By
Temitope Olatunji
May 6th, 2024
Elon Musk reacted stating that Threads has been just copying Twitter at every end. Earlier this month, Twitter was the first to implement rate limits to prevent excessive scrapping of information by external organizations.
Within 10 days of its launch, Twitter alternative Instagram Threads has been forced to implement rate limits as a response to the growing number of reports citing crypto-shilling bots and spam attacks.
On Monday, July 17, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the introduction of ‘rate limits’ in his post on the Threads app. “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 [in] those protections let us know,” Mosseri explained.
A user expressed frustration, stating that they spent a significant amount of time on the app blocking bots promoting gambling and crypto websites. Twitter CEO Elon Musk responded to a screenshot of the announcement posted on Twitter, saying “lmaooo copy 🐈”.
Lmaooo
Copy 🐈
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2023
While the Threads app has been designed to copy Twitter, Elon Musk has said that Meta has literally made a copy out of Twitter. As a result, Twitter has also considered taking legal action against Meta.
Twitter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, accusing the company of hiring former Twitter employees who may have access to trade secrets and confidential information.
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in the letter.
Starting from July 1, Twitter implemented strict rate limits for users due to excessive data scraping by external organizations. Verified Twitter users now have a daily limit of 15,000 posts, while unverified and new unverified accounts are capped at 1,500 and 1,000 posts per day, respectively.
Threads’ Rapid Growth Is Pinching
Soon after its launch, Instagram Threads took less than a week to onboard more than 100 million users. However, the engagement level with the new Twitter alternative has posed a challenge for Zuckerberg.
Olivia Moore, a partner at crypto venture capital firm a16z, discovered that just one week after the launch, daily active users on Threads had dropped by 40%, with the average daily time per user decreasing threefold.
Moore suggests that importing users directly from Instagram doesn’t align well with a Twitter-like app such as Threads. By linking user accounts to their real-life identities on Instagram, it discourages the types of social interactions that Twitter is known for, like anonymous accounts and fan pages.
https://twitter.com/omooretweets/status/1680752472045023232
“Twitter has built a unique social graph and interest graph that’s hard to replace. Even with a copycat product, the underlying networks and user identities developed over a decade are tough to replicate,” said Moore.