Most people aren't even aware that Twitter has a speed limit. But a handful of extraordinary tweeters exceed it almost every single day.
Via: @buzzfeedandrew
At the moment of this writing, a man named Thom has tweeted 192,587 times. He signed up for Twitter three and a half years ago, which would work out to one tweet every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day. But he says his activity really didn't pick up until 2010. "I think i went from 150k to [nearly] 200k in four months or so," and that, while he's not sure of his estimates, he thinks he's probably posting at least 500 times a day.
Twitter has a speed limit. It's high enough that virtually nobody reaches it by accident, and that most people don't know it exists. But if you tweet too much and too fast, your account will get temporarily suspended, or rate-limited. (Super-tweeters call this "Twitter jail" or "TwitMo") Twitter's official limit is 1,000 tweets a day, but that assumes a steady rate of posting. The algorithm is adaptive, so a much smaller burst can result in a banning, too.
The company's site says the limits are in place "for the sake of reliability," and "alleviate some of the strain on the behind-the-scenes part of Twitter and reduce downtime and error pages." A Twitter spokeperson tells BuzzFeed FWD that limits are in place for "technical and user experience reasons — for example, to limit spam." They're a safeguard against bots and timeline flooding, basically — not an attempt to slow users down. As far as Twitter users are concerned the rate limit is meant to be a theoretical maximum, like the speed of light.
