The IT Nerd

Twitter and Elon Musk is back in the news because now it seems the Elon is limiting the number of Tweets that you can read each day. Sky News has details:

Twitter has applied temporary daily reading limits to address “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, Elon Musk has said.

In a tweet, the billionaire gave details for both verified, unverified and new unverified accounts – followed by another post about two hours later, saying the caps would be “increasing soon”.

Verified Twitter users were temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day – later increased to 8,000.

Unverified accounts – those without a blue tick – were initially limited to reading 600 posts a day, while new unverified accounts were limited to 300 posts a day. These figures were later increased to 800 and 400 respectively.

Depending on how many tweets you’ve viewed today – and whether or not you’re verified – you might be able to read Musk’s latest message here.

The first thing that comes to mind is that Twitter’s infrastructure is so fragile that he has no choice but to limit how many Tweets people can read. I say that because this applies to both Twitter Blue subscribers and everyone else. If Elon were simply trying yet another tactic to get you to sign up to Twitter Blue, these limits would likely not exist for Twitter Blue subscribers. This seems to be backed up by a visit to Down Detector:

Clearly there’s something going on at Twitter, and clearly Elon doesn’t have the ability to address it in any other way than this. Likely because Twitter no longer has the ability to handle the strain that a large number of users would put on it on a holiday weekend in the US. Not to mention Canada. Thus I honestly think that the whole “Data Scraping And System Manipulation” thing is cover for the fact that at this moment, Elon has realized that he screwed up. Big time.

This entry was posted on July 1, 2023 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.