In early July, Twitter started imposing rate limiting, severely reducing the number of tweets users (especially those who weren’t subscribed to Twitter Blue) can view in a day. CEO Elon Musk said the measure, which has since been relaxed, was introduced to address “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation,” but it did not sit well with folks who hit their limits and were unable to use Twitter even though they weren’t engaging in said practices.
It was, probably, one of the factors that made Threads – Meta’s Twitter competitor – so popular at launch. But now, Threads is introducing rate limiting, too.
According to Instagram chief Adam Mosseri(opens in a new tab) (Threads is a standalone app but it is tied to Instagram), this is done to counter spam attacks which have “picked up” on the platform.
“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). If you get caught up those protections let us know,” wrote Mosseri.
Threads active users have halved in a week, report says
Again, this likely won’t sit well with users. Replying to Mosseri’s post, several users complained about error reports and getting suspended for no good reason, as well as other bugs, including not being able to follow back users.
Besides these issues, Threads still lacks many basic features that Twitter has had for years, which is likely one of the reasons why user engagement fell sharply after the initial spike in interest. Threads is doing something about it, though; the company just launched its first major update, which includes features(opens in a new tab) like translations, activity feed scrolling and loading improvements, and the ability to subscribe to unfollowed users.