According to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter has begun limiting the number of posts users can see. The company blames “data scraping and system manipulation”, which third party apps cause.
Early on Saturday July 1st, Elon Musk announced that users would be capped at viewing 600 posts per day, or 6,000 if they paid for the monthly Twitter Blue subscription. Musk later raised the cap to 800/8,000, and finally to 1,000/10,000 by the end of the day
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day
Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified https://t.co/fuRcJLifTn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Many users were furious with the cap, calling the app unusable as it displayed “Thread limit reached”. Paying customers were mostly untouched for personal use, but many companies rely on scraping Twitter’s data for their business model.
Others have pointed at this limit being a cover due to Twitter not paying for its Google Cloud infrastructure. Business Insider reported that Twitter intended on not renewing the contract with Google in order to cut costs.
This is yet another instance of Twitter aggressively scaling back external contracts to turn a profit, something it had previously not done. Elon Musk has attempted to find a balance between cutting excess costs, such as the free food provided at Twitter headquarters, and maintaining proper infrastructure. Should the service no longer be usable, users might begin to leave in droves.
Related: Twitter CEO Gives Marching Orders
