Elon Musk, the executive chairman of Twitter, has introduced temporary restrictions on the number of posts users can read per day due to increasing levels of data scraping and system manipulation. The move aims to combat these issues that have plagued the platform recently. Verified Twitter accounts will be limited to viewing 10,000 posts per day, while unverified and new accounts will have caps at 1,000 and 500 posts per day, respectively.
The implementation of these limits comes in response to user complaints about difficulties in accessing tweets, missing timelines, and encountering “rate limited exceeded” messages. As a result, hashtags such as #TwitterDown and #TwitterFail trended in various locations. Downdetector, a real-time outage monitor, recorded numerous reports of Twitter outages over the past 24 hours, particularly in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the East and West Coasts of the United States.
Although Elon Musk did not provide specific details regarding the cause of the data scraping and system manipulation, he expressed concerns about the extensive pillaging of Twitter’s data, which led to degraded service for users. Some experts speculate that web-browsing-enabled artificial intelligence chatbots, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, may be responsible for the excessive data scraping.
Rate limits are imposed by Twitter to manage the volume of requests made to its Application Programming Interface (API), ensuring the reliability and scalability of its API for developers. While these limitations aim to protect the platform from abuse, they can also hinder user experience. To address this issue, individuals have proposed enabling rate limit reads within decentralized applications (DEX) to allow users to trade their excess tweet-read balance for cryptocurrencies, with a 1% commission.
In unrelated news, outside of his role in Twitter, Elon Musk has been training for a potential mixed martial arts cage fight with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. This development brings a different aspect to his public persona as a technology entrepreneur.
In summary, Elon Musk’s decision to impose rate limits on Twitter is a response to the increasing instances of data scraping and system manipulation that have impacted user experience. By introducing these restrictions, Twitter aims to address these issues while ensuring the reliability of its platform. The implementation of rate limits will vary based on account verification status, allowing verified users to access more posts per day compared to unverified and new accounts.