No, Threads Is Not ‘Copying Twitter’ With Rate Limiting
The tech press often gets called out for lazy journalism, and here we have yet another example. On Monday, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri posted that due to an influx of spam on Threads (and there’s been a lot), the company was tightening up its rate limits:
He said:
Spam attacks have picked up so 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.
Given that there was just a big hullabaloo about Twitter rate limiting views for some questionable reasons, many in the tech press world went for the layup, claiming that Threads was “copying” Twitter.
And, of course, even Elon Musk couldn’t resist pretending that this vindicated his rate limiting, responding to someone showing a screenshot of hitting a rate limit on Threads by saying “seems oppressive.”
And, sure, Zuckerberg has copied some of Elon’s worst decisions, like charging for verification.
But claiming that changing the rate limits on Threads is copying Twitter is lazy, misleading, and wrong. Every social media website has some form of rate limiting to deal with actual spam. But the rate limiting is generally for spam-like activities. For example: automated posting that posts hundreds of times in a row. Or automated signups of multiple accounts. Or mass followings. Basically spam like activities.
Rate limiting for things like that is standard practice that basically any social media site is going to have in its bag of tricks to deal with spammers.
The thing that Musk did with Twitter was different: it was rate limiting posts viewed, which makes no sense at all, especially on a social media platform where ad views are so important. There is no indication that Threads is using rate limiting on post views. Even in the screenshot above, it notes that the rate limits are for things “like following people.” That’s standard anti-spam protection.
There is a real difference between standard rate limiting and ridiculously stupid rate limiting, and anyone reporting on this stuff should know the difference, but some are too eager to go with the easy story, rather than the right story.