Twitter implemented temporary limits on how many posts users can view over the weekend. The social media giant, however, flip-flopped on just what the limits were, changing them throughout the weekend.
Elon Musk, Twitter executive chairman and CTO, originally stated that verified accounts would be able to read 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts will be able to read 600 posts per day and new unverified accounts will be limited to reading 300 posts per day. A few hours after that, however, Musk replied to his original tweet, stating that the limits would be increased to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified users.
A third announcement following that further revised the limits to 10,000, 1,000 and 500 for verified, unverified and new unverified respectively.
The limits come after Twitter removed the ability for people to view tweets without having an account on the site. Starting Friday, the services started prompting users to log in or sign up when trying to access tweets and user accounts. Embedded tweets, however, are still visible without logging in. (Read: Twitter now blocking unregistered users)
According to Musk, the "temporary" measure was implemented to cut down on "data scraping and manipulation." However, some tech-savvy users believe that something else is at play here.
Specifically, Sheldon Chang on the SFBA.Social Mastodon instance noted that recent changes to the site may be causing it to DDoS itself. For those not familiar with the term, a DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attack is when any site is bombarded with so many requests that it gets overloaded and effectively shut down.
In the case of Twitter, however, Chang is claiming that the site itself is sending multiple requests—around 10 requests a second—to itself to fetch content that never arrives due to the recent changes.
"This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS," Chang wrote.
That said, this is all just educated speculation and whether or not this is the reason for Twitter's new limits on post views, or whether it actually is an issue at all, has yet to be confirmed.
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