In a series of tweets, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, announced that the "rate limits" on the micro-blogging platform would soon increase. Currently, verified accounts can read up to 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts are limited to 600 posts per day, and new unverified accounts can only access 300 posts per day.
However, in a subsequent update, Musk revealed that the "rate limits" would be raised to 8,000 for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts, and 400 for new unverified accounts. Shortly afterward, he further increased the limits to 10,000, 1,000, and 500 posts respectively. Musk also humorously acknowledged the irony of hitting view limits himself while discussing them.
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Explaining the rationale behind the limits, Musk stated that the temporary change aimed to address the significant data scraping and system manipulation occurring on the platform. He suggested that the increased limits would help combat these issues and emphasized that setting a "View Limit" would encourage users to spend less time on Twitter and engage in the real world.
Musk's announcement came amidst a major global outage that affected Twitter, preventing numerous users, including those in India, from accessing the platform.
Musk also revealed that the increased data scraping had been degrading service quality for regular users, which prompted the need for stricter limits.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO alleged that many companies, ranging from startups to large corporations, were extensively scraping vast amounts of data. By imposing limits, Musk aimed to mitigate the impact of such activities on Twitter's performance.
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While Musk's decision received criticism from users affected by the outage, he defended his actions as a necessary step to combat excessive data scraping and protect the platform's functionality.
As the situation unfolded, Twitter temporarily restricted browsing access on its web platform for users without accounts. The move was intended to alleviate the strain caused by data pillaging and ensure a better experience for genuine users.
