600 is way too low. I've never been into Twitter but whenever I see someone's Twitter page they post like 30 times a day. Imagine how many posts the average Twitter user reads if they post that much.
This also breaks the algorithm-induced doomscroll feature of social media, and probably reduces advertiser value even further. Seems like a very obvious misplay even from the POV of an evil CEO.
The limit will probably be gone in a day or so. Elon just kneejerk reacts to things without consulting anyone, and this move is going to plummet user engagement. In the meantime, I hear Mastodon got a healthy user bump today.
I've heard this is happening because they refused to pay for their cloud hosting with Google and got cut off. They need to throttle the entire service to stay afloat until they get some sort of backup plan in place.
I follow a few artists on Patreon and this just seems another kick in the teeth for them :c cuts down on their ability to connect and reach out to their audience etc. Unless they both are paying. I'm just drifting more to Lemmy since... Well so far it's a good for me
I removed all my old posts and deactivated my Twitter around the same time I got rid of my reddit account. So it doesn't exactly affect me.
But overall it is a very dumb move, and will only drive legions of Twitter users over to Mastodon or get lucky and get an invite to Jack Dorsey's BlueSky.
How well that will go? I dunno. But till it is out of invite only, mastodon is the only real Twitter alternative.
Maybe it’s because I’ve cut back on Twitter far more than I realized, but I never hit the rate limit despite expecting to. In any event, should I hit it, all that will do is improve my productivity for the remainder of the day.
I do feel bad for those who rely on maximizing exposure on that platform for income or awareness of topics or events.
It seems a needlessly self destructive move, certainly an odd decision to make. Guess they still think they are too big to fail?
However, for me at least, 600 tweets doesn't seem that much? I used Twitter a lot yesterday looking at the chaos, and didn't even hit that limit. I guess I don't use Twitter in the same way that others do.
Still, this decision does affect "powerusers" of Twitter, who are the people they really don't want to push away. And it seems to have done so, some accounts I follow have moved off, and I've seen like 10 new people post to hashtags I follow on Mastodon overnight. Just wish people hadn't moved to Instagram only...
Amusingly, Twitter has a "people to follow" box, and it's having trouble recommending me people who actually still use Twitter (2 of the 3 have their most recent posts being "I'm not on Twitter, find me elsewhere").
I do wonder if companies who use Twitter to update people will reconsider that now that non-logged in users can't access it.
Amusingly these restrictions (both the rate limit and login requirement) are apparently temporary (I don't believe it either) and in response to either a DDoS attack or "mass scraping". Coincidentally, Twitter also had a bug where it would DDoS itself if the homepage failed to load. https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057 .
600 tweets a day is nothing. One could easily do that in an hour or so.
Not saying it's the healthiest thing to do, but it's very easy for regular twitter users to hit that limit very soon.