As it turns out, other platforms are also using rate limits, or restrictions on how many posts users may view. In a funny turn of events, Instagram Threads, the newest competitor to Twitter, stated this afternoon that it too will have to increase rate limits owing to spam attacks.
In response to a screenshot of the announcement that was posted on Twitter, Elon Musk laughed and wrote, “Lmaooo Copy [cat].”
You might recall that earlier this month, Twitter had to impose new restrictions on how many tweets users could see due to a prolonged outage.
At the time, Musk explained that Twitter was subject to “extreme levels of data scraping” from numerous businesses as well as other “system manipulation.
As a result, Twitter decided to address the issue by initially limiting unverified users’ access to 600 posts daily while granting Verified users (paying subscribers) access to a daily maximum of 6,000 posts. Musk eventually raised the limitations to 10,000 for verified accounts, 1,000 for unverified accounts, and 500 for brand-new unverified accounts in response to user complaints.
Musk announced over the weekend that he would again raise the rate limit for Verified users by 50%, meaning they might now be able to view 15,000 posts.
Twitter had come under fire for its unconventional approach to the spam and bot problem, which some claimed wouldn’t have been a problem if Twitter hadn’t let so many of its engineers go.
After all, the inability to scroll through the Twitter timeline for extended lengths of time had never been a problem in the pre-Elon era (apart from the early years, of course, when the failwhale was a frequent event).
Now it seems that Meta’s new app isn’t immune to the bot and spam issues that have started affecting Threads, its would-be Twitter rival.
In a post on the Threads app this afternoon, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri described the issue, saying that “Spam attacks have increased, so we’re going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives).” Let us know if you become entangled in those protections.
In other words, even the most active Threads users can have app usage and post-viewing restrictions.
In contrast to Twitter’s strict restrictions on viewable posts, Mosseri is advising individuals to get in touch if they start to run into this issue.
That suggests that the Threads team is willing to work with honest users to minimize any negative effects on their experience.
The platform’s comment spam has reportedly gotten substantially worse in recent days, according to a number of people who commented in reaction to Mosseri’s revelation.
One person even claimed that half of the responses to their postings came from bots, such as bots related to gambling or “bait” messaging.
Another person claimed that barring bots that promote gambling and cryptocurrency sites was consuming half of their time.
Threads will be in the same situation as Twitter if bots and spam are not controlled. Indeed, copycat.
