Twitter is throttling traffic to websites Elon dislikes
Twitter is throttling traffic to websites Elon dislikes
www.washingtonpost.com
Elon Musk’s X is throttling traffic to websites he dislikes
101 comments
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Say the line Bart!
Free speech absolutist
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Stop enabling his childish tactics by continuing to treat his platform as some kind of essential tool for communication. It simply isn't.
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It was - and it's not that the need has gone away or been fulfilled elsewhere, it's just that it's no longer viable.
I think paying close attention to this is important though. It's a case study that just keeps giving - every couple weeks we get an important reminder that billionaires and billion dollar companies aren't a good thing - their interests are not aligned with ours
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I have never used Twitter or X even once in my life. It's definitely not essential. I really don't understand how people have convinced themselves that short format screamposting into the void is somehow the peak of communication. Just quit and let your followers know why.
If people actually cared about what you had to say, they'd go wherever you go to hear you say it. If not, were they really all that interested in the first place? or was it just convenient because they were already on Twitter and so were you?
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This is the correct and only take. Stop using these shit services.
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at this point, with twitter being inaccessible to non logged in user, the 'public square' thing is totally done,. Get off twitter now. There are alternatives.
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true. I know a lot of people are in similar situations, that's what kept me on facebook for years. I'll just say at this point, twitter could just die any day now, starting DMing people if you haven't already and find another way to say in touch.
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People demanding others to leave Twitter often seem to forget that not everyone has the same experience on that platform. If one wants to argue that I should leave to make some sort of a statement then fair enough, but to claim I should leave because it has now become something it wasn't before doesn't at all resonate with my personal experience. Besides the obvious UI changes I haven't noticed anything else to be different. No one is forcing right wing/conspiracy propaganda down my throat there. My highly curated feed has the same content it always has and when I see something I'm not interested about I block it and it's gone. Lemmy is way better alternative for Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter.
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Do what you want but just be sure to know shit is going down hill. It's not effecting you now but doesn't hurt to start looking for an alternative for when these wide sweeping changes do start effecting you.
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This should surprise no one at this point.
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They're going to have a hard time throttling the Fediverse.
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Why? Because there are 100 or so moderately active instances with their own url? Or will you expect people who link to the fediverse to use new or obscure instances to indirectly link to things?
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Yeah they're not going to have a hard time at all haha
Export a list of largest instances and put them in the firewall QOS, 5 minute job max
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A bit of both, actually. With such a diverse amount of instances, covering every possible type of social network, the best they're ever going to throttle the flagships. xD
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Actually they could do the same thing to any Fediverse link as they are with these news sites' links. They added a 5-second delay from when a twitter user clicks the external link from a twitter post, which is garbage overall, but not "throttling" websites. Yes I skimmed the article.
The headline seems to imply that Twitter controls the internet traffic to non-Twitter sites, which is misleading. Twitter is simply degrading the experience of their own site's userbase, and nobody else. The rest of us can still visit the news sites that Leon Skum hates without Twitter.
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Enshittyfication without earning more money? Interesting concept.
Let's call it shittyfication.
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True
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I don't give a xit about Xitter.
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Wait, I was told net neutrality wasn't needed.
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This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Either you didn't read the article, you didn't understand what you read, or you don't understand what net neutrality means.
To your credit, the use of "throttles" in the headline is (likely intentionally) deceptive. It's the wrong term entirely. What Xitter did was make their own servers wait ~5 seconds before serving an http redirect.
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Net Neutrality.
The principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of source and without favoring, blocking, or throttling particular products or websites.
Sounds exactly like he is disregarding net neutrality to me.
Edit: To be clear, proponents of net neutrality believe that all corporations, not just ISPs should follow net neutrality. It's because of this exact situation that people want shit like this put into law.
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It definitely draws direct parallels to net neutrality. It also shows the consolidation of web services into the hands of a few large corporations and the impact it has on the internet.
Im sure Twitter would argue that it's not throttling, they don't limit the speed in any way. But it does make it appear to end users as if the web site is loading slower.
It would be interesting if these sites could see a noticeable drop in traffic during the period Twitter was imposing delays on the redirect. If so, thats potential lost revenue and a basis for a lawsuit.
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What is Twitter?
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A Mastodon alternative apparently. Seems they haven't implemented ActivityPub yet? I'll stay away.
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It's an older platform that no longer exists. You're thinking of X. Which is newer than Mastodon but still hasn't implemented activitypub.
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This is the most perfect response.
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Birdy don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more
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These companies either need to rip the bandaid off and leave Twitter or, at least, start establishing themselves elsewhere and encourage their users to find the content wherever that place is.
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This is definitely already happening. It'll be slow, but both my wife and are work adjacent to marketing for larger companies and "well twitter is a shitshow, what else can we use" is such a constant refrain it's basically canon now.
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Interesting insight. Glad to know it’s happening.
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On Tuesday afternoon, hours after this story was first published, X began reversing the throttling on some of the sites, dropping the delay times back to zero. It was unknown if all the throttled websites had normal service restored.
Who there didn't see that coming? They thought nobody was gonna notice 5s delays on NYT links?
That new CEO must be locked in a cage somewhere at this point because she is definitely not calling the shots on this, or "X", or any of the other nonsense that's still been occurring because only one billionaire egomaniac is capable of this absolute fucking trainwreck.
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People eat Elon Musk's garbage PR like it's dinner.
Every damn day they post about some inane shit just so Elon can stay in the 24 hour news cycle.
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I am not sure being a petty anti-competitive cunt here is inane exactly,if anything it highlights the issues with rich cunts owning access control.
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The most immature billionaire. Scary.
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It's Elon Musk. So it's not surprising.
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Doesn't that go against net neutrality?
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Is Twitter an ISP?
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Twitter is website that contains "links to" the other 5 websites. Those "links to other sites" are really links to Twitter scripts that do database queries before finally linking to the other sites for real. It is easy for elmo to insert delays in the process.
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Yes.
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It provides a service on the internet.
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Net neutrality is about Internet itself. Twitter/X is a service build on top of the Internet, so no.
It is for example when your Internet provider Gomes you 100Mb/s, but only when accessing these particular sites, otherwise it's 1Mb/s. It has nothing to do with data caps or overall speed limit, as some suggest, or with speed on the other end.
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I love the article has an image of the letters T, W and @ from the building.
Good one
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This is a low-key genius observation
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Just like the GTA Internet cafes
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Companies need to abandon Xwitter already
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Elon CornHusk is nothing but an idiot and a MASSIVE bully. Nothing he says or does has any value.
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Thank you for saying twitter
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Isn't it called Ex-Twitter?
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the website formerly known as twitter
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Twitter X Creator Dashboard pays creators for the distribution of CSAM.
If you use Twitter you are supporting the production of child sexual abuse materials.
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There are those of us who were on the Internet before the capital showed up, and all of us said that it was a bad idea to use these corporate silos, that there were implications that were not great to handing what we knew would one day be the public square over to private interests. We were not listened to, of course, and for the thirty years that the government kept the house of cards propped up with zero interest they created a real illusion that it might actually work.
But maybe I have to reassess Elon. I have heretofore considered him something of a bad man, a Senator Palpatine with his "saving the world through capitalism" schtick, but with an Emperor lurking in his twisted mind. And here we have that very Emperor, taking off the mask. But perhaps... perhaps... perhaps Musk is actually Vader. Perhaps in revealing, to all with eyes to see, the very problems we Libre'd zealots have been crying out in the wilderness about, perhaps he is the one who will restore balance to the Internet.
Nah he's just an apartheid rich boy who talked a good line while he could keep pulling free money out of the bag, but now that he has to put money back in the bag he's taking whatever work he can get.
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How has no one just punched him in his stupid face yet?
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Zuckerberg is trying to schedule face punches but he keeps making excuses.
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He can get hit too. They're the same.
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I've had an idea for a song for a while that starts off: "have you ever noticed how no one has assassinated Elon Musk?"
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I bet WaPo tweeted out this article. I'd check but nitter is down.
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slaves kowtowing to their fascist master
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I mean, it is a private company and they can do what they want. It’s a shitty and childish thing that Musk is choosing to do but it’s his $44B dumpster fire to fuel as he pleases.
Advocating for free speech rights for a private American company to be beholden to is stupid because it misunderstands everything about free speech laws work and how companies and content moderation work.
The people who think Elon brought free speech to Twitter tend to also be the people who think free speech starts and ends at your right to use slurs without social consequences.
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101 comments
I cannot believe that there are companies and non-wingnuts who are still actively using that site at this point. Like maybe at the start it was ha-ha funny watching him flail about with code printouts and unplugging random microservices leading to outages, but I feel like the moment he started actively funneling money to alt-right knuckleheads and human traffickers should have been enough of a kick in the pants for even folks heavily reliant on the platform to make their exit.
Thats the worst part about the real world, nobody gives a shit whose at their table as long as they get to eat.
Yep. It’s easy to complain or change your profile picture or share a link but if putting your money where your mouth is results in even the slightest discomfort or change to your comfort zone, that’s usually where people stop having a problem with the latest offense.
As long as our lives keep moving unaffected we’ll abide anything 😞
The problem is that there isn't a great replacement for it now. The same with reddit. I'm on here and I'm on Bluesky. The main uses I have for both Reddit and Twitter/X is sports news and discourse. Reddit for the discourse and Twitter for the news. There aren't the communities here to have that. I want to talk Orioles baseball but the Orioles community here literally has zero comments other than bot comments updating scoring updates/pitching changes during the game threads. I'm trying to do my part and comment/post stuff to them but without any actual responses or conversation it feels like yelling into the wind.
Yea a lot of the niche communities haven’t and probably won’t migrate to these smaller sites like Lemmy and Mastodon. Don’t know how to solve the issue either.
In this case, the Orioles would have to announce they have an official mastodon to get most fans to move to it.
Personally I’ve just stopped using the internet for checking on my niche hobbies. A good number of Reddit clones have been trying to populate communities with bots to just post links but without any discourse, it’s the same effect as just googling “topic” and filtering for links from this week. I’m sure it will get better with time. Maybe
Yep. There are only so many people willing to take the leap for ideological reasons. I bailed from Twitter the day Apartheid Boy reinstated Donald Trump (but laughed when Donald decided to start his own dollar-store Twitter instead). Most people aren't willing to go that far.
I'm tired of being manipulated & jerked around by shitfucks like Apartheid Boy, so I came here for ideological reasons, specifically, because I think it's time to bring democracy to social media, and the distributed Fediverse model is the way to do that. Those playing ball with the Zucks and Musks and Spezs, should know they're playing footsie with wannabe dictators, so don't be surprised when they get shit dictated at them.
Porn is the only reason to use it now
That's the power of critical mass. Person 1 won't leave because they have too many followers and follows Persons 2, 3 and 4, who also have too many followers and only follow person 5 and 6 there, who...
The decline is gradual, but will hardly be complete. Facebook isn't as used as some years ago, but it's still absurdly big. Xitter is likely to lose some relevancy, but there's not much that can be done to truly "kill" it. One way to speed that up is if space karen x decides to block all porn.
Must be heaven for real hackers, bet everything is deteriorating at the speed of time ...
Isn't... isn't everything happening at the speed of time?
I'm really shocked that anyone would be surprised.
So many people that used to be really amazing creators ended up down the Twitter rabbit hole. At first their content suffered, and then dried up completely. And now all you ever hear from them is about whatever Twitter tells them to hate this week.
Hating Twitter is just the latest thing to hate on Twitter. And all these people are going to keep on going to get their hit during the 2 minutes of hate, and then a bunch of them will run off and write articles about how much they hate Twitter based on all the stuff that they read on Twitter.