The limits on posting to Twitter — 500 direct messages per day, 2,400 tweets, seem reasonable enough to most people.

However, I have feedback from people with extensive DM group systems that find the 500 DM limit really chafing. They generally operate private accounts and use the DM system to maintain multiple private groups for various reasons of online confidentiality.

Further, it was the rate limit on reading posts, 6,000 per day (avg. 250/hour), which meant many accounts monitoring breaking real-time world events found the platform to all-too-easily locked up.

For example, if you are doing Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), you often have to scour through a bunch of chafe (crap posts, disinformation, look-at-me distractions, etc.) to get the few kernels of grain (new, unique information) you are looking for. The rate of posts for a suddenly stochastically popular keyword or hashtag means that you can fill that pipe really quickly — sometimes less than an hour.

Twitter API changes have been perceived as utterly draconian, especially for researchers into, say, disinformation analysis.

The thing is that Elon is making these changes without any sort of grace period, or any sort of actual plan. Zero accommodations. Capricious, mercurial changes like this are being seen as user hostile.