Musk is undeniably just trying to run twitter into the ground at this point.
Musk is undeniably just trying to run twitter into the ground at this point.
Musk is undeniably just trying to run twitter into the ground at this point.
This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.
The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.
These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.
"The DDOS is coming from INSIDE the HOUSE!"
The self-DDoS truly the height of idiocy. It’s been a good couple of weeks watching billionaires who have never faced consequences fuck around and find out.
Elon was right, firing off many engineers didn't cause any DDoS attack from outside- as DDoS attacks are now happening from within
I find it especially bizarre that spez took inspiration and guidance from Musk. I can entertain the possibility of Musk intentionally driving Twitter to the ground (though he sure is taking the scenic route), but Reddit? It just seems like the rich tech bros have collectively lost their minds
You can't lose something you never had
I really don’t believe at all that he would intentionally drive it to the ground. I can see him claiming that if he manages to actually kill it tho
They never had their minds. They just now have enough money to make that all of our problems... This is why no one deserves billions of dollars. It makes you go megalomaniacle.
They just don't want LLMs scrapping their websites
Yo for real, what's up with all these social media sites literally shooting themselves in the foot as we speak?.
Youtube planning to antagonize adblock users and limiting video watching, Reddit killing itself with bureocracy style and now Twitter doing this shit. Hopefully shit sites like TikTok or Facebook jump on the wagon too.
For reddit at least, The money from VCs dried up. They have to monetise fast or go broke.
Elon way way way overplayed for Twitter and the company is hemorrhaging money paying the loans he took out to pay for the purchase.
Google in general is in decline. Ad sales are down as the net becomes SEO'd to death. Marketing teams just aren't willing to pay for Google ads like they used to since the roi isn't there anymore.
The world is starting to wise up to the fact that online advertising is nearly 100% fraudulent so they aren’t buying online ads as much.
The tin foil part of my brain says that they're trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it's just that we've reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it's turned out that this 'they're selling your data and making billions!' was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as 'we're having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!' so all the idiot 'angel Investors' threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say 'ok you dominate the market, now what?!'
The tin foil part of my brain says that they're trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it's just that we've reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it's turned out that this 'they're selling your data and making billions!' was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as 'we're having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!' so all the idiot 'angel Investors' threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say 'ok you dominate the market, now what?!'
It goes deeper than that.
This all started with the API changes. Before they were charging a fair price for the API and companies happily paid it for the convenience. Then Elon got greedy he started charging a ridiculous amount for the API so those companies decided it would be worth it to just deal with the annoyance and switch to scraping the website instead. But when you hit the website it's way less efficient than hitting the API because it's doing a bunch of mixing and ranking which is a lot more complicated and costly than serving static content, which costs a small fraction of real time algorithmic ranking. So now instead of making money off companies that want their data they're losing money on the cloud costs to serve the scrapers.
More recently, they haven't been paying their hosting bills to Google and their service was set to expire at the end of last month. What just happened at the start of this month? They added the limitations. That can't be a coincidence. Now the Google services weren't hosting the site itself, otherwise they'd probably be fully down right now, but it was hosting their trust and safety services for things like fighting spam. That could have also been hosting anti scraper services as well. Since they're so under staffed they probably couldn't swap the services in time, so instead of having anti scraping services like every other big company on the internet, they decided to cut service instead. It's just built up incompetence coming to a head.
How is that even possible? By limiting access the load should be lower, there is no way
Much like the case of Reddit, Musk might want to reflect on who actually produces all the content he's guarding so jealously, and ask himself what's likely to happen to the value of his site if he makes it difficult for millions of us to write all his content for free
I don't think this is that complicated. The hypothesis Musk and Spez are pursuing is that right wingers are easier to monetize because they are stupid. They are basically purging the old, liberal web2.0 userbase, under the premise that they are going to build back something which is more friendly to the conservative social media space.
Elon Musk, the latest billionaire owner of the online screaming match known as Twitter, sat slumped at his desk, staring at a wall of monitors blinking with a technicolor smorgasbord of error messages. The reason? He'd just let Twitter's hosting contract with Google lapse because he thought it'd be fun to see if he could migrate it somewhere else. The results? Not so fun.
A comment on Reddit had caught his eye, and he couldn't shake it. "Every now and then Elon must have a moment of clarity. Where it occurs to him 'Maybe I am just stupid?' But then he violently buries the thought."
"Stupid?" he scoffed aloud to his empty office, sending a mini landslide of Mars Rover prototypes tumbling off his desk. "I'm a genius."
He remembered how smart he'd felt when he decided to axe the account verification system, only to reinstate it after a week of high-profile mix-ups that included the Dalai Lama being mistaken for a llama enthusiast.
And the content moderation! Who needs it? Well, as it turned out, everyone. Without it, Twitter had turned into a feral wilderness of conspiracy theories, insult slinging, and more unsolicited pictures of eggplants than a greengrocer's catalog.
And then there was Kanye. "Free Kanye!" he'd declared one afternoon after one too many rocket fuel coffees. But after the notorious rapper had declared war on flannel shirts and clogged up the site with CAPS LOCK tweets, the ban was back on faster than you can say "Kim Kardashian for president."
"Stupid?" he muttered again, watching as Twitter spontaneously DDOS'd itself like a robotic bull in a digital china shop.
There was a pause. Then a grin spread slowly across Elon's face, as if he'd just understood the punchline to a particularly tricky joke. "Naaaah," he laughed, slapping the desk.
He looked at the chaos on the screens, the digital calamity his decisions had wrought, and couldn't help but chuckle. There was something amusing about being this absurdly, cosmically, hilariously brilliant.
"Back to the drawing board," he chuckled, picking up a Mars Rover and making it do little jumps across his desk.
Remember elon musk isn't smart
We shouldn't credit him for Tesla, spacex, etc because it's the employees that actually put in the effort and contribute
Elon is just a Mr moneybags that thinks he smart because the things he funded have been good ideas when he actually never contributed anything to those ideas
I can't wait until the companies he's finding push him out completely
People call him an inventor. He's not an inventor, he's an investor. He's not an engineer. He doesn't know how to make cars or rockets. He didn't invent the Tesla and he just plowed money into SpaceX. His brilliant ideas are things like having the Tesla make a fart noise. His experience is in coding and, based on comments of former Twitter engineers, he's not even very good at that.
Honestly this is probably more close to reality than anyone wants to admit.
As a former individual who understands the underlying systems, it seems like they botched deployment of a new feature causing issues and cannot figure out how to solve them.
Most of Twitter is and has been in maintenance mode since acquisition (think of 10 man engineering team and 1 left to handle maintenance).
This is why it cracks me up every time when someone is praising Elon for "cutting slack" when firing all those twitter employees. Yes, twitter did not implode immediately. Turns out, people can build software that is stable enough to run in maintenance mode. But good luck dealing with new issues cropping up.
I've noticed that my batch image downloader works on maybe 40% of all twitter posts, and only 40% of the time (It used to work 100% of the time before Musk arrived). It's fucking annoying. I think they're having major API and CDN issues.
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I've heard.
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I've heard.
Image Transcription: Twitter Post:
Elon Musk, @elonmusk
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits
I'm a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!
I am amazed that this transcribing thing went from Reddit to the Fediverse. Good work 👍
Well, that transcribing thing is volunteers, and I brought it with me haha
And thanks!
Good human
That rate limit is insanely low, even for verified. I’m not verified, but I hit the limit in like 10 minutes of very distracted usage.
The hilarity is that these moves are the exact opposite of the so called Public Square he claims Twitter is or should be.
It’s just like how they forcibly remove you from public squares after you’ve passively listened to people for 15 minutes
The quintessential public square experience
Yeah, 600/800 sounds like a lot until you realize that includes all the stuff you're just scrolling past in your feed or comments, not even clicking on. I wouldn't be surprised if they even overlooked the fact that ads might count against that cap too. I'm no heavy user but hit that cap in less than 20 minutes of reading people reacting to the news.
Transcription for the blind: Screenshot of a Twitter post from Elon Musk, Twitter handle @elonmusk, that says:
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits:
1:01 PM Jul 1, 2023 3.6M Views
-Transcription from a human volunteer. Let me know how I can do better.
Thank you for the transcription, human volunteer :)
The sequence of events from Elon Musk acquiring Twitter to now is an incredible journey.
Maybe I'm dumb, but this is starting to seem like these Tech CEOs are dumber than we thought.
Why not just make 4000 accounts and have distributed scraping? What are they going to do next? "Unverified Twitter accounts can only be accessed 10 times?"
I don't think this has anything to do with data scraping. They seem like can't pay Google server bills and now got into metered connection
They've always been dumb. You don't put smart people in CEO chairs, you put smart people to do the actual work and leave all the decision making to idiots. Hence the results.
The ones who have that position because they provided capital or such really have nothing left to offer. And I bet that actually really bothers these venture capitalists. They have no use other than their money. When they try to show that they do, they prove that they don't.
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It's part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism's status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we're in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn't be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
Hey I see you're commenting from lemmy.world, since yesterday I've had troubles opening links, viewing posts and images, and posting comments. Are you having the same issues? I wasn't even able to open this post on my lemmy.world account
https://lemmy.world gained 40%+ users on July 1st alone.
Methinks the servers are melting from #RedditBlackout.
Elon Musk don't make the worst decisions known to man challenge (IMPOSSIBLE) (GONE WRONG)
The Future
Why are so many people suddenly against Twatter burning? I thought we all wanted that?
Oh I'm all for it. Let it crash and burn. Any time a billionaire gets embarrassed is okay with me, because it's the only thing that will hurt them.
Embarrassment and submarine implosions
limiting engagement an app that RELIES ON ENGAGEMENT????? IT CAN'T POSSIBLY GET DUMBER THAN THIS???
“Starting immediately, all McDonald’s will restrict the number of fries we sell to 1.5 packages per customer.”
More like the ketchup packets.
Twitter and Reddit both dying at the same time was not what I expected in 2023
The CEO of Reddit is a huge Musk admirer.
who had two social media companies dying on their bingo board?
They have never properly turned a profit - and relied solely on VC money. It was kind of "obvious" from the beginning - this house of cards of completely free services is increasingly unstable.
That man has got to legitimately be one of the stupidest motherfuckers to ever luck his ass into a pile of money.
My pet theory...... Though I don't believe it.
Musk and u/spez are playing 4-dimensional chess. The end goal is to increase freedom and user choice. By slowly destroying their respective platforms, people are driven to the fediverse, the idea of centralised platforms is tainted, power is shifted back to the user and long term everyone is better off.
It is a nice thought experiment.....
This but I don't think they are on the side of the people. For both of them it could be personal or part of some secret deal, though if it's the latter at all, it's probably both. Both got a lot of disrespect through those platforms, and the freedom of movement of information on both platforms were making things more difficult for entities that were previously dominating the information game.
I just wonder what their next play is if I'm right. I suspect Reddit will walk back their changes to try to kill off these decentralized mass social media sites to bring the discussion back to the centralized ones where they can at least influence the discussions with admin access to the platform.
Elon is so damn transparent. I NEVER remembering anything like this happening before Elon. Dude is running this like a moronic mob boss.
"Hey..it'd be a shame if you could only view 600 tweets. I have this Twitter Blue that might be able to help...."
The mob boss who wants $8/mo for a lame service but won't harm you if you don't want it?
I thought this guy was supposed to be stepping down - didn't he even announce the new CEO?
Well yeah there is a new CEO
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/technology/twitter-ceo-linda-yaccarino.html It sounds like he really just hired her as an advertising coordinator and slapped the CEO title on her.
Edit: I think I made a poor assessment of this article. It mainly focuses on the advertising part of her job and I mistook that as encapsulating her entire position. I encourage you to read and make your own judgment.
She was supposed to ride it the last mile to the dump off a glass cliff. Then she tried to fix it so he's stepping in to finish it off.
Yep his Twitter suicide bomber tried to take off the vest so Musk had to step back in, suit up and restart the countdown.
So with Spez having a hard on for Elon and how he runs Twitter, how long until we see this on Reddit? Premium members can view 1000 posts/day and regular members can only view 100 posts/day. Similar rule will apply to comments too.
I find this more mildlyhumorous than infuriating. I'm looking forward to a new era where every news article no longer includes a string of embedded tweets. :) As a non-twitter user, this certainly doesn't encourage me to bother making an account.
He's impulsive and doesn't know when to shut up. I got the distinct impression that, initially, he was absolutely not serious about buying Twitter. It was a joke/jest. BUT, because his antics affected their stock price he actually got forced into the purchase and now he's desperately trying to figure out how to make the purchase worth what he actually paid, which is fine and all, except he seems to be leading by impulse, not by consensus or logic. He wakes up in the morning, has some random ass idea and implements it without any oversight. Even his new CEO straight up admitted that she is basically a straw man CEO who will offer no friction to anything Elon wants to do.
This is pretty much what ive thought all along. He already owned a huge chuck of twotter when he said he'd buy it. The Ftc called him out and accused him of market manipulation. He then tried everything thing he could to weasel his way out of buying twitter but failed. Now he's purposely trashing the site so he can declare bankruptcy and get his money back. That's my theory at least.
When a company declares bankruptcy the only money anyone gets back are the value of the company's assets. Which some quick googling indicates is somewhere around $14B. So $30B less than what he paid for it.
I've heard Twitter was actually worth somewhere around $25B when he bought it. If he did nothing and left it alone for a year and then sold it, yeah he'd have lost around $20B from the whole mess, but that's still better that driving it into bankruptcy.
I think it's more an ego thing. He obviously overpaid for Twitter, and he can't admit he made a mistake, so he's trying to find a way to blame the mistake on the "woke" left or whatever.
Things like Reddit and Twitter are bad for billionaires. It makes it harder for them to exploit you when there is a public place to talk about their bullshit.
Mastodon for the win!
Juli 1
Somehow I doubt it's even that. The guy's just a braindead, incompetent moron. I don't think the fucker's even smart enough to realize this is literally the worst possible decision he could've made.
im pretty certain he is being paid by the saudis to destroy twitter. it's way too powerful a vehicle to be in the hands of the proletariat.
this might sound crazy but ..... this is why kbin/lemmy etc is so important. in about 2 years+ time, there will be a gigantic global civil war as the masses rise up and seek to annihilate the billionaires. the billionaires will hide behind the use of nukes by russia, then china invades taiwan, then WW3, then Biden is cloned, Covid26 arrives, global tsunamis and geostorms, and then the aliens invade. It's all pretty much clear. we need to organise now, to just give 0.5% of our kids a miniscule chance to survive the coming extinction of humanity.
Yeah Occam's Razor and all that, he's probably just a fucking idiot.
Funny enough, it's actually Hanlon's razor.
I bet the throtteling is not caused by data scraping but by Twitter not paying their Google Cloud bills and therefore now with the new month they got services suspended.
I'm quite shocked Elon would implement a policy that is counter to the purpose of twitter... As controversial as it is, doomscrolling is probably twitter's biggest busines
Let me get this straight… paying verified members have limits on how many tweets they can read
"Extreme levels of data scraping" my ass. This is probably meant to reduce server costs because Elon put a huge hole in this boat and now he does a very loud "look-what-you-made-me-do" scream. And what on earth would "system manipulation" exactly mean? Sounds like some pseudo-profound bullshit.
pseudo-profound bullshit
That sounds like every single public statement he's ever made.
Most likely attempt to force people to pay if you ask me. Paid users have significantly higher limits according to him and I wouldn't be surprised if they are not implemented for paying customers. Others have a casually low limit which can be reached easily.
For me, the biggest mistake he made was put the signup wall without an initial reading limit of 1-10 tweets. Tweets are used as citation by journalists in news articles because people use it as an official platform and many journalists use it to report on what's happening to a fairly large audience of followers. This is only one example where the signup wall ruins it all. You can't even go in to read a single tweet. However, look at Medium. I despise it on a personal level due to the quality reduction it caused, but at least it only shows the paywall after your 1sth/3rd/10th article. At least it provides a window to your website from the internet. Elon Musk has slain that dragon too now, and all the windows to look through have been boarded up. He has walled himself and all Twitter users in.
That has been his goal since he got forced to actually buy it rather than just boosting the stock so he could make a profit, which like most of his antics was really the only goal (publicity and money)
what's the end game tho
This is beyond speedrunning enshittification now...
I'm eager to see what twitter users think of this - lots of people are watching, and corpos taking notes.
Edit: He's announced an increased limit but it's hardly generous IMO.
I think this really will be the straw that broke the camels back for a lot of people. I don't think it will immediately kill twitter but it will have a lasting effect. And if not this I am sure he will come up with an even worse policy change within the next 2 months. Something like limiting it to only 10 tweets per day for unverified users.
I see that a lot of people complain about reddit, twitter, and whatever mainstream website completely fuck the consumer, but fail to realize one crucial thing. The only time change happens in mob settings is when the pain of no change is greater than the pain of change. I applaud Elon, spez, and who ever else wishes to put there services behind their paywall whether it’s an API or just simply viewing tweets. Anyone in the know knows that it’s a crock of shit and anyone who isn’t is annoyed to the point where change is preferable. The sooner people figure out posting information, entertainment, and other forms of media/knowledge to the benefit of a company is horrendous the better. Now we have the opportunity to get rid of the corporate greed and basically open-source peoples knowledge from around the globe. Although like with reddit, mob mentality poses a real threat to communities like this one, I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother (as corny as that sounds). I much prefer it over giving more information to companies who use it to profit off of my content, while I receive nothing.
*Edit: Thank you kind stranger for the reddit gold! Glad you spent real hard cash so I can have reddit premium and reddit coins! The lovely people at reddit will be spending your money sitting on a yacht eating grapes in one hand and lobster in the other. I’m sure they are real thankful too! :) *
I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother
Not me!
Username checks out.
That would be the most incredible thing if Elon’s plan was just to destroy Twitter from the inside. Pipe dream I know.
I mean I see why Reddit and Twitter are doing it. We're in a really weird transitional period of the internet right now, for better or for worse. They're doing it to prevent scraping, because why would you read all these garbage tweets to get to the information you need when an ChatGPT can spit out the exact information without fluff? It's taking their content without any funding back to them, effectively stealing their revenue.
So what are these companies to do? Honestly I hope this is birth to a new form of social media, and this benefits the fedi greatly. It will be unsustainable to run large social media companies like theirs who profit off of user data and content. Whereas tons of fedi servers ran by hobbiest, effectively ran out of pocket or by donations, is much more sustainable. They're doing it for community and more pure content that everyone wants without corporate fluff. If ChatGPT scrapes the fedi community, that's okay because the fedi isn't designed to make money so nothing is lost.
How fast can one really read 6000 post ? Assuming you read 100 post a minute, is that 1 hour of usage before getting cut off for the day? I dont really have a feeling how many posts a normal twitter user would go through in a minute.
This is an attempt of someone shortsighted trying to play the long run. If you think bots are the reason for this, you are wrong. Limits are carefully chosen so that they severely hinder non-paying users. Musk is neither good at solving issues nor is he good at planning things. This is his attempt to force more people to buy Twitter Blue.
If you are running a bot or 7, paying 8$ is nothing.
Sometimes the real DDOS are the companies we buy along the way
This reeks of him scaling back infrastructure to reduce costs, gets overloaded, and the C-level talent remainings best idea to prop it up is rate limiting.
Pathetic.
Twitter is like The Producers in that the owner seems like he's trying to destroy and also they've introduced nazis.
Somewhere at Twitter Headquarters... Intern 1: Oh look, I found two PDF's with the company's financial plan. Intern 2: Really, what do they say? Intern 1: Yeah, this one's called "Show to the IRS" and this one's called "Don't Show to the IRS."
Or at least that's what he'll claim as it comes crashing down around him
I gave up on Twitter when this turd took over but holy shit...
Hopefully this leads to Twitter not being the public square of the internet anymore at least mainstream wise. The man is doing everything to make the site worse.
What did he even think the purpose of APIs were. Data scraping puts unnecessary load on servers only to scrape out majority of the content. It’s funny how he shoots himself in the leg and now complain.
He's the cause of his own implosion. It's kind of wonderful to see.
I don't know about twitter but it is common for the API to also be powering the front end regular user's interact with. No matter what it's stupid to rate limit this heavily.
True. REST APIs are a godsend to create structures and effectively communicate data. Shame its on the hands of these whimsical cry-baby CEOs
Can’t wait for Reddit to relearn this lesson too.
He'll probably get some total write-off when it fails and get $44B returned to him (from the tax payers, of course)
The sad part is that all the Musk evangelists (and there are a lot of them) will happily pay for a 'verified' account if they happen to exceed the limit.
I feel like most of them will already have it by now. For them its probably just a loyalty perk.
A fool and their money are easily parted. That won't be nearly enough people to offset the mind boggingly large losses of Twitter, however - so they're basically just burning it for a sense of pride and accomplishment.
I thought the end goal is to no more Twitter. And I'm here for it.
Who would even read 300 a day?
Nevertheless, Twitter has fucking died. 😆
I don't know if I could do a worse job running Twitter if I tried
I keep hitting the limit by scrolling down. This is stupid.
Seriously who needs to post 300 things in a day?
Reading not posting, however I still agree. No need to scroll that much.
This isn't mildly infuriating, Musk is being the biggest fedi advocate out there! He's selflessly nuking his own site so he can drive traffic to decentralized alternatives. This is a good thing lol, and should be an important lesson on link rot, and that social media should never be the primary method of communication.
Maybe it was just me but Musk has never seemed like someone who actually understood tech. Just a rich guy who buys up other's work and talks a big game. I knew the second I heard he bought Twitter it was going to crash and burn. He's doing it way faster than I thought possible.
Of course he will eventually say this was all on purposes and not that he is crap at business and tech.
Therefore any company that puts out notices or alerts via Twitter should immediately exit the platform. Running their own server on mastodon would be a better bet