On Friday, it became apparent to many Internet users Twitter had walled itself off. No more anonymously reading Tweets on Twitter. Users discovered if they wanted to view Tweets on Twitter they would need a Twitter account and must be logged in. Musk claims this is only temporary due to ‘data scraping’ issues.
Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.
What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023
“Temporary emergency measure,” he claimed in a tweet. “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk subsequently shared more context. “Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” he said, replying to a tweet from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney lamenting the “increasingly broken” state of the internet. In a separate tweet, spotted by Mashable, Twitter engineer Aqueel Miqdad said the company would re-enable logged-out access “in the near future.”
Related to this Musk has now introduced a limit as to how many Tweets users can read. No that is not a typo. Apparently users can post as many Tweets as they want, but are going to be restricted based on their account type as to how many they are allowed to read on a daily basis. This too is suppose to be “temporary” to address the scrapping issues which are allegedly degrading Twitter’s performance…hmmm…is that really the cause of the performance issues…not the lack engineers to keep Twitter running when shit breaks?
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
On a side note I ended up having to create a new Twitter account in order to embed these Tweets into this post. I found the signup process rather annoying with having to select three areas of interest as well as choosing someone to follow. All this to embed as the Jetpack Social no longer supports Twitter. Now, lets see how long until they disable embedding.
via Engadget
