Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Twitter Twitches, published by Zvi on July 4, 2023 on LessWrong.

The situation is evolving rapidly. Here’s where we stand as of the morning of July 4th.

Well You See What Happened Was.

Oh no! To be clear, by twitches, I mean ‘Elon refused to pay the cloud bill.’

As a result, Twitter has been forced to rate limit users.

This started out as 600 posts per day for most accounts, 300 posts per day for new accounts and 6,000 posts per day for those who pay.

This is now up to 1k/500/10k according to one Musk tweet.

If you are not logged in, you get nothing. Even direct links will break.

Tweetdeck has been forced into a new worse version, but now works again. In 30 days, this will be for paid accounts only, which seems fair.

That fourth one hurts my process. Navigation is somewhat slower and more annoying. In particular, forced threading breaks chronological order assumptions and one’s ability to use duplication to locate one’s place, and zooming in to move around twisting Twitter threads is so bad you need to jump to Twitter itself. Navigation to zoom back requires clicking in annoying places. I was unable to configure the column order without deleting them all and then creating them again, although this was quick. Column width and monitor real estate use is screwed up in subtle ways. Oh, and now its settings are linked to Twitter’s even though I want them to be different. Sheesh.

Another little thing is that the tab icon is now identical to Twitter’s. So annoying.

This is still vastly better than the period where Tweetdeck stopped working.

The third is brutal for some of my readers. Many report they can’t view any links.

What to do, if this doesn’t end soon?

The Plan

Three parts: How I will deal with processing info, how I will change how I present info, and how you can adjust to the new situation.

The efficiency hit on my end is unavoidable. I’ll make three adjustments.

I’ll check Twitter less often, rely more on other sources.

I’ll raise the bar somewhat for what is worth including or investigating.

I’ll shift some people from lists to follows and eliminate duplicates.

The inability for viewers to see Twitter links means moving away from them.

I’ll more often quote more of the relevant Twitter threads.

I’ll link directly to the primary source first whenever possible.

If you don’t have a Twitter account, you have a choice to make.

Having an account with zero connections fixes links. Consider that.

If you simply can’t do that responsibly, so be it, and I’ll write the posts such that this does not cause any showstopper issues.

Most of you almost never clicked the links anyway.

What I will not do is join BlueSky or another Twitter alternative. We are still far from where that would make sense.

Also, clarifying some policies on how Twitter threads work here.

I will silently correct capitalization and spelling and other obvious errors.

I will reformat as makes sense for the new context, again silently, if the words themselves need to change I will use [brackets].

I use your real name if I know it, your handle if that’s all I have.

I will use judgment on ordering and when to provide detail on structure.

For a quote tweet, I use the order that seems right to me – sometimes the intention is that the reader will see the quoted tweet only after, despite it happening earlier in time.

For multiple different replies, I will make that clear if it is ambiguous.

A link generally indicates a new thread of some kind.

Oh No, That’s Not the Reason, Except It Is

This Maggie Johnson-Pint thread offers a cool explanation of what else might have caused this situation, written before we knew the answer.

Twitter owner Musk explains, with a different justification than the real one:

Twitter Daily News: NEWS: Twitter’s web version no longer allows users to browse without logging in. All urls redirec...