The sad truth about Twitter’s rate limit

TL;DR

Twitter imposed daily viewing limits of 600 tweets for non-Blue users and up to 6,000 for paying members, officially blaming heavy access by bots and web scrapers. It also required users to sign in, while a Chrome plugin using Twitter’s old theme reportedly bypassed the limit. The report examines a JavaScript failure, API restrictions, unpaid bills, and several clearly labeled theories. Read on to separate the stated explanation from speculation.

Transcript

it is July 3rd 2023 and you're watching the code report in his latest 7D chess move Elon surprised Twitter users with some exciting new features first he decreed a rate limit for everyone on the platform non-blue checks get to look at 600 tweets per day while paying members get to look it up to 6 000 tweets that may sound harsh but this is just som... Read More

Key Insights

• ☠️ Elon Musk introduced rate limits on Twitter to address social media addiction and encourage users to reduce screen time.
• ⛔ A programmer developed a Chrome plugin to bypass the rate limit, allowing users to view more tweets than the designated limit.
• 🤖 Twitter shut off public access to the website to combat increased bot and web scraper activity.
• ☠️ The implementation of rate limits and the paywall might also be connected to Twitter's unpaid bills, including their Google Cloud contract.
• ☠️ It is speculated that the rate limit is a temporary measure during the migration of Twitter's infrastructure to a Raspberry Pi.
• ❓ Another theory suggests that Elon Musk is battling against intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA, who are scraping Twitter for censorship purposes.
• 🧑‍💼 Speculations also link these changes to Twitter's financial troubles, including unpaid bills and eviction from offices in Boulder, Colorado.

Questions & Answers

Q: Why did Twitter impose a rate limit?

Twitter’s official explanation was that too many bots and web scrapers were accessing tweets through automated tools. The report questions whether scraping was the primary reason because limiting views could also reduce advertising impressions.

Q: What were Twitter’s daily tweet-viewing limits?

Non-Blue users could view 600 tweets per day. Paying members could view up to 6,000 tweets per day.

Q: How did the Chrome plugin bypass Twitter’s rate limit?

A developer created a Chrome plugin that used Twitter’s old theme. According to the report, this allowed users to bypass the newly imposed viewing limit.

Q: Did users need to sign in to view tweets?

Yes. Twitter shut off public access to the website, so users had to be signed in to look at tweets.

Q: What caused Twitter’s reported downtime?

The report says bad JavaScript code appeared to call the API in an infinite loop from the client side. It describes the result as a self-inflicted DDoS attack caused by a recursive asynchronous function that would repeatedly catch and fetch.

Q: How did Twitter’s API changes relate to increased web scraping?

Twitter had shut down access to its free API a couple of months earlier and made API access too expensive for the developers discussed in the report. The report suggests this helps explain why automated web scraping had become a more prominent issue.

Q: Was Twitter’s Google Cloud contract linked to the rate limit?

The report says Twitter had reportedly refused to pay its Google Cloud bill until recently and that the contract, worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year, expired on June 30. It explicitly labels any connection between that contract and the new limits as pure speculation.

Q: What other theory did the report mention about Twitter scraping?

Another theory claimed that agencies such as the CIA and NSA were behind the scraping and were using Twitter to build a censorship system. The presenter did not endorse the claim and characterized it as possibly being Elon fan fiction.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• Elon Musk introduces a rate limit on Twitter, allowing non-paying users to view 600 tweets per day and paying members up to 6,000 tweets.

• A developer creates a Chrome plugin that uses the old Twitter theme to bypass the rate limit.

• Twitter shuts off public access to the website, making it necessary to be signed in to view Tweets.