Elon Musk said on Saturday that Twitter would temporarily limit the number of posts users read per day to address concerns over data scraping, hours after thousands of users reported widespread problems using the site. gave information.
Many of those users reported that they were getting an error message that they had “exceeded” their “rate limit”, which suggests they had downloaded and viewed too many tweets and violated Twitter’s rules. .
mr musk who Said on Friday that “several hundred organizations” were taking Twitter’s data in a process called scraping and that “it was affecting the actual user experience”, it did not say how long the limits would be in place or whether they would be prompted to lift the ban. Could
They originally stated that verified accounts would be limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts to 600 posts and newly unverified accounts to 300 posts.
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 on Saturday evening.
“Rate limiting because of reading all the posts about rate limiting,” Mr Musk Said on Twitter.
The billionaire has been vocal about his distaste for organizations that scour Twitter and use tweets to conduct research or train artificial intelligence programs.
But Saturday’s change sparked frustration among some users on the platform, with many questioning why their online activity would be cut so drastically.
The phrase “rate limit exceeded” started trending on Twitter, leading to memes on the site about people who were inconvenienced by the new policy. Downdetector, a website that tracks reports of malfunctions on multiple websites, showed that user reports of Twitter problems increased on Saturday.
Other users had more practical concerns, including how the daily limits might affect the way people monitor severe weather on the platform, which often involves scrolling through dozens of updates, alerts and warnings.
Alabama meteorologist James Spahn said, “This change in Twitter today is complete trash fire.” Said on Twitter. “Unless something changes, this platform is now pretty much useless to those of us in the weather enterprise.”
An email to Twitter’s communications department seeking comment was returned with a poop emoji.
Since Mr Musk’s takeover in October and his move to eliminate more than 75 per cent of the company’s workforce, Twitter has become less stableAlong with features or the entire site sometimes shuts down without explanation.
On Saturday, company engineers rushed to diagnose the problem in private Slack channels, according to two employees. Those people said Twitter salespeople asked what they should tell their advertising customers after they realized some ads weren’t being displayed 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 document said the company routinely lagged behind its US weekly sales estimates, sometimes by as much as 30 percent.
Twitter’s tremendous changes continue to inspire some users to try other similar social media sites Mastodonthat aims to be a “viable alternative to Twitter”, and Blue SkyA social network that offers many of the same core features as Twitter.
BlueSky is invite-only for the time being, but on Saturday the company’s name was trending on Twitter.
It appears that “I need a BlueSky code, too bad bro,” wrote one Twitter user on Saturday.
