Yarrr! Avast ye! Hear me tale o' Twitter's plight. What be these rate limits and when shall they depart?
2023-07-03
Avast ye, ye landlubber! Be ye havin' trouble wit' this Twitter contraption? Brace yerself, for behold! Here be a tale o' all the blunders committed by that scallywag Elon Musk.
The saga of Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition has been long, arduous, and frankly a bit wild. The eccentric billionaire has been shaking things up at the social media platform, from scrapping legacy blue checkmarks to raising the character limit to 10,000. However, the latest development could be the final nail in the coffin for Twitter. Musk announced that users would be limited to viewing a set number of posts. Verified users will be allowed to see 6,000 tweets per day, while unverified users get just 600. New accounts that aren’t verified will get to view just 300 posts per day.Since Musk delivered this news in a tweet, it’s fairly unclear as to what actually constitutes a ‘view’ or a ‘post’. Replies appear to count towards the limit, but ads might not. Musk was quick to raise the limits to 10,000 for verified and 1,000 for unverified users, but the new rules are enough to severely hobble the user experience for anyone not willing to shell out for a Twitter Blue subscription.
Musk claims that the new limits are to deal with “extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”, but there could be a more direct cause behind the scenes. Musk fired a large portion of Twitter's workforce and stopped paying for a number of services used by the social media giant, including rent on some of its physical offices. Twitter relies on Google’s platform for a great deal, and some are claiming that the relationship breakdown between Musk and Google is the cause for Twitter’s current instability.
Confidence in Twitter is at an all-time low, and it’s not entirely due to the things Musk has actually done. During his short stint as CEO, Musk built something of a reputation for planning but not actually implementing new features. As for what users should be doing next, there is no real alternative yet. Meta has a rival app in the works, but it’s not available yet, and decentralized social network Mastodon has largely failed to capture the hearts and minds of Twitter refugees. Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky app is a potential contender, but the platform is currently invite-only. What happens next is anyone’s guess.