Elon Musk keeps finding creative ways to make the platform he paid $44 billion for less attractive to the majority of people.
Over the weekend millions of Twitter users were greeted with the message 'Rate limit exceeded' accompanied by a frozen timeline.
Musk quickly explained that he'd applied temporary limits on how many tweets users could read per day:
"-Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
-Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
-New unverified accounts to 300/day"
Welcome to your nothing view
A rational person who has not been using Twitter for 16 years might have read that and said, "Okay, Musk is asking us all to chill."
I am not that person, and made my displeasure clear in a series of tweets.
Part of the problem was that I, and most other people, saw the 'Rate limit exceeded' message almost immediately, long before I read 600 tweets.
It wasn't just that. It's actually relatively easy to 'consume' 600 tweets in a matter of minutes – all you have to do is scroll for 15 minutes or so.
My biggest problem though, might have been that Musk used this apparent alarm-worthy moment to yet again put the screws on non-paying Twitter users.
Remember, 'Verified' users could read thousands of Tweets, while if you were both unverified and 'new,' you could only read a few hundred. (It's unclear how Twitter defines 'new.')
If you recall, Musk blew up the verification system earlier this year, stripping millions of users of the blue checks they'd held onto for a decade or more. Now, if you want verification, you pay from $8 / £9.60 / AU$13 a month (Twitter Blue also comes with a bunch of other features including the ability to post 25,000-character tweets 🤦♂️).
Many, including me, have refused to pay Musk to fill his platform with content. But Musk likes to remind us that he thinks we made a mistake, and he will do anything, including, it seems, undermining his own platform, to prove that point.
Nice try, Elon. I'm still not subscribing.
Man in Donut Shop.“A dozen donuts please!”“Sure”Comes back a hour later “A dozen donuts please!”“Sorry, no”“There are dozens of donuts behind you”“I can’t serve you and all these other people at the same time.”“You just handed that guy a donut”“He’s paying extra”Leaves. pic.twitter.com/DaxROsLTMOJuly 1, 2023
Is this a joke?
Over the next few days, Musk defended his decision. while back peddling a bit by upping the rate limit exceptions. He also joked – I think – that he was doing this to encourage all of us to spend less time on social media.
In the meantime, there was some conjecture that Musk had so hobbled his engineering department through mass layoffs that it could no longer handle huge amounts of user traffic. There are also rumors that he may not have been paying his server bills, including some evidence that he stiffed Google, though I recall reading that new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino was busy tidying up that relationship.
Speaking of which, where is Yaccarino in all this? She was silent during the height of the 'rate limit exceeded' fiasco, which only strengthens my belief that Musk has given her zero powers over most critical Twitter decisions. Whatever the case, it seems clear that Musk is not running major platform decisions by her.
I keep thinking about what would prompt the owner of a social media platform to throttle his users. Musk says it's about preventing system-scrapping and data manipulation. That might be another way of describing a dedicated denial of service attack (a.k.a DDoS), where cybercriminals flood a server with requests until it succumbs and crashes.
Did Musk actually identify a DDoS attack in progress, and save us all from a nearly unrecoverable crash? That seems unlikely. A day before his rate limit tweet, Musk boasted that the platform "hit another all-time high in user-seconds last week."
What's more, Twitter used to be a robust system that was capable of handling high levels of user engagement and interaction (after so many early years of Fail Whales). I'm on Twitter often enough that I would have noticed platform and performance issues.
It's all about him
Ultimately, this whole fiasco feels like another bit of Elon Musk techno performance art, with Musk manipulating users, especially people like me, to boost interaction and engagement on the platform.
I'm not saying that the system trigger that made 'Rate Limit Exceeded' appear as I tried to read and post new tweets wasn't real, but I'm starting to think that Musk simply engineered the whole thing to shift Twitter and himself back to the top of the everything discussion pile.
As Musk joked on July 1, "Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits."
Even if that was Musk's aim, this remains a dangerous and, in my opinion, clumsy move akin to shooting oneself in the social media foot. The rate limit not only covered users but, apparently advertisers as well. I mean, think about it. Someone pays to have their ad run in millions of Twitter streams that are suddenly empty of all tweets, including their ads, because Elon Musk thinks it's a smart idea to throttle the majority of the platform's users (since most are not verified).
Once again Musk has managed to enrage the people who built Twitter, reminding them that he won't let them enjoy the platform unless they pay, all while again boosting his own profile.
I really hate that Twitter has become a platform for Musk to play out his own social media and societal psychodramas, and with each passing moment it's less and less a place where I can find valuable information, entertainment, and friendship – especially when I can't read any tweets at all.
It's a shame it...*
Sorry, this post was cut off because I exceed my rate limit.
