Why the social media platform’s latest blunder may spell its demise.
It’s no secret that Twitter has been in decline for months. The will-he-won’t-he-destroy-the-network drama has spawned an entire ecosystem of wobbly social media upstarts trying to fill in the vacuum left behind. And even still, Twitter soldiered on. I found it difficult to quit entirely, because there were still valuable and important conversations and voices there I couldn’t get anywhere else.
But this week was different.
On Monday, many Twitter users started to hit an error during their morning scrolls. “Rate limit exceeded — please wait a few moments then try again.”
The problem is that waiting a few moments wouldn’t fix the problem.
If you’d had the “good fortune” to see Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s Tweet earlier this week announcing a major feature update (behavior which he has, in the past, promised to stop) you would have seen this:
“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” — @ElonMusk on Twitter, 10:01 AM July 1 2023
Twitter “temporarily” limited Twitter Blue users to 8000 post reads a day and all other users 800 post reads a day, based on an update a few hours later. No word on why the change or that specific number. He later changed it to a new model: Verified users could see 10,000 posts a day, unverified users could view 1,000, and new users could see 500 posts. He was clearly in a “go fast and break things” mood this week.
Here’s Elon Musk’s quote Tweet showing the original post about the data scraping and the rate limits — the first reply shown underneath is from the Auschwitz Memorial, who point out that these policies would silence their posts commemorating those lost:
Examining the consequences
Why was this change so different from all the rest? Four key elements:
-The huge mental model shift it represented for Twitter users
-A decrease in value of company-curated content
-Silencing of the most prolific Twitter creators
-Weakened social graphs caused by mass unfollows to control post views
Let’s break that down a little further:
Mental model shift
No Twitter user has ever, in the history of Twitter, had to think about throttling how much they use Twitter unless it was for their own mental health. Twitter virtually invented “infinite scroll” behavior. In one fell swoop, Elon cut that addictive loop off — and in fact, that instinctive basic interaction loop with Twitter was also penalized, because if you went too fast or scrolled too carelessly, you would burn out your posts too soon. What if you burned out your views in the morning and needed a traffic update in the afternoon?
Lost value of company-curated content
Twitter has for years been trying to make “fetch” happen, metaphorically, to borrow a meme from Mean Girls: Time and time again, they have foisted the For You or Home views on users, where algorithmically curated non-chronological posts are served based on what Twitter both thinks we want to see — and what they want us to see. Lately, that includes a lot of boosting of “blue checks,” or verified users.
But here’s the issue: If you’re limiting me to 1000 posts a day, they should be posts I enjoy or get value from. And if you’re boosting a subset of your user population because they paid for it, that’s at odds with the goal of showing me content I wanted to see.
As a result, the Blue boosts make it more likely that my 1000 posts are going to include content I didn’t want to see, or isn’t relevant to me, because someone else paid to put it there. It’s as if a large chunk of the content feed is actually advertisements masquerading as content.
In a world like that, Twitter becomes almost untenable. Ostensibly, a rate-limited environment is where a really personalized algorithm would shine — but these algorithms aren’t really personalized when they’re boosting specific paid users.
Furthermore, the vastly higher post view count for subscribers means that they’re more likely to be replying and posting, which creates an echo chamber effect. If the group of subscribers you have right now isn’t enough to sustain Twitter with interesting enough content to draw the rest of us in, you have a Problem.
So do I or others like me risk switching to the For You feed in a rate-limited scenario? No. The few times I look at Twitter, I’ll likely stick to my Following feed. Users will feel the need to be more in control of those precious 1000 posts they can see daily.
Silencing of the most prolific Twitter creators
Creators who post frequently may be seen as taking up too much oxygen in this new space. This is a paradox for anyone who was relying on Super Follows or other monetization tools. Twitter is, in the end, a product that relies on free content creation — but the unintended consequences of these changes is that they’ll dampen content creation and consumption significantly, possibly irreparably. The screenshot embedded above is a great example — in response to Elon’s post about rate limits, the Auschwitz Memorial (a “Verified” Blue account) replied with:
“Support memory by excluding tweets of @AuschwitzMuseum from the limits. Most of our tweets commemorate individual victims of the Auschwitz camp on their birthdays. We remind their names, their faces and their fate. They all deserve to be seen and remembered.”
Weakened social graphs
The further effects of this kind of environment is that those fun “I’ll follow them — what’s the worst that could happen?” connections actually hurt or cause harm, especially for prolific posters. Since you can’t force someone to stop posting, the best you’ll be able to do is unfollow those who are “burning” your 1000 posts a day too frequently. And, of course, folks who are spamming threads with unwanted replies may be more likely to get a quick mute or block because there’s additional immediate harm caused just by the presence of their post on the feed.
Everyone’s reach will be dampened. Small communities might lose critical mass. Voices will be silenced. And the ease of making new connections will be replaced by a high level of scrutiny for any new follows.
Business Implications
In the end, limiting posts is like taking the gas out of a car and hoping it runs on fumes. Will people be enticed to subscribe to Blue for more post views? Not necessarily. None of us is used to counting views, so it’s not clear to me whether 1000/10,000 views is actually a reasonable amount for an engaged Twitter user.
If you add enough friction, people will leave. And Twitter made this recent choice just a handful of days after upstart competitor BlueSky gave an extra invite code to every active member. Mind you, it’s far from perfect there, most of all in matters of inclusion for Black folks and other marginalized identities. Even still, BlueSky quickly began slowing down earlier this week as Twitter buckled, clearly indicating a raft of untouched invites going out quickly to new users. Competitor Mastodon may be having a similar experience.
Moving forward
There’s plenty of speculation about this change. Why this change? Why so suddenly, on a holiday Saturday? Why in a classic Elon Tweet?
The deep irony is that folks affected by this change can’t go view his tweet. There’s no other way for the app to provide news like this, and an error message incorrectly says “please wait a few moments then try again.”
That message, by the way, is how you self-DDOS, aka create the conditions for a self-directed denial of service attack. When you create an outage situation and encourage folks to refresh madly, your system will be overwhelmed by incoming requests and will never get the chance to flush and catch up.
While one can’t say for sure, it’s unlikely that the “scraping” is the true root cause of Twitter’s issues. One thing has motivated most of Twitter’s decisions since Mr. Musk took over, and that is money. Eagle-eyed pundits have pointed out that Twitter had a large Google Cloud contract that lapsed recently. Is this out of fiscal and logistical necessity?
Either way, Twitter has successfully pivoted from the world’s town square to a tourist information kiosk at the mall. You can get a pamphlet or two, but you’ll have to pay for the tours.
Poetic closure for an epic journey
Those of us who’ve been around since the late aughts remember the original Fail Whale. Held aloft by small orange birds, the Fail Whale was an error page shown when Twitter’s servers were at capacity. Poetically, the Fail Whale was a white whale, just as in Moby Dick. In the end, after years of perceived indignities lain at the Fail Whale’s feet, Captain Elon Musk has chased this white whale of server capacity and rate limits straight to Twitter’s undoing.
Y’all can catch me on BlueSky and Mastodon and Instagram. In the meantime, I want Twitter to rise like a Phoenix, but it feels more like a zombie now. Just remember — when we move to another social network, we risk creating new social bubbles. But ideally, we can make our new social homes stronger, warmer, and better places than the ones we’re fleeing.
Cheryl Platz is a world renowned user experience designer, best selling author, professional actress and public speaker, and an accomplished video game developer. Her book Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences is available from Rosenfeld Media or your favorite online bookseller.
