Meta’s newly launched app, Threads, has implemented rate limits like Twitter to combat bots, which sparked the reaction of Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk.
Announcing the plan to implement rate limits, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri wrote on Threads,
“Spam attacks have picked up so we are going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives). If you get caught up in those protections let us know”.
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Users who tend to do so many things on the Threads platform, like following people are restricted and met with the message “We limit how often you can do certain things on Threads, like following people, to protect our community”.
A Twitter user who was perplexed by the recent development on the Threads app, took to Twitter to share a screenshot of the message he received on the platform, which he captioned “Well that’s ironic”.
His tweet attracted the response of Twitter CEO Elon Musk who wrote “Seems Oppressive”.
Recall that rate limits were what Elon Musk implemented on Twitter at the beginning of July this year, to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation. Users were met with a message that read, “rate limit exceeded,” when trying to view content.
Verified accounts were limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts 600 posts per day, and New unverified accounts 300 per day.
After Musk enforced the new limits, more than 7,000 users in the United States reported glitches and outages on Twitter and created several hashtags like #RIPTwitter and #TwitterDown. Multiple users posted memes with several others threatening to leave the platform over the limits implemented, saying they were done with Twitter.
While Musk had hinted that the limits were temporary, many Twitter users openly stated if it was the beginning of the end for the controversial microblogging platform. Some described Musk as stupid and one that doesn’t understand anything technical.
Not too long ago, Meta launched Twitter-like platform Threads, which saw over one hundred million users sign up on the text-based app, within four days of its launch.
However, in an ironic twist, several users who migrated to the Threads platform from Twitter, are now limited on certain activities they can do on the app, following its recent rate limits implemented.
Thread’s recent restriction has seen several Twitter users react
@Luau_Wolf wrote, “People moving to Threads just to encounter more rate limits. Ironic”.
@ginotluciano wrote, “Now it’s clear Zuck just copied and pasted Twitter code”
@Sinney_Scwasp wrote, “I’m sure the people who were outraged over the 1-day rate limit on Twitter and have moved over to threads will be equally outraged over this”
This move might likely deter some Threads users from using the app and likely stick to Twitter, as it makes no sense for them to still encounter why they left Twitter, to experience the same on Threads.
Meanwhile, Meta CEO said he is very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together.
He wrote,
“Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily. That’s way ahead of what we expected. The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention. It’ll take time to stabilize, but once we nail that, then we’ll focus on growing the community. We’ve run this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc) and I’m confident Threads is on a good path too.”
Though Threads started on a remarkable move, having leveraged Instagram’s social graph to quickly scale its user base and users’ social connections, the app’s long-term future is uncertain.