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Topics: Twitter, Social Media, Technology, Elon Musk
Joe Harker
Topics: Twitter, Social Media, Technology, Elon Musk
Twitter users are not best pleased with Elon Musk right now after the social media site CEO announced some new changes to the site.
It's one of the most popular social media sites in the world with hundreds of millions of users, but Twitter has been quite the wild ride ever since Elon Musk took over last year.
The value of Twitter appears to have plummeted since Musk bought it for $44 billion and there's been all sorts of controversies on the site to go along with his arrival.
A whole load of staff got fired in a series of purges and it turned out there was a good reason why they were employed in the first place as the social media site's service suffered.
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Musk scrapped the old blue tick verification system and started selling people blue ticks, which came with all sorts of perks for them, forcing the rest of us to scroll through a sea of terrible replies to get to the good ones.
Then he gave some celebrities blue ticks because having a way of being able to tell if famous accounts are actually the person they say they are is really quite important.
Now there's a new development with Twitter and it's gone down like a cup of cold sick among the site's users.
Lots of Twitter users were scrolling through their feeds yesterday (1 July) when they were suddenly couldn't scroll no more, as they were told it was a case of 'rate limit exceeded'.
Musk explained what this meant to the site, telling them that Twitter was applying a limit to the number of tweets a person could look at each day, with significantly more for verified accounts.
At first it was 300 for new accounts, 600 for non-verified accounts and 6,000 for verified ones, with those figures increasing a couple of times following the announcement.
He said this was done on a temporary basis to combat 'extreme levels' of data scraping, with AI being able to sift through huge amounts of tweets to gather data.
However, this also stopped basically everyone else on the site, much to their dismay, and plenty of people complained that they were being blocked from seeing more posts.
The phrases '#RateLimitExceeded' and '#RIPTwitter' soon started trending as people declared that they were done with the site if these restrictions persisted.
Plenty of users pointed out that this would just cause people to leave Twitter and go to another social media site, with one joking that 'everyone going to Insta once their rate limit exceeds' and a second saying it was 'time to find a replacement'.
Another dubbed Musk as 'the man who broke Twitter' after complaining that they'd been rate limited after '15 minutes of light browsing' on the site.
Others pointed out that limiting the amount of content someone could get through on Twitter would also limit the number of ads they'd be able to see, which wouldn't be good for Twitter's revenue streams.
Someone else complained that they'd 'reached my rate limit looking at all the rate limit memes', though we can think of fewer worthy ways to spend time on the internet.
It turns out that people on a site that provides them with near-infinite amounts of content as long as they keep scrolling don't like it when the site tells them they've got a few hundred tweets before they've got to stop.