Elon Musk’s Strategy for Twitter Success: Have Users Read Fewer Tweets Every Day

Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk has announced limits for how many tweets users can read in a day, causing confusion and frustration among social media users in multiple countries. Musk claims that the limits are temporary.

On Saturday, Twitter users in several countries either could not access the site or faced issues and delays. Then, “Rate Limit Exceeded” and “#TwitterDown” began trending on the platform in the United States.

Outages were also reported at around 8:00 a.m. EST, according to DownDetector, a site that tracks internet outages.

Meanwhile, Twitter users complained that their tweets weren’t loading, and noted having received an error message, which read, “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again.”

After this news began to spread, Elon Musk tweeted that the social media platform has temporarily limited users “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”

The Tesla CEO explained that verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts are limited to a mere 600 posts a day, and new unverified accounts are limited to just 300. Given the huge number of posts loaded into the “for you” feed from accounts users don’t follow, these limits are not very hard to hit — especially if a person has a popular tweet with many replies.

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

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

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

A few hours later, Musk added in follow-up tweets that he would soon increase the rate limits to 8,000 for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts, and 400 for new unverified accounts.

After that, he revealed that he would later increase that rate limit to 10,000 for verified accounts, 1,000 for unverified accounts, and 500 for new unverified accounts.

Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Musk has made a slew of changes to Twitter since buying the social media platform last year. The changes seem to be constant and ever-evolving. This latest change has caused frustration and universally negative feedback.

Only 6,000? That barely covers leftist attacks on me for not being a lawyer!

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) July 1, 2023

This is the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever seen on here. It’s destroying Twitter.

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) July 1, 2023

How long is “temporary”? And does every tweet a user scrolls passed count?

Because 300-600 for unverified users seems REALLY low.

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) July 1, 2023

Just say you want everyone to get Twitter blue no need to write all that

— Janty (@CFC_Janty) July 1, 2023

To make everyone buy Twitter blue, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6M posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 5 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 3/day

— Billy Green  (@BillyGrene) July 1, 2023

Yesterday, Twitter appeared to change its settings so that people are unable to browse tweets on the social media platform unless they are signed into a Twitter account — in a likely attempt to grow its stagnant userbase.

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