Elon Musk is leaving no chance to take a dig at Meta’s newly launched Threads app, which is seen as a direct rival to Twitter. Twitter bosses are either calling out Mark Zuckerberg for copying the idea or threatening legal action for hiring ex-Twitter employees for Threads. Most recently, Musk has taken aim at Threads’ decision to limit the number of posts users can see on the app to a rate cap that Twitter announced a few weeks ago.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri recently announced that the company is taking serious steps to crack down on spam and bot accounts that clearly fill user’s feeds. He added that the company is tightening rate limits on the platform due to increasing spam attacks. The move will also limit active users on the platform.
“Spam attacks have spiked, so we have to get tougher on things like rate limits, which means limiting active people to more unintentional (false positives). If you get caught by those protections, let us know,” Mosseri said. said in his recent post on the threads.
While the announcement followed the company’s aim to fix spam attacks, it took the news in no time to reach Twitter CEO Musk, who found the platform yet another opportunity to call out copy. Responding to a tweet about Threads introducing rate cap, Musk mocked the platform and called it copycat.
Earlier, Twitter implemented restrictions and rules due to Elon Musk’s claim that the platform was being targeted by multiple organizations attempting to extract data. Elon Musk also called these actions temporary and said that Twitter is experiencing excessive data theft, which is degrading the quality of service for regular users.
Following the new rules, Twitter users had to sign in to access tweets, and limits were placed on the number of daily tweets a user could view. Twitter only allows verified users (paying customers) to view a maximum of 6,000 posts per day, while unverified users can only view 600 posts.
However, the new guidelines were not well received by Twitter users and later the platform faced backlash. In response to the criticisms, Twitter revised its guidelines once again and Musk announced that he would increase the rate limit for verified users to 50 percent. This means that now they will be able to see 15,000 posts.
While Twitter’s approach to cracking down on bots and spam issues seemed harsh, Threads is also spot on. However, the Meta-owned app is not imposing any strict limit on the number of posts users can see. Instead, Mosseri suggests that Threads users should contact the bots if they encounter any issues. This shows that the company is determined to ensure that the new limits do not negatively impact the user experience.
The response from Threads users regarding the latest rate limit was generally positive, as many of them were undoubtedly frustrated by the presence of bots. “Thanks for the alert… Thank you. I feel like I’m wasting half my time blocking bots promoting gambling and crypto sites… Something needs to be done because this is the least of every post, is less than 50% who get the charm…” reads user feedback.
