Twitter’s CEO, Elon Musk, has made a strange move today by reducing how users can view tweets. On Saturday, Musk limited how many posts users could see daily.
Verified users can now only see 6,000 posts daily; unverified accounts can see 600 posts daily, and new unverified posts can see 300 posts daily. He later tweeted that rate limits would increase to 8,000, 800, and 400, respectively.
Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified https://t.co/fuRcJLifTn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
The CEO says that this was due to data scraping and system manipulation. True or not, this will likely cause many to leave the platform.
Earlier Saturday, many were complaining that the service had an outage, but in reality, they had already exceeded their limit for the day. So if you’ve seen either a “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets” error message, you now know you’re past the daily limit.
Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.
What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023
Musk has also recently made another huge change to Twitter by preventing users not logged into the platform from viewing tweets. Now, if you want to read tweets, you’ll need to be logged into the service.
Before this, users could see public tweets and user profiles without commenting or leaving likes.
A Bluesky rumour suggests that this move may come as a result of Google and Twitter’s negotiations over cloud hosting, as reported by Platformer earlier this month.
