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Twitter faces backlash over restricted tweet limits
Mumbai: According to experts, Twitter’s new reading paywall that restricts the number of daily tweets available to paying and non-paying users could harm the platform’s revenue and usage.
On Saturday, Twitter executive chair Elon Musk announced that Twitter Blue subscribers, or verified users, can read up to 6,000 tweets per day, whereas unverified users are restricted to 600 tweets per day. Newly created unverified accounts will be limited to 300 tweets per day. He said the idea is to prevent “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”.
In a follow-up tweet, Musk announced that the daily reading limits for Twitter Blue subscribers and unverified users would be raised to 8,000 and 800 tweets, respectively, and to 10,000 and 1,000 tweets in another tweet. Although data scraping has its advantages and disadvantages, limiting the number of post feeds may be excessive.
On Saturday, numerous users experienced error messages while trying to use Twitter, including “rate limit exceeded” and “cannot retrieve tweets.” Additionally, Twitter now requires users to sign in to access tweets, user profiles, and comments.
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Leonid Radvinsky, the man who made OnlyFans a $5.5bn empire, dies at 43
The Ukrainian-American entrepreneur transformed a niche subscription site into a $5.5bn cultural force, then kept almost entirely out of sight
LONDON: He owned one of the most talked-about platforms on the internet and almost nobody knew his name. Leonid Radvinsky, the billionaire majority owner of OnlyFans, died on Monday after a prolonged battle with cancer. He was 43. The London-based company confirmed his death in a statement, saying he had “passed away peacefully.” His family has requested privacy.
Radvinsky was not OnlyFans’ founder. That distinction belongs to British entrepreneur Tim Stokely, who launched the subscription platform in 2016. But it was Radvinsky who turned it into a money machine. In 2018 he acquired Fenix International Ltd, OnlyFans’ parent company, becoming its director and majority shareholder. What he inherited was a modest content platform. What he left behind was a global phenomenon, valued at roughly $5.5bn including debt, according to a Reuters report in January citing talks with investment firm Architect Capital over a potential majority stake sale.
Born in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, Radvinsky moved to Chicago as a child and most recently lived in Florida. Long before OnlyFans, he had built businesses in the adult internet sector, including the live cam site MyFreeCams, and founded a venture capital firm focused on technology in 2009. He knew the terrain.
His masterstroke was timing, or rather, recognising what the pandemic would do. When Covid-19 lockdowns drove millions of people indoors and online in 2020, OnlyFans was ready. Creators poured onto the platform. Subscribers followed. The model, which allowed creators to charge users directly for content, much of it adult-oriented, became a template for the broader creator economy. OnlyFans did not merely survive the pandemic; it became one of its defining commercial stories.
Despite presiding over all of this, Radvinsky maintained a near-total public silence. He rarely gave interviews. His illness was never disclosed. OnlyFans said he had supported several philanthropic projects, including donations to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, open-source initiatives and the West Suburban Humane Society. A Wall Street Journal report noted that he and his wife supported a $23m grant programme for cancer research through a gastrointestinal research foundation in 2024, a detail that now carries a particular weight.
His death lands at an uncomfortable moment for the platform he shaped. OnlyFans faces growing scrutiny from regulators and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic, even as it continues to redefine how content creators make money online. The sale talks with Architect Capital add another layer of uncertainty. Radvinsky built something vast, then quietly stepped back from view. The question now is who steers it next, and whether anyone can do so with quite the same invisible grip.
