Threads mimics Twitter again, introduces ‘rate limits’ to combat bots

Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter alternative, Instagram Threads, has been forced to implement rate limits in response to a growing number of reports citing spam attacks and crypto-shilling bots.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri announced Rate cap introduced on the Threads app in a post dated July 17th.

“Spam attacks have spiked, so we have to get tougher on things like rate capping, which means limiting active people more unintentionally (false positives). If you get caught in those defenses let us know,” Mosseri explained.

One user complained that they were spending half their time on app blocking bots that were pushing “gambling and crypto sites”.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk took a jibe at the announcement, replying “lmaooo copy 🐈” to a screenshot of the announcement posted on Twitter.

lamau

copy

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 17 July 2023

On July 1, Twitter imposed stricter rate limits on users for a different reason, citing excessive levels of data scraping from outside organizations. Verified Twitter users are still limited to viewing 15,000 posts per day, while unverified and newly unverified accounts are limited to viewing 1,500 and 1,000 posts per day, respectively.

Connected: Close to 100 million sign-up on ‘scammers’ threads posing as crypto Twitter users

Following its launch on July 5, Threads saw record-breaking growth in new users, crossing 100 million users within five days. Unfortunately for Zuckberg, there appears to be a problem with the new Twitter option to keep people engaged.

Olivia Moore, partner at crypto venture capital firm a16z, found that just one week after launch, there was a 40% drop in daily active users on Threads and the average daily time spent per user had tripled.

Moore believes the move to import users directly from Instagram doesn’t work for Twitter-esque apps like Threads. By linking user accounts on Instagram directly to their real-life identities, it discourages the methods of social interaction that Twitter is famous for, namely anonymous accounts and fan pages.

It turns out that plugging 100M users into a copycat product is no slam dunk.

One week after launch, DAUs on ~other apps~ decreased by 40% and average daily time per user decreased by 4x.

Why is it not working? pic.twitter.com/rMO4IBHDHf

— Olivia Moore (@omootretweets) 17 July 2023

“Twitter has created a unique social graph and interest graph that is hard to replace. Even with a copycat product, it’s hard to replicate the underlying network and user identity developed over a decade,” Moore said.

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