Elon Musk's Twitter 'Rate Limit': A Stroke of Genius or a Potential Disaster?
"Temporary Rate Limits"
Elon Musk on July 1st announced temporary rate limits which restricts users from viewing tweets once they surpass a certain threshold.
The users started complaining.
The Tesla chief then later added that the “rate limits” were increasing to “8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified, and 400 for new unverified
And then to "10k, 1k & 0.5k".
Why Rate Limits?
Elon Musk claimed that this step was crucial due to the excessive scraping of Twitter data by numerous organizations, which severely impacted the genuine user experience.
Possibly Musk is blaming companies attempting to collect data for training large language models (LLMs) such as the ones utilized in ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing, and Google Bard.
Is scraping a genuine reason?
It well could be.
Twitter is now charging very high fees ($42000/Month) for API access. This might have created a market where people are buying and selling tweet data.
...or was it due to forcing users to log in?
A few days ago, Elon Musk made a decision to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in which could have resulted in twitter "DDOSing itself"
Impact on Ad revenue?
Capping how much users can view could be "catastrophic" for the platform's ad business, said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.
"This certainly isn't going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to return. It's a hard sell already to bring advertisers back,"
Are the "rate limits" temporary or is Musk forcing his users to move to verified accounts - what is your opinion?