Twitter users who read too many tweets risk having their feeds cut off now. And you can thank Elon Musk for that.
On Saturday, the Twitter owner tweeted that throughput limits would be temporarily imposed on users, which means a restriction on the number of tweets you can read per day. To justify this new measure, Elon Musk blamed the “data scraping” and manipulation of the system by bots and external services that seize huge amounts of Twitter data for their own purposes.
But confusion quickly set in, as Musk kept changing the configuration of these limits. In his first tweet of saturdayhe said verified accounts could only read 6,000 messages per day, unverified accounts 600 per day, and new unverified accounts 300 per day.
How does the company determine if a tweet is read?
A verified account is an account that pays $8 per month or $84 per year for a Twitter Blue subscription, while unverified accounts are those that use Twitter for free.
But later that day, Musk changed these numbers tweeting that verified accounts could read 8,000 tweets per day, unverified accounts 800 per day, and new unverified accounts 400 per day.
In a third tweet on the same daythe CEO of Twitter said the limits would be 10,000 tweets per day for verified users, 1,000 tweets per day for unverified users and 500 tweets per day for new unverified users.
Many Twitter users have also started asking questions, such as: how does the company determine if a tweet is read, how can we track how many tweets we read, what is considered a new, unverified account, and how long will these temporary limits remain in effect?
The question of large-scale data scraping
“Elon, if I close my eyes and skip over some tweets, will they count towards my 6,000 tweets? asked a user. “Can we have a counter that shows how many videos we’ve watched? asked another.
Faced with these new temporary limits, many Twitter users began complaining about not being able to use the service to read tweets, posting screenshots that read: “Throughput limit exceeded.” The downtime led to many complaining about a Twitter outage on Saturday, as reported by sites such as DownDetector.
Before the announcement of the new limits, Mr. Musk had already raised concerns about the massive data harvesting on Twitter by third parties. In a tweet from friday, he said that several hundred organizations were aggressively harvesting data from Twitter to the point of affecting the user experience. Asked what Twitter should do to stop this, he said he was open to ideas.
Twitter is DDOSing itself
Musk’s criticisms of data scraping focus on AI companies like OpenAI that capture massive amounts of data from sites like Twitter to train their chatbots. “Almost every company that does AI, from startups to the biggest corporations, collects large amounts of data,” Musk said in another tweet from friday. “It’s infuriating to have to urgently bring a large number of servers online just to help the outrageous activity of an AI startup.”
But these limits can trigger other problems that make users unhappy. On Saturday, a developer named Sheldon Chang posted a message on Mastodon claiming that Twitter was DDOSing itself, i.e. sending Distributed Denial of Service signals to its own website, thus preventing it from respond to legitimate traffic. And Chang attributed the DDOS to the new limitations.
“Twitter sends about 10 requests per second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest awesome innovation is to stop people reading Twitter without logging in,” Mr. Chang. “It probably created hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned.”
Source: “ZDNet.com”