Twitter owner and chairman Elon Musk infuriated plenty of the website’s users on Saturday by implementing a surprise temporary limit on how many posts users could read in a given day.
A strange message of “rate limit exceeded” started to appear on people’s Twitter feeds early Saturday, accompanied by Musk sharing that “extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation” had forced the company into limiting how many posts a user could see in a day.
Twitter Blue subscribers and other verified accounts would be able to view 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts would be limited to 600 posts a day. New unverified accounts would be held to 300 posts a day.
Musk later made slight amendments to that number seemingly in response to the outcry.
Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
While Musk said the blockages were temporary, many Twitter users openly wondered if this was the beginning of the end for the controversial social media platform.
As you can guess, there was also plenty of anger to go around, primarily sent Musk’s way for initiating the limits in the first place.
I know people have said “well…this might be it for Twitter” like 30 times since Musk took over but…this actually might be it for twitter this time. Just absolutely unusable
— Will Mavity (@mavericksmovies) July 1, 2023
Will be nice to hear what the real story is. How long before you have to pay to tweet pic.twitter.com/zhQh20RnFj
— Kris Willis (@Kris_Willis) July 1, 2023
I was on this site for 5 mins and got this.
Thanks for my time back. I might be done. pic.twitter.com/1L0oFK5oJk
— Steve Cavendish (@scavendish) July 1, 2023
"step 1: we charge them for twitter
step 2: we limit the number of posts they can read" pic.twitter.com/nzYLwRoodh— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) July 1, 2023
It’s awesome to still be able to post while not seeing any news posts. Really feels like screaming into the void
— Tyler Nettuno (@TylerNettuno) July 1, 2023
Ah, Twitter, where it is time to follow precisely 600 people and read exactly one of their posts per day and then log off for another 24 hours.
— Wampler™ (@ScottWamplerRIP) July 1, 2023
Twitter is good? pic.twitter.com/tG5mj2ZG2C
— Jordan Tomiyama (@Jttomiyama) July 1, 2023
lol this place is dead and these limits are completely stupid. he’s an idiot that doesn’t understand anything technical pic.twitter.com/HtWHnXCq8N
— Brian Floyd (@BrianMFloyd) July 1, 2023
Not twitter apparently https://t.co/on2bJ9s07v
— Jason Kirk 🦉 (@thejasonkirk) July 1, 2023
limiting the number of posts you can see a day while refusing to just show you the posts from people you want to see: a perfect system pic.twitter.com/3LDqffqqjd
— Sam Adams (@SamuelAAdams) July 1, 2023
This is fine dot GIF pic.twitter.com/r59PNTgvfG
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) July 1, 2023
tWiTtEr Is So MuCh BeTtEr NoW
yeah okay but I used to be able to read all the tweets
— Metro Bloopin (@BlooperBraves) July 1, 2023
Elon Musk is like a Scooby Doo villain who dresses up as a ghost to scare everyone away from the theme park but forgets that his business is theme parks
— Matthew Sweet (@DrMatthewSweet) July 1, 2023
This seems like a terrible idea
Scrolling through the timeline is really the best part of this site. Limit that and it’s basically just promotion and people yelling at each other
I can’t imagine this will help anything pic.twitter.com/7SsruYZ35x
— Matt Jones (@KySportsRadio) July 1, 2023
— Maurice Patton (@mopatton_sports) July 1, 2023
