(New York Post) Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Saturday announced rate limits on the number of tweets users can view which caused a spike in traffic at rival social media platform Bluesky.
Musk imposed the rate limits because of “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, saying that Twitter was “getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading the user experience!”
The rate limits gradually rose from 6,000 posts per day for verified accounts and 600 posts per day for unverified accounts, to 10,000 for verified users and 1,000 for unverified users.
When users hit their limits, they received error messages saying, “Rate limit exceeded” or “Unable to load tweets” as tweets failed to load and populate users’ feeds with fresh content.
Twitter users who were frustrated by the limits impeding their typical usage flocked to social media company Bluesky, a startup that is still in an invite-only beta testing phase and is backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Elon Musk’s new imposed rule had to deal with the rate limits “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.AFP via Getty Images
Bluesky said Saturday that the influx of visitors caused “some degraded performance as a result of record-high traffic.”
That instability prompted the social media platform to temporarily pause sign-ups to address those issues on Saturday, though it resumed sign-ups late Sunday.
As of the end of April, Bluesky’s website stated that the platform had more than 50,000 users.
Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky said the rise of visitors caused “some degraded performance as a result of record-high traffic.”picture alliance via Getty Image
Aside from users requesting to sign up via a waitlist, Bluesky says on its website that it periodically distributes invitations for existing users to distribute to other participants.
Depending on the quality of invitees converted into users, the platform gives certain users more invites.
As for the cause of the excessive data scraping on Twitter, Musk attributed it to artificial intelligence companies pulling in data for the purpose of training their models.
