Musk says Twitter limits the number of posts users can read
Elon Musk said Saturday that Twitter will temporarily limit the number of posts users can read per day to address concerns about data scraping, just hours after thousands of users reported widespread issues using the site.
Many of those users reported getting an error that they had “exceeded” their “speed limit,” suggesting they had broken Twitter’s rules and downloaded and viewed too many tweets.
Mister Musk, who said on Friday that “several hundred organizations” used Twitter’s data in a process called scraping that “it affected the real user experience,” didn’t say how long the limits would last or what might lead him to lift the restriction .
He originally said verified accounts would be limited to reading 6,000 messages per day, unauthenticated accounts to 600 messages, and new unauthenticated accounts to 300 messages.
About two hours later, he raised those limits to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified, and 400 for newly unverified — before raising them again to 10,000, 1,000, and 500 early Saturday night.
“Rate capped due to reading all rate cap posts,” Mr. Musk said on Twitter.
The billionaire has spoken out about his aversion to organizations scrapping Twitter and using tweets for research or to train artificial intelligence programs.
But Saturday’s change left some users frustrated on the platform, with many wondering why their online activities would be so drastically restricted.
The phrase “speed limit exceeded” was trending on Twitter and spawned memes on the site about people being affected by the new policy. Downdetector, a website that tracks reports of outages across various websites, showed that user reports of Twitter issues surged on Saturday.
Other users had more pragmatic concerns, including how the daily limits might affect how people track bad weather on the platform, which often means scrolling through dozens of updates, alerts, and alerts.
“This Twitter change today is a total dumpster fire,” said James Spann, an Alabama meteorologist, said on Twitter. “Unless something changes, this platform is now pretty much useless to those of us in the weather business.”
An email to Twitter’s communications department requesting comment was returned with a poop emoji.
Since Mr. Musk’s acquisition in October and his moves to eliminate more than 75 percent of the company’s workforce, Twitter has become less stable, with features or the entire site sometimes going down without explanation.
On Saturday, engineers at the company raced to diagnose the problem in private Slack channels, according to two employees. Those people said Twitter sellers asked what to tell their ad customers when they realized some ads weren’t showing on the social network.
Twitter’s US ad revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 percent from a year earlier, according to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times.
The company regularly underperformed weekly U.S. sales forecasts, sometimes by as much as 30 percent, the document said.
The frantic changes at Twitter have continued to motivate some users to try other similar social media sites, such as Mastodon, which aims to be a “viable alternative to Twitter,” and Bluesky, a social network that offers many of the same core features that Twitter does.
Bluesky is currently invite-only, but on Saturday, the name of the company was trending on Twitter.
One Twitter user seemed to have had enough on Saturday, writing, “I need some Bluesky code like that, man.”