Twitter users without accounts can see tweets again but not profiles or replies

Over the last week, Twitter recently implemented several changes, including limiting the number of tweets users can see daily unless they pay for the service and blocking people from seeing any tweets unless they logged in to the site.

However, as of July 5th, 2023, it appears logged-out users can view tweets again.

MobileSyrup has confirmed on multiple devices that a user who isn’t logged in can follow a link to a specific tweet, but can’t view the replies to the tweet or the full profile of the poster. If the tweet you clicked on was itself a reply, you can’t see the tweet it’s replying to.

Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.

What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023

In response to a complaint from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, Elon Musk said that the decision to implement an account wall was made because “several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.” Musk also blamed data scraping for the move to limit how many tweets people can see. A follow-up tweet clarified the account wall, at least, would be a “temporary emergency measure,” but no timeline for its removal was provided.

Bugs and problems with the site have been a constant headache in recent months, such as one that was causing deleted tweets to reappear.

However, significantly more users have started experiencing errors since the rate limits were implemented. It may be related to a bug that seems to be causing Twitter to send infinite requests to itself.

So apparently other people also found this bug and it's effectively causing Twitter to DDOS itself. You can't make this shit up, Musk's decision making is just beyond parody. https://t.co/43as8f3BMu pic.twitter.com/cJ8wQrqKAc

— Romlib 🎄 (@RomanianLiberal) July 1, 2023

All of these issues have caused many to ditch Twitter and consider whether an alternative to the platform is even needed at all.

Bluesky, a microblogging site funded by one of Twitter’s founders, reported “record-high traffic” after Twitter imposed its limits. Meta (formerly known as Facebook) also put its Twitter competitor, Threads, on app stores two days before its launch on July 6th, 2023.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s engagement levels have consistently dropped since Elon Musk acquired the company.

Via: Engadget