ETtech Explainer: Will rate limits accelerate the decline in Twitter’s revenue?
Twitter users complained that they saw ‘cannot retrieve tweets’ and ‘rate limit exceeded’ error messages on their timelines. Befuddled, many thought it was another Twitter outage. Instead, it was a move by Twitter executive chairman Elon Musk to apply ‘temporary limits’ on the number of tweets a user could see.
Many users, particularly verified ones, called out Musk and Twitter for restricting access. ETtech tries to answer some of the questions about Musk’s latest diktat.What exactly is the rate limit imposed by Twitter? The rate limit is a threshold that prevents you from accessing the platform once you have viewed a certain number of tweets (up to the set limit). Simply put, Twitter users who see the “read limit exceeded” message have reached the maximum number of posts they can view that day.
On the mobile app, this message appears to limit the number of replies you can see under a post and your ability to refresh your feed.What is the rationale for the rate limits? Will they be permanent? Musk said the move is aimed at addressing extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation. Initially, he said verified accounts were limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts could read 600 posts a day. Also, new verified accounts could read 300 daily posts.
In a subsequent tweet, Musk increased the limits to 8,000 tweets per day for verified users, 800 for unverified users, and 400 for new, unverified users. Finally, Twitter increased the limit to 10,000 tweets per day for verified users, 1,000 for unverified users and 500 for new unverified users. The limits set by the platform will be ‘temporary’ according to Musk.What is data scraping, the reason for Elon Musk’s latest move? It is a technique
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