Twitter tells users to touch grass, adds new rule limiting how many tweets you can read per day

July 2, 2023

3 min read

Yesterday, Twitter started blocking people not logged into an account from viewing tweets, profiles, or any information. In what could be considered an even more shortsighted decision, Elon Musk now says that Twitter is limiting the number of tweets that users with an account can view.

Update 11:45 am PT: Elon has responded to the criticism and is increasing the limits to a whopping:

Verified accounts: 8000 posts/day
Unverified accounts: 800 posts/day
New unverified accounts: 400 posts/day

Musk announced the change on Twitter on Saturday morning, so you might not be able to view the announcement if you’ve already hit your Twitter limit for the day. According to Musk, Twitter is implementing these changes as “temporary limits to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”

Here are the new limits:

Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
New unverified accounts to 300/day

So, if you pay $8 per month for Twitter Blue, you can read 10x the number of posts per day as someone who doesn’t pay for the ~~ransom~~ subscription service.

9to5Mac’s Take

I’m starting to think this Elon Musk cat doesn’t know much about running a social network. Does he not realize how much these limits are going to impact users, engagement, and subsequently advertising revenue?

Not to mention the fact that this change seemingly went into effect this morning without announcement, leading many Twitter users to believe that the social network was offline. Musk retroactively announced the change hours after the complaints first began surfacing.

There are also no details on what exactly it means to “read” a post. What if you scroll through your time, but only stop to actively read a handful of posts? Based on the current implementation, it seems like any tweet you scroll past counts as a “read.”

So let me get this straight: for millions of Twitter users, the ability to read tweets will break at some point today. Those Twitter users, however, will not be able to see Elon’s announcement…because new tweets won’t load after you hit that limit.

Since I started writing this story approximately 20 minutes ago, I have hit my Twitter limit.

Twitter to its users today: stop using our platform and touch grass. Great work, team. I expect Reddit to implement a similar limitation sometime within the next six months.

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