Cheryl’s recent post for Medium on June’s rate limit “feature” release was promoted as a Staff Pick, sent out in several large-distribution Medium newsletters including Longreads, and met with some great discussion and discourse. In this piece, Cheryl breaks down the potentially unintended consequences of these restrictions and how they cut to the core of what made Twitter so special. She also uses the PICS framework from her book Design Beyond Devices to talk about how to evaluate decisions like this in the future. Read “Fail Limit Exceeded” on Medium.
“Either way, Twitter has successfully pivoted from the world’s town square to a tourist information kiosk at the mall. You can get a pamphlet or two, but you’ll have to pay for the tours. Temporary or not, the types of mental model shift this will cause are severe, and each day they are left in place will be another nail in Twitter’s premature coffin.Cheryl Platz, “Fail Limit Exceeded”, Medium July 1 2023
There was such wide interest that Katie Couric Media reached out and asked if her work could be reposted to Katie’s Wake-up Call newsletter with one million subscribers. Cheryl’s resulting piece, “Is this the End of Twitter?” was the lead article in Katie’s July 8 newsletter.
![A screenshot of Cheryl's Medium post as distributed to the Medium Longreads newsletter, with the title "Scroll Interrupted: Twitter Imposes User Rate Limits" and a custom piece of artwork.](https://www.cherylplatz.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/20230705_191122000_iOS.png)