I haven’t commented here about developments on Twitter since it changed ownership. Yesterday’s “rate limit exceeded” weirdness, though, deserves at least a nod, along with some light ridicule and muscle-straining side-eye.

For those who missed the latest kerfuffle, users started experiencing widespread “rate limit exceeded” error messages when they tried to read tweets. (See a recap and an intriguing hypothesis here.) Elon Musk, claiming data scraping  was putting a strain on the system, announced the site would limit the number of tweets a user could read in a day: 600 for non-paying users; 6,000 for those paying their monthly tithe. (Those numbers increased over the ensuing 24 hours.)

This is the kind of blunt-force, knee-jerk response you can expect from a company that has laid off the bulk of its workforce, micromanaged by an owner who doesn’t seem to grasp the need for capacity that can meet surges in demand. Florida governor Ron DeSantis discovered this when he opted to launch his campaign for the GOP driver of the final nail into the coffin of American democracy presidential nomination there, only to have his big moment drown in a sea of technical failures. (Which may have been Twitter’s fault, or may have been the moral arc of the universe pushing back against fascism and bigotry at a quantum level. Welcome to the resistance, moral arc!)

I’ve frozen my personal and Noise to Signal accounts there for quite a while now. (You can find me over at Mastodon.) That’s mostly because the quality of conversations there has dropped drastically, and that’s saying something; Old Twitter could be pretty awful at times, but now its steady flow of hate, abuse and disinformation has become an absolute torrent. And Twitter’s new “free speech absolutist” owner repeatedly slams his thumb on the scales, banning journalists’ accounts and issuing bizarre, arbitrary edicts like declaring cisgender a hate slur.

At least with Old Twitter, you got the impression that poisoning civil society and paving the way for an authoritarian takeover of democratic regimes was a side effect. Under Musk, it’s the whole point. And at some point, you just have to reply “Rate limit exceeded.”