TweetDeck down? Users complain Twitter's reading limit affects the valuable tool
TweetDeck, owned by Twitter, shows multiple tweets simultaneously in real-time, allowing users to keep track of multiple accounts.
TweetDeck, a Twitter client used by many professionals to monitor several Twitter accounts concurrently, appears to have been affected by the social media platform's recently implemented reading limit restriction, which limits the number of tweets a user may view in a day.
Users globally are complaining that the media management tool is not getting auto-refreshed. While some claimed that columns containing mentions, likes or other information on TweetDeck are left blank.
TweetDeck down? Here's how netizens react
“I have been using TweetDeck for 14 years. I never suffer the issues of an irrelevant timeline. I would completely stop using Twitter if the web interface is the only option,” a user complained on Monday.
“Seems like Twitter is messing about with Tweetdeck. If you enable Tweetdeck Preview, then it works. If you opt out of the new Tweetdeck, then it's still borked,” another user tweeted.
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TweetDeck a valuable tool for professionals
TweetDeck shows multiple tweets simultaneously, with multiple timelines updating in real-time, helping users to keep track of multiple accounts.
This would be placing a higher demand on Twitter’s servers than the regular Twitter apps. It is reported that this may be one reason why Twitter has limited some of TweetDeck's functionalities.
What Twitter has to say on TweetDeck errors?
Neither Twitter nor Elon Musk has commented on the issue yet. The official Twitter page of TweetDeck, which has the last post around a year ago, since then it says, “A new & improved TweetDeck...coming soon.”
Elon Musk caps daily read limit
Twitter on Saturday decided to cap the number of posts users can read each day. The measure is said to be for a “temporary time” but no timeline has been given. This decision follows right after the microblogging site made it mandatory for users to log in to use the platform.
Announcing the decision, Twitter boss Elon Musk tweeted, "To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts per day
Unverified accounts to 600 posts per day
New unverified accounts to 300 per day."
Why a Twitter reading limit?
Elon Musk said that AI models were scraping data to build their AI models to such a point that it was causing traffic issues on Twitter.
“Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” the Twitter boss said.
"Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data," Musk said.
ALSO READ: Reddit's CEO addresses intense backlash and site-wide blackout amidst API pricing controversy
‘See your friends & family': Elon Musk tweets amid backlash
Ever since the new rate limit has been implemented, Twitter and Musk have both faced backlash. "Goodbye Twitter" was a trending topic in the United States following the announcement.
To defend his decision and to answer people's complaints about the rate limits, Musk asked people to step away from their phones and spend time with friends and family instead. “You awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends & family,” he tweeted on Sunday.
Rate limit relaxed? Latest updates on Twitter's daily reading cap decision
Twitter's daily reading cap decision seems to be very short-lived as very few users have come out to say if they have faced a rate limit recently compared to Saturday when it was first implemented. No official update has been given by Twitter in this regard yet.
