Twitter gives a reason for rate limiting users on the site
Social messaging service Twitter implemented two drastic changes on the site that limited access to it for a large number of users. First, Twitter limited access to anonymous users, so that these started to see login or sign-up prompts instead of the posts that they wanted to access.
Then, just a few days later, Twitter applied rate limits to all members of the site. The limits were applied to all members, free and paying alike, but paying members were allowed to view more posts before they reached their limits. Site engineers increased the rate limits on Twitter several times since the initial introduction.
Elon Musk stated on the day the rate limits were introduced that Twitter was implementing them as temporary measures to "address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation".
Today, Twitter published a post on the official Business Blog that provided additional information on the changes and a reason for implementing them seemingly in a hurry.
Twitter writes: "To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform. That’s why we temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform. Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.".
According to the post, Twitter implemented the read ratios on the site as a honeypot to identify spam and bots on its platform. It had to implement the changes without prior notice, as giving prior notice would have allowed bad actors to change their behavior.
Twitter attempts to reach two goals with the implemented measures:
- Prevent third-parties from scraping content on Twitter, including people's public profiles, to build AI models.
- Prevent manipulation of "people and conversation on the platform".
Only a "small percentage of people using the platform" are affected by the limitations at the time, according to Twitter. It is unclear from the description whether that means that affected users are hitting the rate limits or if the limits are applied to a small percentage of users only.
Twitter promises that it will publish an update once it has reached its goals. Since the post was published on the Business blog, Twitter uses it to reassure advertisers that advertising was affected in a minimal way only.
Twitter, in the meantime, has started to limit access to Tweetdeck to verified members who pay the service a subscription fee.
Not trusting this. Goodbye twitter anyway.
Couldn’t data scraping be limited by putting a delay in before reading each tweet? Put a longer delay in as the user tries to access tweets more rapidly, i.e., it’s not a human. That would fix one bot scraping.
To limit multiple bots scraping, limit new sessions trying to access a tweet by putting in a longer delay for reading the first tweet. I guess you could have millions of bots scraping just one tweet, but maybe you could limit them by IP address.
Humans will put up with a slight delay in reading tweets, but delays would make bots less useful.
Twitter was run a left wing cabal making every possible effort to control and censor political speech for its own ideology and agenda. I don’t use Twitter (or Facebook or Instagram, etc., etc.) these actions have no effect on me, but I’m certainly grateful to Elon Musk for his efforts to clean up that swamp.
in passing, I think that any individual who needs to tweet more than 600 times a day needs some kind of intervention ASAP.
@Herman Cost
“but I’m certainly grateful to Elon Musk for his efforts to clean up that swamp.”
Don’t be too grateful. “Elon Musk Signs Letter Pledging Tesla’s Commitment to China’s ‘Core Socialist Values”
https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-signs-letter-pledging-teslas-commitment-to-chinas-core-socialist-values/
It is true that Twitter was very politically biased “top-down” in terms of moderation and censorship, one side had much better leniency in terms of the terms of service being applied to them or not – if you never noticed such a thing you probably hold the “correct/allowed” opinions in the first place. The only problem really now is that Elon has made a number of missteps which make him seem foolish in the eyes of the public, it shouldn’t be conflated with the actual good changes in terms of culture/politics that are trickling down.
Twitter most definitely was a bloated company with too much high-paying luxurious/pointless positions, you can easily tell by looking at tik-toks of “a day in the life of ____ silicon valley employee”, then also looking at the “last day at ____, I was laid off” tiktoks – this blew up because of how luxurious and relaxed things were, people couldn’t believe these jobs existed and how little work was actually required.
On the topic of politics: a good number of left-wing people cry out that the platform is becoming right-wing when the playing field is merely somewhat getting levelled towards a fair balance – so it’s not balanced and fair unless you’re dominating all your opponents? Yeah that little game seems to be coming to an end, sorry… I don’t use twitter either, but this could be seen from the outside without much trouble.
And about the tweet limit – all companies are coping differently with the AI-related scraping that’s happening, seemingly there is no great solution: Reddit’s solution was seen as terrible (rightly), and this is also being seen as bad. What I find funny is that many people on here are (rightly) against social media and people’s unending obsession with it – so take the limit as a good thing, take it as a sign that maybe you should go outside and witness nature for a half hour a day, there are certainly a large number of “terminal” twitter users, that are glued to it, and it’s not healthy – seems like Twitter itself is helping people out in that regard, why be mad?
Also, twitter now inaccessible without an account: nobody complained when facebook did this, then also others such as instagram, etc. I agree it’s bad but Twitter is hardly the first platform to make non-account browsing impossible, many just go the route of making it annoying and inconvenient.
As a non twitter user, I just sit with popcorn and watch the fun :)
@bruh,
> Also, twitter now inaccessible without an account:
“Twitter silently removes login requirement for viewing tweets”
[https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/twitter-silently-removes-login-requirement-for-viewing-tweets/]
Though, strangely, third-party frontends such as Nitter still isn’t working, should it ever.
—
Left/right wings have proved to be both concerned with privacy and freedom of speech issues, this is historical and roots to far before the digital era. I’d forget political tags and rather concentrate on the effectiveness of honesty, ethics of a parson as of a company. This pseudo-intellectual approach aiming to understand the world via definitions of generality seem to me quite inoperative and closer to aberration than to impartiality.
Tom,
That is an interesting update, thanks for sharing! Occasionally there is something noteworthy on twitter, I am slightly glad I will at least have the option of viewing such things.
@Herman Cost
That 600 limit is for tweet viewing, not for tweeting. Anyway how’s the weather in Maro Lago! Having fun with Donald Duck, Ye and Alex Jones?
Wrong on my politics @Yash (I dislike Trump as much as you do), and a typical reaction from someone who loves censorship as long as it involves speech he disagrees with. @Anonymous obviously falls into the same. Start to censor ‘progressive’ speech and these type of hypocrites lash out furiously.
quote by Herman Cost
“typical reaction from someone who loves censorship as long as it involves speech he disagrees with.” “Start to censor ‘progressive’ speech and these type of hypocrites lash out furiously.”
..and there’s your pathological victimhood and avoidance of personal responsibility.
@Yash
I think he is more of a Rubert Murdoch man. The pathological victimhood and avoidance of personal responsibility gives it away.
Everybody knows The best and most accurate news about American social media comes from an 107 year old Australian who had to pay out $787 million for trying to spread his fake news ideology and agenda
Translation:
We fired 80% of our workforce, then we had to move a whole bunch of services off of Google Cloud Infrastructure before 30 June because the 5-year contract expired and we can’t afford to renew it at the same level – causing reliability and capacity issues. And we also have to find excuses to force people into paying $96 per year for some Twitter-blue BS, because advertisers are reluctant to spend money with us anymore, as they don’t like dealing with an unstable man-child who replies to emails with a poop emoji.
I believe the last quote was supposed to mean “[Only a] small percentage of people [are still] using the [Twitter] platform”.
>Only a “small percentage of people using the platform” are affected by the limitations at the time, according to Twitter.
Like all readers without an account?
That’s a stupid lie.
>the day the rate limits were introduced that Twitter was implementing them as temporary
measures to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”
If you set the limit to 0 for ALL users, regardless of account type, then the level of scraping will become even lower, as well as the number of bots (which will become 0 at all).
*smart guy*
Wow, with such cool and effective ideas, it turns out I can rule Twitter as well as the current management.
Rate limits is one thing, but blocking access to their services for people who do not have an account is another : Twitter could very well set walls for incriminated bots without setting them for anonymous users globally.
Users who do have a Twitter account are of course bothered by rate limits, to put it mildly, but requiring an account just to read a tweet is the final straw.
Worthy article, many others, this one seems pertinent as well :
“Elon Musk Really Broke Twitter This Time” at,
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/twitter-outage-elon-musk-user-restrictions/674609/]
I’m not the only one to desperately try to understand the rationale of such moves and especially the account requirement.
@ Tom Hawack,
On the TheAtlantic site you linked to: “Signup for your free trial to read the full article…” Well, I won’t be doing that.
Falls under the same heading as a tweet i.e. if you don’t have an account you can’t read our stuff.
@TelV, I didn’t have in mind TheAtlantic’s requirement because I handle this sort of bother automatically …
You can either,
– open the page in Firefox’s Reader View Mode : sometimes it works, there it does;
– use a user-agent modifier extension (‘User-Agent Switcher’ in my case) and set your UA as ‘Google Bot’ for TheAtlantic.
Sorry for that.
Well Tom, since you have never been a CEO or executive of a worldwide social media company, you don’t have the experience or strategic skills to analyze and judge what Twitter does and why, which btw they explained. If it annoys you that Elon didn’t get your approval before hitting the switch, I apologize on his behalf. As for me, I don’t have any social media accounts. I read twitter for current events and opinions, I’m not angry that Twitter has gone dark. Plenty of other sites to view. I prefer free websites with political content and there a thousands. I would never pay for news. If a SM company wants my personal info (ie., FB etc.) I don’t bother with them. I am a social media skeptic. Fact is there is nothing social about social media. Leb wohl Tom.
@M. Fromme, I think no one understands Twitter’s rationale. As many of us I presume I’ve searched the Web for experts’ analysis of Twitter’s chaotic day-by-day erratic as it seems decisions. No one understands.
Trying to understand doesn’t mean being involved. One can perfectly well be totally disinterested by social sites yet try to understand what’s going on when an issue concerns a major company such as Twitter. Hence, to make it personal and therefor link to your personal approach, I’d say that even if I don’t refer to social websites I remain interested by their policies, changes, issues. It appears that I make (made) an exception for Twitter’s tweets via a third-party dedicated tool (Nitter) mainly to access communication threads often not available on homepages: an example is that of [https://www.followthatpage.com/] which has been down for several weeks and if it hadn’t been for its Twitter page [https://nitter.redir/followthatpage] (still accessible at the time) I never would have known what was going on …
The point is trying to understand. Attempting to understand should not be mistaken with whatever approval or excuse. Putting social websites on trial is another problematic and perhaps you and i could have common arguments on that point. But for now we’re only trying to … understand. Understood? :)
EDITing my above post where I mentioned [https://nitter.redir/followthatpage]
There’s no such Nitter instance as [nitter.redir], it’s only that I access and bookmark Twitter to Nitter links to [nitter.redir] which I use as a variable in a redirecting extension in which I set the valid Nitter instance I wish to use [nitter.redir] = [nitter.lacontrevoie.fr] for instance. I forgot to reverse the bookmark when I copy/pasted it here.
Well M. Fromme since you have never been a English teacher or executive of a worldwide gHacks post writing company, you don’t have the experience or strategic skills to analyze and judge what Tom does and why, which btw he explained. If it annoys you that Tom didn’t get your approval before writing his post, I apologize on his behalf. As for me, I don’t have any gHacks accounts. I read gHacks for tech events and opinions, I’m not angry that Tom has written a post on gHacks. Plenty of other posts to view. I prefer posts on gHacks with tech content and there are thousands. I would never pay for gHacks posts. If a gHacks post wants my personal info (ie., Iron Heart etc.) I don’t bother with them. I am a gHacks posts skeptic. Fact is there is nothing gHacks about gHacks posts. Leb wohl M. Fromme.
Love it!! LOL
this comment chain is too funny! wow