Twitter's View Rate Limit / "Rate Limit Exceeded"

Overview

Twitter's View Rate Limit is a temporary limit for the number of posts users can view daily imposed by Twitter in July 2023. The limit restricted unverified users to view a maximum of 600 posts and verified users to 6,000 posts daily. The introduction of the limit sparked controversy as users accused Twitter owner Elon Musk of using the tactic to increase sales of Twitter Blue, while the phrase "Rate limit exceeded" (the error message shown to users who exceed their limit) went viral. The move was widely mocked, with many arguing (as they had with previous, contentious Musk policies) it would lead to the death of the social platform. The move came soon after Twitter announced that it was temporarily disabling public profiles and requiring users to log in in order to view tweets.

Background

On June 30th, 2023, Twitter^[1] withdrew the capacity to browse the website without making a Twitter account, sparking a controversy.

On July 1st, 2023, Twitter^[2] owner Elon Musk wrote that "to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation," Twitter had decided to apply temporary limits to the number of posts users were able to view daily. The change limited the number of posts for verified accounts to 6,000 per day, for unverified accounts to 600 per day, and for new unverified accounts to 300 per day.

Scraping is a practice in which large amounts of data are gathered in an automated way from a platform or website, generating significant traffic not tied to human users. Scraping is also a common way in which artificial intelligence large language models like ChatGPT get training data.^[13]

Developments

Musk Changes The Limits

Within hours of his initial tweet on July 1st, 2023, Musk then changed the amounts of tweets allocated to users two times, boosting the number of tweets each class of user could see in a day so the new totals were 10,000, 1,000 and 800 (shown below).^[6]

Online Reactions

The announcement was immediately followed by viral reactions from users on Twitter. On July 1st, 2023, YouTuber Cr1TiKaL tweeted^[3] that the change was "an effective way of killing [Twitter]," with the tweet garnering over 3,000 retweets and 39,700 likes in three hours. Also that day, Twitter^[4] user @InternetHippo posted a screenshot of Musk's tweet, writing "Just openly begging for money would be less embarrassing than this," implying that the change had an ulterior motive of getting more people to purchase Twitter Blue. The tweet (shown below, right) received 2,200 retweets and 14,800 likes in three hours (shown below, right).

In the following hours, users made joke posts about using up other people's view limits by "shitposting" and about the error message "rate limit exceeded" that was shown to users when they exceeded their daily limit (example shown below, left). For example, on July 1st, YouTuber^[5] Dolan Dark posted an image of a person dipping a chip into a bucket of blue paint captioned "Wasting 1 of your 600 daily posts with this image." The post gained over 480 retweets and 10,100 likes in less than a day (shown below, right).

Other responses included posters mocking Musk for his perceived incompetence, such as user @kirawontmiss, who received over 41,300 likes in less than a day for comparing him to Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate and the captain of its infamous Titan submarine, which imploded the week before (seen below, left).^[7] Some, such as @TeslaDarth in Musk's replies, begged the Twitter owner for more posts via memes (seen below, right), earning over 10,000 likes in a day.^[8]

Social platform and Twitter rival Bluesky had performance issues on July 1st, reportedly due to "record-high traffic" and suspended the creation of new accounts. Many users speculated these technical issues were due to a massive influx of people formerly on Twitter attempting to log on.^[12]

Theories and Speculation

As the controversy continued spreading in late June 2023, many began speculating about possible explanations for the move. For example, some users argued that Musk's official reasoning for the new rule (to prevent data scraping) was not the real reason. Certain posters speculated that Twitter's servers might be in a state of disarray and unable to handle usual amounts of traffic, either because the company was short-staffed and had failed to pay a number of its bills or because a self-inflicted bug had damaged the servers — though mere speculation.

On the same Saturday night (July 1st, 2023) that Musk tweeted the view limit announcement, there were widespread outages of Twitter and problems with the site for many users.^[9] For example, in a viral post that was reposted to other platforms, Mastodon user Sheldon Chang proposed a theory that Twitter "is DDOSing itself," arguing that the policy of allowing only registered accounts to read tweets had led to an overload on the servers (seen below).^[10]

Also on July 1st, Twitter user @BenCollins argued along similar lines, saying the new policy was purportedly a cover-up for deeper back-end problems at Twitter, earning almost 68,000 likes in less than a day (seen below).^[11]

Related Events

Twitter Disables Public Profiles

Twitter Disables Public Profiles refers to Twitter's decision to withdraw the capacity to browse the website without making a Twitter account. News about Twitter's policy requiring a Twitter account to view tweets broke on June 30th, with various users reacting to the event and speculating about what it means for the future of the website. Reactions to the news touched on discussions about the enshittification of social media and the internet. Possible unintended consequences of the move include the inability to access archived versions of deleted tweets, and the inability to view a tweet by a blocked account on a separate incognito tab.

Search Interest

External References