I don't believe Twitter will actually have a view limit

NFL fans shouldn't have anything to worry about when the season starts: Seaside Joe 1583

Seahawks report to training camp in: 23 days

It’s been three years since I counted myself among the Twitter “users” (important phrasing to note—we call people who tweet, “users”) and I don’t think that I’ve read 1,000 tweets in any day since quitting the platform. Prior to then, I was probably over at least 10,000 tweet views per day, which sounds like a lot but isn’t once you consider that the vast majority of your favorite NFL writers, podcasters, analysts, and personalities of any sort are usually on Twitter from the moment they wake up until just before they fall asleep.

And that is why Twitter impacts your daily life as a football fan whether you use it or not.

“I don’t use Twitter, I’ve never used Twitter, I wouldn’t even know where to begin!” That may be true, and if it is, I think you’re one of the coolest people I know! But you also know who Adam Schefter and Ian Rapoport are and it’s not because they’re such charming TV personalities.

Schefter and Rapoport would not be anything in the NFL world if it wasn’t for Twitter. For the better part of a decade, when breaking news about the league goes from the event horizon through certain channels until reaching you, whether that was directly on Twitter or not, the majority of those stories probably started with a tweet by one of those two people.

What’s going to happen when the NFL season starts and news breaks at 6:15 PM, after most users have hit their daily limits of tweets read and can’t find out right away that a player was traded, cut, placed on IR, or quitting football in the middle of a game because he’s Antonio Brown?

Over the weekend, Twitter’s Elon Musk announced a temporary restriction on the number of tweets that non-paying users can read per day, first saying that it was 600, then 800, and now it currently sits at 1,000. Paying users can read ten times as many tweets for $8 per month. Musk’s initial announcement tweet has been viewed over 500 million times, a record for the website, according to him.

This has caused a frenzy—”Oh my God, why is Twitter the worst website in history!!!”-tweeted the users on “the worst website in history” without being able to comprehend the irony—and is causing people to once again falsely claim that they’re leaving Twitter for good. They aren’t.

What’s going to happen then when the Seattle Seahawks are playing football games during the season and tens of thousands, if not millions of total NFL fans are locked out of the website because they hit their limits that day? What about when the Seahawks or any NFL team is playing on Sunday Night Football, after people have already been locked into their phones for the last eight hours straight following fantasy updates, injuries, scores, news, highlights, and anything else related to the game? What about when the next NFL draft hits? Or free agency? Or any trades? Final cuts?

Well, I don’t believe that the restrictions are really going to be in place for long. Here are a few reasons why I think Elon Musk is not actually going to follow up with this claim, though I believe that might be obvious to those of us who aren’t addicted to that website:

He upped the limit two times in under 5 hours

Musk tweeted at 10:01 AM on Saturday that there was a temporary limit of 600, then followed up at 11:46 that it was 800, then updated that again at 2:49 to 1,000. In the past ten months, we’ve seen Musk tweet out many upcoming “changes” to Twitter that were never implemented. I’m sure that sometimes that’s because he’s seeing what the reaction and response to potential changes would be—using the entire userbase as a focus group—before actually acting on it. Which, in this case, would clearly show that the focus group is not able to focus on anything else and doesn’t want a limit…which is good for Twitter.

“I HATE this website and the person who runs it!”

We’re implementing restrictions to how much you use this website.

I know most people believe this is simply a tactic to get more people to sign up for Twitter verification, and it may be slightly related to that, but I think the main reason is actually simpler than that.

Twitter is the news now

Over 500 million views for that initial tweet! At least, according to Twitter. At least once a month now, Twitter is the biggest headline in the news because of some “crazy change announced by Elon Musk”. Whether it was removing Twitter verification (which did eventually happen, but only after several false starts and since it happened there isn’t any noticeable difference to the site or paid subscribers) or partnerships with controversial figures or something else, the website is getting free brand awareness advertising from mainstream media simply because of one tweet that strikes a chord with millions of users.

Even if by the next tweet, Elon Musk has changed his mind.

When Coke or McDonald’s puts their logo on a building or buys ad space on a website, it’s not to get you to buy the product right then and there. It’s to make sure you’re always aware of the brand. When Spotify pays $200 million for a podcast host, it’s not just to get people to subscribe so they can listen to that particular podcast. It’s so that you read the news and then become aware of the fact that there’s this music app called “Spotify” and they also have podcasts.

This week’s news about Twitter is classic “the sky is falling” panic to create awareness about the website and similar to when New Coke replaced regular Coke, getting consumers to scream outloud, “No! I NEED this and you CAN’T take it away!”

Come back to me in August and tell me that Twitter didn’t make the news again within a month for some other panic-inducing claim that everyone said would be “the final nail in the coffin” for the website. We’ve had about 15 “final nails” in this Twitter coffin in the last year—if it ain’t shut by now, it ain’t shutting.

There’s nothing big happening right now

The NFL news cycle is at its usual standstill between the draft and training camp and the start of the season. The NBA has completed its draft and the bulk of free agency, as far as I know, and won’t get going again until October. Baseball is…well, I don’t know, I don’t see many people tweeting about baseball.

That’s only the sports world, I know, but if Twitter was trying to create an actual panic that could hurt the website they’d do so during the NFL season or amid their big “key date” spikes for an election season or at almost any other time than right now.

The timing of this announcement is convenient. If you stop to think about when this restriction would actually worry you—like say when the Seahawks are playing on Monday Night Football and you want to track the game through Twitter, so you make sure to not open the app until 5 PM at the earliest—then you would realize there’s nothing to worry about. I feel confident that well before that time gets here, there won’t be a meaningful (or any) restriction on number of tweets you can view.

It just doesn’t make sense.

It just doesn’t make sense

It’s a contradiction of intentions for Twitter to implement changes like tweet view counts (within the last few months, Twitter made “view counts” visible for each tweet, but removed “video view counts” for videos, seemingly so people could brag about how many people viewed their tweets) and then to limit the number of views your tweet could get with a change a few months later.

People like Schefter, Rapoport, Dan Orlovsky, Jordan Schultz, etc. etc. etc. etc., they are OBSESSED with their popularity on Twitter. People obsessed with their popularity on Twitter are responsible for creating Twitter’s content. What’s going to happen when something important happens late at night and their views and reach are throttled by the website because 80% of their most-addicted followers already reached their limit?

I immediately think back to one of the worst nights in Twitter history, in early January when Damar Hamlin nearly lost his life on Monday Night Football, and I saw user after user try to exploit that moment for their own personal gain. “How can I come up with the best tweet about this guy that might have died in front of us?”

I was trying to find any tweet updating people on Hamlin’s actual status and instead my timeline was flooded with tweets saying, “Y’all, now is not the time to tweet.”

It would be great to limit the number of times that a person can tweet instead of the number of tweets that a person can read, then that might have made that night more palatable. But imagine the next time that you want to get actually important information on breaking news, perhaps something that happens on live TV like a football game, and what you get on Twitter is: “Bullshit” “Bullshit” “Bullshit” “Bullshit”—”Sorry, you’ve reached your limit.”

That will also mean that by the time there might actually be a tweet worth reading with actual information, that so many people have hit their limits that the obsessed-ones are reaching only a small fraction of their followers.

Then the obsessed-ones, maybe they’ll finally make their way to another website that isn’t throttling their view counts for reasons outside of their control. As we’ve seen in the past with Friendster, MySpace, Vine, and plenty of other examples I’m sure, social media websites fail when they place restrictions and limits on their content creators and force them to go elsewhere to “break free”. This could be what’s currently happening to TikTok and Twitch, as some are speculating.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m supportive of Twitter becoming a failed social media website. I just don’t believe, like some do, that Musk is intentionally blowing it up. He may unintentionally fail, but I think the goal has always been to turn Twitter into a trillion dollar business and the only way that could happen is by maintaining a user base over 350 million people and growing.

Throttling their ability to use the website, especially for key moments that bring people to “the public square” to have a shared experience for things like football games, would do the opposite.

I don’t think it will happen.

But if it does, what can you do?

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Please feel free to share your thoughts on Twitter and NFL media, that sort of thing, because I know that I’ve opened the door to talk about something only adjacent to the Seahawks today. But the “no-politics” rule still applies and will always apply. That’s not for this website.