After enforcing Twitter limits, Elon Musk puts TweetDeck behind paywall

According to a post from Twitter’s support account, the “new” version of TweetDeck is now officially available to everyone. This was a necessary step to assist address some of the recent problems that TweetDeck has been having. However, this change does come with some worry, as in 30 days, TweetDeck will become a verified-only feature. This means that you’ll have to purchase a Twitter Blue subscription in order to utilise it. For almost two years, TweetDeck’s new edition has been in preview.

As per two Twitter employees, all users will be required to transition to the new TweetDeck. Further, the employee also provided a few minor clarifications regarding the old TweetDeck. Recently, TweetDeck has been unusable for many users of the old interface. According to a report by the Verge, all of their columns were simply spinning with a “Loading…” notice, and others too experienced a similar issue.

The empty columns appeared after Twitter started rate-limiting tweets, although, in the opinion of Twitter staff, the rate limitations weren’t the root cause of the issues with the old TweetDeck. Instead, the staff asserts that the problems resulted from Twitter disabling legacy APIs in order to stop data scraping.

One of the employees expressed, “Rate limits only apply to new TweetDeck and Twitter. Legacy TweetDeck uses legacy APIs, and those have been removed to reduce scraping.” Another employee explained that the issues are “definitely not related to the rate limit.”

An employee explained that the process to force the conversion will start “this week,” and in response, people are pleading with Twitter to “please don’t.” The Verge has expressed that the TweetDeck was never as per their liking and they did not prefer it, so they hope that now that the platform has brought changes, it should be for the better. As per the same report, when the publication tried reaching out to Twitter for a comment, they were auto-replied with a poop emoji. Reportedly, this is the response Twitter has been receiving since March.

In the recent turn of events, Twitter has put accessibility restrictions in place as the platform has claimed that it is under attack from several hundred organisations. Users now have to log in to view any tweet. If they choose not to be on the platform, they won’t be able to see any tweets. What’s more, there is a restriction on the number of tweets a user can view in a day. Those who have verified accounts will be able to read 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts will have access to 600 posts a day, and new unverified accounts will have access to 300 posts a day. Due to this, users have reported that they are seeing “Rate Limit Exceeded” messages.

A web developer, Sheldon Chang, reported that a bug in the web app is responsible for sending continuous requests to Twitter in an infinite loop. Chang reported that Twitter is “DDOSing itself.”

The platform is experiencing a series of problems. Reports do suggest that it could be because of a bug in Javascript, but it is also possible that Twitter might have defaulted on some bill payments, as they have done since Musk took over the company.