API rate limits at the core of Elon Musk’s decision

theregister.com

6 points·albird··4 comments

How will businesses view any contract from Musk or one of his companies after this twitter kerfluffle? Will there have to be a set of clauses to defend against him changing his mind or losing interest? Assets placed in escrow to ensure compliance? Will this make these companies less desirable business partners when resources are limited?

I would think that other companies are looking for performance rather than performance art…

Why would it matter if he only wanted to assess the statistical amount of bot behaviour across the service? If he's only getting 0.1% randomly it should be more than enough to see the 40% of bots or whatever it is he claimed.

I don't really understand.

We all know about the click farms with humans creating and re-authenticating accounts via VPNs. Not to mention the very probably existing modified with AI blink|geeko/webkit which are trained by those very humans.

"click metrics" and accounts you can create online have literaly ZERO value.

If a company which sells "stuff" wants to assess the "performance" of its internet exposure, well it has only one and sole option: correlate the actual sales of this "stuff" to its internet exposure by itself.

Elon Musk had some ideas about Twitter usage, users, customers, interaction patterns, blah, and and offered $44B based on those ideas. Next he wanted to verify the assumptions, and for that needed API access, lots of it. Twitter did not give him enough access even though (this is crucial) the company could have, as shown by the fact that some paying customers do have the access Elon claims to need.

We all know there are bots on Twitter. The relevant questions are how many of which kinds of humans are there, how do they behave and interact with each other, what income can be extracted from the various kinds humans.

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