Rate Limit Exceeded?

Elon just announced(July 1 2023) that due to extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, they are applying rate limiting on Twitter - and not to bots, but to their people users! If that is crazy, their numbers are even crazier: verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts a day, unverified accounts a mere 600 posts a day and new unverified accounts a paltry 300 posts a day!

I'll be damned if I've heard of anything crazier in the tech rate limiting space as this.

Shortly after reading his tweet, in fact it was his tweet that I was reading, then I tried to open it so I could read people's comments and pap! I had exceeded my rate limit (note that I have a verified Twitter account), and I haven't even been on Twitter today as normally as I would (I was fighting some Rails Hotwire bugs to bring you the commenting feature so you can comment on my blog posts :))

Twitter is running like a startup now and it is interesting to watch. It looks to me like people inside Twitter do not want to go against Elon in any of his suggestions, he suggests something , they blurb about a little and then just agree without much debate.

I say this because there is no way Twitter 1.0 would have allowed this to pass. They are essentially preventing people from accessing Twitter, and Twitter being a content marketplace, lesser people are going to engage in creating and consuming content, which means advertisers will find Twitter less appealing, and hence lesser revenue for the tech company.

Twitter is definitely not the first company to face this scraping hurdle, many people and companies have faced this before and they all had different solutions, but not once did I hear of one that reduced their users' usage of the platform, just so they could reduce the overall scraping from bots.

At the least, Twitter should've first tried to identify the bots, the scrapers (people have done this before), then limit their interaction on the website. People and bots behave differently on websites, Twitter can definitely figure out who is who if they spend enough time on the problem and not just slap Elon's ideas on every problem they face.

Cloudflare has years of experience identifying, preventing and blocking bots and nets that cause massive DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service) on platforms. And they have done this for thousands of companies over the years. I'm sure they can borrow a pamphlet from them.

End of rant :)

A bit unrelated but related, I just added commenting to these blog posts - and you don't have to be signed in to make a comment! Just your name and comment and that's it! So different from what Elon would do huh.

To be honest I have not added any DDoS prevention on this site, so I could easily get attacked for this, but before we reach that point, I'll be happy if you leave behind thoughtful and kind comments on this post, and other future or past posts!

Thank you!