Twitter Introduces Rate Limits for Users

[Spectrox_]

Summary

According to Elon Musk, the current CTO of Twitter, Twitter will now be rate-limiting users on the number of posts they can view per day.

 

Quotes

Quote

- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day

- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day

- New unverified accounts to 300/day

 

My thoughts

This is yet another drastic change for Twitter users. For Twitter power users, this change may be devastating. Imagine casually scrolling through your feed only to receive the message, "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments and try again." The only solution to this is being forced to subscribe to Twitter Blue.

 

Sources

 

[Erioch]

I'm perfectly happy with my 0 posts/day plan.

[VincentVanMan]

Maybe it's a good thing.... If you hit 6000 posts it's time to get off your ass and do something useful

[vetali]

I haven't used twitter much since Musk took over. Decided to use it like I normally would in the past. Locked out in 30 minutes.

 

Extremely hardcore indeed.

[Spectrox_]

So I tested this myself; I set my mouse to scroll down infinitely. Eventually I was met with the error message "Something Went Wrong". I refreshed thereafter and was met with a black Twitter feed with no posts, I was unable to load anything.

It seems simply scrolling past a post counts as “reading it”

[nshire]

This has got to be the stupidest change Elon has ever implemented on Twitter. And the bar is already pretty low for that. 

[Needfuldoer]

6 minutes ago, Erioch said:

I'm perfectly happy with my 0 posts/day plan.

Nice! Looks like every lurker gets that plan now.

[nshire]

Just now, Spectrox_ said:

It seems simply scrolling past a post counts as “reading it”

This is correct. It probably doesn't even need to be rendered on your screen to be counted as "read" (for example, tweets loaded a few rows beneath the bottom of the view area to keep the user experience smooth). 

[WereCat]

4 minutes ago, nshire said:

This is correct. It probably doesn't even need to be rendered on your screen to be counted as "read" (for example, tweets loaded a few rows beneath the bottom of the view area to keep the user experience smooth). 

1min later.... "That's it for today!"

 

 

 

[manikyath]

i want to be angry.. but this might inadvertedly be a good thing for twitter users.

 

it essentially makes doomscrolling impossible, and might motivate people to 'keep clean house' in who they follow.

in other words - this forces their most "addicted" users to rehab themselves.

[Crunchy Dragon]

5 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i want to be angry.. but this might inadvertedly be a good thing for twitter users.

 

it essentially makes doomscrolling impossible, and might motivate people to 'keep clean house' in who they follow.

in other words - this forces their most "addicted" users to rehab themselves.

One can always hope that it helps with the addicts, and I'm sure it will for a little bit until people try using alts to get around it one way or another, but I find it interesting that nobody seems to be addressing the reason we were given for why the change is happening.

 

Instead, all we hear about is "but muh tweets!!!". Kinda makes a fella wonder.

[Kisai]

24 minutes ago, nshire said:

This is correct. It probably doesn't even need to be rendered on your screen to be counted as "read" (for example, tweets loaded a few rows beneath the bottom of the view area to keep the user experience smooth). 

You know what else also counts? deleting "my interests", blocked users, etc

 

Every single "click" you make counts towards it. EVERY SINGLE ONE.

[Needfuldoer]

18 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i want to be angry.. but this might inadvertedly be a good thing for twitter users.

 

it essentially makes doomscrolling impossible, and might motivate people to 'keep clean house' in who they follow.

in other words - this forces their most "addicted" users to rehab themselves.

Just what a social media platform needs - less engagement.

 

(Don't get me wrong, doomscrolling is bad and a hard habit to break.)

[Kisai]

20 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i want to be angry.. but this might inadvertedly be a good thing for twitter users.

 

it essentially makes doomscrolling impossible, and might motivate people to 'keep clean house' in who they follow.

in other words - this forces their most "addicted" users to rehab themselves.

nope, it's just making the exodus to bluesky, mastodon, and whatever else people use faster.

 

Mostly it's people going back to tumblr or discord.

[Avocado Diaboli]

30 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i want to be angry.. but this might inadvertedly be a good thing for twitter users.

 

it essentially makes doomscrolling impossible, and might motivate people to 'keep clean house' in who they follow.

in other words - this forces their most "addicted" users to rehab themselves.

While I agree that this in theory sounds like a generally good idea at a glance to force extremely online people to finally close the app and touch some grass, you could also make the argument that by forcing you to do a culling with regards to who you follow, that only accelerates the formation of echo chambers. 

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

While I agree that this in theory sounds like a generally good idea at a glance to force extremely online people to finally close the app and touch some grass, you could also make the argument that by forcing you to do a culling with regards to who you follow, that only accelerates the formation of echo chambers. 

i didnt say that this would necessarily turn out well at all.. i just found it strikingly similar to the solutions people think of when they talk about fixing social media addiction.

[Quackers101]

its bugged, so yeah it destroys the whole point of twitter being a news or social media platform...
all the people doing promo's, for games, art, or it being news for the community or companies using it to update consumers or people living there... more or less gone with this. unless you can get it as an "alert" instead.

it doesn't account for spam, maybe doesnt account for multiple of the same post in feed, doesn't handle threads, and a bunch more.
so you might only get past 5-50 useful posts or 100-300 normal ones (3-10 scrolls), that actually loads or isn't as above. as its bugged too.
doubt you get 300 or 600 "real posts of content" with this.

Edited July 1, 2023 by Quackers101

[Quackers101]

also it doesn't even deal with bots that elon wanted to "reduce or eliminate"... so he's full of BS.
and that NOT free to see without account is pretty bad too but some can be seen anyways (until its removed access).

Edited July 1, 2023 by Quackers101

[Yuiski]

Waow, I hit it in ~5 mins doing relatively normal browsing. Pretty hardcore..

[starsmine]

600 a day unless you pay is just unusable. I know plenty of sites are struggling with scraping, more than ever because of ai training. And are having to make choices that limit users in ways the site owners are not happy with. But this is scorched earth and self sabotage 

[WolframaticAlpha]

Didn't know that Twitter under Elon was going to become a hardcore wellness app to keep hardcore Twitter users off from doomscrolling.

 

I would be surprised if they don't roll this back. If Twitter goes down because of this, it would be truly hilarious.

 

Also, the zuck and co. have probably smelled blood in the water and the purported Instagram clone of Twitter will be fast tracked.

[TetraSky]

Pretty good to curb out people's social media addiction. Force them off the platform by not giving them any service.

[grg994]

If anyone needs an emergency workaround, currently there is a way viewing things not-logged-in through embeds like this:

https://syndication.twitter.com/srv/timeline-profile/screen-name/LinusTech

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1675217814355865604

 

[Quackers101]

can agree that if one reduced posting an interactions, social media might become slower and less "reactionary"? to be a good thing.
although so much has been about live content, be it for idols, events, global events and others sites that can support this, but might not have as much of an audience.

[HenrySalayne]

This is probably not to help the addicts or annoy users but to throw a wrench into the gears of automated scripts trying to bypass the horrendous API pricing.

 

And I just checked, I'm unable to visit Twitter without being logged in...

 

Embeds still working.