lungs. But requiring someone to sign into the town square just so that they can hear someone speak in the town square is not at all the functionality of a town square. That's more like a concert or going to see Ben Shapiro dunk on the libs at your college campus. You've got to present your student ID in order to get into that event. I can understand making people sign in if they want to post something, I mean that isn't technically required either. Twitter could easily have anonymous posting like 4chan does. But that's the model that most social media platforms have decided to go with. So whatever. Make people create an account if they want to post stuff to the site. But forcing logins just to see content really doesn't make any sense unless you plan to paywall your content which we're going to talk about in a moment. But if the content is free and it's only accessible when you log in then I think that the reach of your content is going to be severely diminished. I can't tell you how many websites I have personally clicked off of because they required me to create an account in order to use them. The only little bit of credit that I can give twitter here is at least they aren't teasing you with content like at least they didn't design it like so many of the e-commerce sites that I've seen where they'll let you add a product to your cart and then when you go to checkout they're telling you to make an account in order to complete that purchase. Or like those sites that host PNG images and then they want you to log in like create an account and then log in just to download an image. I feel like there's a special place in hell for the people that make those sites. So at least twitter isn't being a tease here but still this goes against everything that Elon said twitter would represent even just now he made this tweet saying that comedy is legal on the platform. You know pretending that it's going to be a free speech platform but right now it seems like twitter is even more locked down than tiktok. How ironic Now if we actually take a look at his tweet timeline here we can get an idea of why these force logins are being required or at least this is one of the excuses that Elon seems to be going with since it's something he retweeted from a parody account. The reason I set a view limit is because we are all twitter addicts and we need to go outside. I'm doing a good deed for the world here and that's another view that you just used. Now the real reason for forcing these logins is so that he can make it easier to enforce rate limits on twitter. Now rate limits are a pretty straightforward concept. They limit the rate at which a user is able to have some sort of interaction with your site. Usually this is to prevent DDoS attacks and things of that nature but the reason that Elon stated for the rate limits a little bit higher up is to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation. Now to put the data scraping thing in context when you just want to get a specific piece of information from a website like the current price of Monero from CoinGecko it's best for you to do this using an application programming interface because a well-written API is going to let you just request this really small piece of data that you know only makes up a few bytes worth of information and nothing else. Which is good for the end user of course because this is going to be faster and it's going to have less overhead than scraping the whole page and it saves CoinGecko bandwidth and service drain because now they don't have to serve me up this entire web page they can just send me the few bytes that that string represents. Well Twitter of course put their API behind a paywall at the beginning of February which means services like Nitter and accounts on Instagram and Reddit that just repost stuff from Twitter or any program that anyone made to try to gather data from Twitter via its API then had to pay up in order to keep running or they had to resort to web scraping which is when we make a request for this entire page and then we start digging down into the HTML of the site so that we find just like whatever row Monero is on and then we're going to go into the divs so that we can find just the price of Monero and you wouldn't really do this manually if you were web scraping you would write a program to use this you would utilize libraries like beautiful soup to parse the HTML and yeah you would just be extracting that specific piece of data out of this cell but in order to do that you have to request this entire web page which if we go to the networking tab and we reload the page you can see all the information that is transferring 1.2 megabytes transferred so that's a whole lot more than uh you know obviously loading all of and it didn't even really load the page it loaded this error page uh but you get the idea like if we look at uh the network tab again and it doesn't even matter if it actually loads it but you can see the majority of what's being loaded on a website and I'm just using coin gecko as an example I mean this is true for basically any website um most of what's being loaded is javascript and like style sheets and like little um logos and stuff like webp images all of this is garbage if the only thing that you actually care about is the current price of Monero so the only way to effectively prevent that kind of scraping going on on Twitter is to do what Twitter did make it so that you can't even browse the site anonymously and then apply rate limiting to people's accounts that way it doesn't matter if you sign into your account on another device or if you change your IP the rate limit is always going to apply and of course the rate limits are much higher you know you'll be able to view a lot more content if you purchase Twitter blue or whatever it's called to get your account verified which is really what I think this is all about I mean I agree with the parody accounts notion that a lot of people are addicted to Twitter and so putting the content behind a soft paywall might make them go outside in theory um but I think what this really is is Elon's way of trying to squeeze more profit out of the people that are addicted and it's not a coincidence that most of the big social media platforms are making these similar moves all at once like Reddit straight-up copy Twitter with the API paywall and YouTube is testing out this three strikes policy against people that are blocking ads although I don't think that the engineers over at YouTube thought this through as much as the Twitter engineers because you don't need to be signed in to YouTube to watch YouTube videos so there's not really anything to ban if you browse YouTube anonymously besides I guess your IP but that can just be changed with a VPN something that everyone and their mother has these days and I've also heard a rumor like I haven't tested this for myself but I've heard rumors that if you have an IP address that says you're in Russia and you watch YouTube right now you just won't see any ads at all because I guess every company that buys ads on YouTube has already sanctioned Russia I wonder if that also works for Iranian IPs and other countries that the US sanctions the crap out of but anyway Elon is claiming that despite the rate limits you know despite blocking the lurkers from Twitter and from viewing his tweets and other people's tweets that this specific tweet right here has achieved a record view count and assuming that this is true and not just copium it will probably give Elon the confidence that he needs to actually stick with this decision of locking Twitter down more than it has ever been personally I can't see too many people actually buying into this you know Twitter blue cost about the same as much as a standard Netflix subscription and I can still see a lot of people going over their verified rate limits if literally every single tweet and every single comment is considered one post that you viewed then most people can probably hit their verified daily limit during a six hour flight or six hours of downtime you know whether you're you're on a subway or you're I don't know waiting in line to serve someone coffee or waiting in line to get your coffee you know whatever I think a lot of Twitter addicts might buy into this at first after they use up the free limit in like 10 minutes but if they still aren't getting that fix with the verified account I think they're just going to switch to another site to consume content and once that starts happening once a site starts losing a bunch of users which has been happening at least amongst US users on Twitter since the beginning of this year then the people who actually post the content here that makes the site interesting are going to end up going somewhere else so that their content gets looked at and at that point the site is dead but what are your guys thoughts do you think that this move by Elon is going to actually make Twitter more profitable which is the real reason behind this move or do you think it's going to fail and maybe he'll just pull the plug on the rate limits you know pretend like it never happened in the old Elon Musk fashion let me know what you think in the comments below like and share this video to hack the algorithm and have a great rest of your day