Science & Tech

10 weird and wonderful tweets to waste your Twitter reading limit on

10 weird and wonderful tweets to waste your Twitter reading limit on
New Twitter CEO details goals for social media platform
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Optimists may welcome it as an unofficial screen time limit, but for those who are partial to a bit of Twitter doomscrolling, Elon Musk’s decision to restrict the number of tweets we can see a day to address “data scraping” and “system manipulation” is not the best.

On Friday, it was reported that the Tesla founder’s platform had implemented a block on people being able to view tweets on its web browser without owning an account.

A day later, users were complaining of being unable to view the For You page or profiles due to a “rate limit exceeded” error message – the latest bug to impact Twitter since Musk took over in October and laid off almost half of the tech company’s staff.

Musk, who is now Twitter’s chief technology officer after appointing former NBCUniversal advertising chair Linda Yaccarino as CEO back in May, sought to rectify the problem with a rather unusual and controversial solution – all while Yaccarino continues to remain silent on Twitter as her company bursts into flames.

On Saturday, the SpaceX entrepreneur wrote: “To address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts/day; unverified accounts to 600 posts/day; [and] new unverified accounts to 300/day.”

The limits have since been increased twice and currently stand at 10,000 posts a day for verified accounts, 1,000 posts for unverified users and 500 for unverified accounts who have just joined the platform.

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While being ‘verified’ pre-Musk takeover meant an account was “notable” and helped to tackle impersonation, it now refers to any individual or company willing to actually pay Twitter to have a blue badge on their profile and access to additional features.

With many shunning the paid subscription model and mocking those who splash the cash on it, Twitter users have criticised the limitation on their ability to browse the bird app without any restrictions.

Others, however, have noted that the view limit means users have to make every tweet count, and they’ve decided to have some fun with that by “wasting” people’s views with weird and wonderful nonsense.

Here’s 10 we’ve rounded up for you to waste today’s quota on:

You’re welcome.

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