Both Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram lead Adam Mosseri have been adamant they were not simply copying Twitter wholesale. And yet, that’s exactly what they seem to be doing as the company’s latest move has been to limit the number of posts users can see on the Instagram-based app, just as Elon Musk’s Twitter did a few weeks ago.
Mosseri claimed in a Threads post late on Monday that “Spam attacks have picked up,” requiring new rate limit changes. While the Instagram boss didn’t describe precisely what those post view limits were, he mentioned that some actual human users could get caught up in the crossfire.
Some Threads users responded to Mosseri with screenshots of spam posts flooding the Instagram head’s replies. Gizmodo reached out to Meta for more details on what the rate limits entail, but we did not immediately hear back.
You only have to look back to the first days of July when Twitter owner Musk announced that the platform would be limiting the number of tweets users could see per day, citing “system manipulation” and “extreme levels of data scraping.” After Mosseri made his announcement, Musk tweeted calling the obvious Twitter clone a “Copy [cat emoji].” Twitter has already threatened to sue Meta over the Threads app claiming the app stole the bird app’s “intellectual property.”
After a few false starts, Musk limited the number of posts Twitter Blue users could read to 10,000 per day while cutting off unverified accounts at 1,000. New accounts were limited to just 500. On Monday, Musk said he was increasing the limit for verified accounts by 50%. While most users would likely never reach those thresholds, the changes had the adverse effect of mangling the site’s Tweetdeck platform among some other services. Users also reported problems with embedded tweets and watching videos contained in posts.
As soon as Musk made the change, users complained about seeing a “Rate Limit Exceeded” message. As pointed out by tech blogger Andy Baio, one critical web developer claimed that Musk’s unprecedented move to limit views was actually an error due to a bug that essentially put Twitter in the position of DDOSing itself. Former head of trust and safety at Twitter Yoel Roth claimed in a Bluesky post “futzing around with rate limits is probably the easiest way to break Twitter.”
Most of those service issues on Twitter have since been fixed, but the screwy Twitter UI was a big impetus for millions of users to try out Meta’s Threads app. According to data scraping platform Quiver Quantitative, Threads is currently sitting at 114 million users. A better number for judging real engagement would be monthly active users, but it hasn’t even been a month since Threads first came online. However, analysis from several oft-cited data platforms shows that user engagement on Threads has been cut by half since launch.
Threads may be home to more spammers, but it’s missing several features that would help it actually take the throne from the decadent, dying Twitter. Zuckerberg wrote in a Threads post late Monday that the focus for the rest of the year would be “improving the basics of retention. It’ll take time to stabilize, but once we nail that then we’ll focus on growing the community.” If Threads really wants to improve retention, it could try giving it features equivalent to the barest bones of the Twitter UI.