This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.

The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.

These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.

Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.

Elon Musk, the latest billionaire owner of the online screaming match known as Twitter, sat slumped at his desk, staring at a wall of monitors blinking with a technicolor smorgasbord of error messages. The reason? He'd just let Twitter's hosting contract with Google lapse because he thought it'd be fun to see if he could migrate it somewhere else. The results? Not so fun.

A comment on Reddit had caught his eye, and he couldn't shake it. "Every now and then Elon must have a moment of clarity. Where it occurs to him 'Maybe I am just stupid?' But then he violently buries the thought."

"Stupid?" he scoffed aloud to his empty office, sending a mini landslide of Mars Rover prototypes tumbling off his desk. "I'm a genius."

He remembered how smart he'd felt when he decided to axe the account verification system, only to reinstate it after a week of high-profile mix-ups that included the Dalai Lama being mistaken for a llama enthusiast.

And the content moderation! Who needs it? Well, as it turned out, everyone. Without it, Twitter had turned into a feral wilderness of conspiracy theories, insult slinging, and more unsolicited pictures of eggplants than a greengrocer's catalog.

And then there was Kanye. "Free Kanye!" he'd declared one afternoon after one too many rocket fuel coffees. But after the notorious rapper had declared war on flannel shirts and clogged up the site with CAPS LOCK tweets, the ban was back on faster than you can say "Kim Kardashian for president."

"Stupid?" he muttered again, watching as Twitter spontaneously DDOS'd itself like a robotic bull in a digital china shop.

There was a pause. Then a grin spread slowly across Elon's face, as if he'd just understood the punchline to a particularly tricky joke. "Naaaah," he laughed, slapping the desk.

He looked at the chaos on the screens, the digital calamity his decisions had wrought, and couldn't help but chuckle. There was something amusing about being this absurdly, cosmically, hilariously brilliant.

"Back to the drawing board," he chuckled, picking up a Mars Rover and making it do little jumps across his desk.

As a former individual who understands the underlying systems, it seems like they botched deployment of a new feature causing issues and cannot figure out how to solve them.

Most of Twitter is and has been in maintenance mode since acquisition (think of 10 man engineering team and 1 left to handle maintenance).

That rate limit is insanely low, even for verified. I’m not verified, but I hit the limit in like 10 minutes of very distracted usage.

Transcription for the blind: Screenshot of a Twitter post from Elon Musk, Twitter handle @elonmusk, that says:

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

1:01 PM Jul 1, 2023 3.6M Views

-Transcription from a human volunteer. Let me know how I can do better.

I thought this guy was supposed to be stepping down - didn't he even announce the new CEO?

This reeks of him scaling back infrastructure to reduce costs, gets overloaded, and the C-level talent remainings best idea to prop it up is rate limiting.

Pathetic.

I find this more mildlyhumorous than infuriating. I'm looking forward to a new era where every news article no longer includes a string of embedded tweets. :) As a non-twitter user, this certainly doesn't encourage me to bother making an account.

Therefore any company that puts out notices or alerts via Twitter should immediately exit the platform. Running their own server on mastodon would be a better bet

Maybe I'm dumb, but this is starting to seem like these Tech CEOs are dumber than we thought.

Why not just make 4000 accounts and have distributed scraping? What are they going to do next? "Unverified Twitter accounts can only be accessed 10 times?"

This is beyond speedrunning enshittification now...

I'm eager to see what twitter users think of this - lots of people are watching, and corpos taking notes.

Edit: He's announced an increased limit but it's hardly generous IMO.

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Anyone still on Twitter at this point is getting what they asked for. It's like you drove past every "last restroom for X miles" sign, and now you're in the middle of nowhere and have to piss.

I bet the throtteling is not caused by data scraping but by Twitter not paying their Google Cloud bills and therefore now with the new month they got services suspended.

Why are so many people suddenly against Twatter burning? I thought we all wanted that?

Maybe it was just me but Musk has never seemed like someone who actually understood tech. Just a rich guy who buys up other's work and talks a big game. I knew the second I heard he bought Twitter it was going to crash and burn. He's doing it way faster than I thought possible.

Of course he will eventually say this was all on purposes and not that he is crap at business and tech.

Somehow I doubt it's even that. The guy's just a braindead, incompetent moron. I don't think the fucker's even smart enough to realize this is literally the worst possible decision he could've made.

limiting engagement an app that RELIES ON ENGAGEMENT????? IT CAN'T POSSIBLY GET DUMBER THAN THIS???

Time for Mastodon

What did he even think the purpose of APIs were. Data scraping puts unnecessary load on servers only to scrape out majority of the content. It’s funny how he shoots himself in the leg and now complain.

Sometimes the real DDOS are the companies we buy along the way

Brilliant move to help sell more ads on the platform: limit how many people will even be able to see those ads

Twitter and Reddit both dying at the same time was not what I expected in 2023

He's impulsive and doesn't know when to shut up. I got the distinct impression that, initially, he was absolutely not serious about buying Twitter. It was a joke/jest. BUT, because his antics affected their stock price he actually got forced into the purchase and now he's desperately trying to figure out how to make the purchase worth what he actually paid, which is fine and all, except he seems to be leading by impulse, not by consensus or logic. He wakes up in the morning, has some random ass idea and implements it without any oversight. Even his new CEO straight up admitted that she is basically a straw man CEO who will offer no friction to anything Elon wants to do.

So with Spez having a hard on for Elon and how he runs Twitter, how long until we see this on Reddit? Premium members can view 1000/day posts and regular members can only view 100 posts/day. Similar rule will apply to comments too.

Things like Reddit and Twitter are bad for billionaires. It makes it harder for them to exploit you when there is a public place to talk about their bullshit.

Elon is so damn transparent. I NEVER remembering anything like this happening before Elon. Dude is running this like a moronic mob boss.

"Hey..it'd be a shame if you could only view 600 tweets. I have this Twitter Blue that might be able to help...."