Twitter starts limiting how many tweets you can post per day
forum.cktn.de
forum.cktn.de
I think this is a write/posting outage/incident.
Firing everyone seems to be working out well for stability.
> You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets.
What absolute shitshow is going on at Twitter?
firing the folx who run the ship seems to be going swell
There are limits documented on Twitter's website, but I'm nowhere near reaching them.
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-follow-lim...
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a40314411/folx-meaning...
TIL
"Twitter back online after suffering longest global outage in years" (2022, before Musk fired everyone.) https://nypost.com/2022/07/14/twitter-down-as-social-media-g...
"Twitter’s massive outage may be over, company says ‘no evidence’ of hack" (2020) https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/15/21518367/twitter-down-ou...
"Twitter Suffers Widespread Hour-Long Outage on Mobile Apps, Web" (2019) https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/twitter-suffers-worldw...
"Twitter is down again for some" (2018) https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/twitter-is-down-again-for-...
"Twitter is down for some users" (2017) https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/19/twitter-is-down-for-some-u...
Partial or total failures of Twitter isn't some new phenomena.
I don't think people are surprised to see a website go down; they're surprised to see a website go down often enough that it no longer seems like a particularly noteworthy event. I opened this thread to see what people were saying about the policy change and instead saw people complaining about a service outage, and my response was not, "huh, what on earth is going on at Twitter?" It was, "eh, seems about right."
Twitter always struggled with outages, but they shouldn't be the expected result whenever new features/changes are launched.
Key points:
- Free API continues until Feb 13 instead of sunsetting tomorrow
- $100 paid tier grants access to Ads API, which is where promotion and scheduling of Tweets happen. So this will become a necessary but minor expense for brands, influencers, and third parties that cater to them.
- Free API access will continue to be available but users will be limited to 1500 tweets/month.
This actually strikes me as a rational compromise that will bring in a few million $ a month in revenue with significantly disrupting the development/research/comedy bot ecosystem. Bad for spammers and shit-tier brands, both of whom deserve to suffer anyway.
A few millions a month is peanuts compared to what Twitter actually needs, which is measured in billions per year. Was it worth the negative publicity and reinforcing the image that Twitter is unsteady and that policy is changed day to day by a flailing attention-addicted teenager? The end result might sound reasonable, but the process to get there was anything but.
I'd imagine this move will probably not earn Twitter any considerable amount of profits as Twitter is weirdly heavy app and new lazy web scrapers/bots will drain all of those 100$ sales.
For some context, currently there are two ways to scrape/automate twitter outside of the official API since it's a heavy JS-only web app:
- run a real script-controlled browser (using something like Playwright/Selenium/Puppeteer).
- reverse engineer their backend graphql API.
The former is super easy to do but since it runs a full web browser it's expensive resource-wise as it loads everything a normal web user would load (unless configured explicitly not to). The latter is much more efficient but not accessible for most developers as Twitter's backend is pretty complex.
To add, Twitter's backend has a bunch of layers on top of it. I did a bit of reverse engineering for my blog article on scraping Twitter [1] and there's a bit of magic token/header generation involved.
Good resource if you'd like to learn more about how the whole backend works is Nitter [2] which implements most graphql functions in Nim (it's very readable even if you don't know Nim).
1 - https://scrapfly.io/blog/how-to-scrape-twitter/#scraping-pro...
It makes no sense whatsoever seeing what twitter have become.
I saw very little human engagement in my few minutes on twitter.
My feed consists of 200 people and _most_ tweets seem to get around 5-20 replies. The closest thing you can come to spam are "fake" accounts that comment on political posts. It became big news a few years ago when it was revealed that the largest political party in Sweden were behind some of them. I don't think there's much you can do besides block them since they are real people with fake accounts. But it's only on political posts so I rarely see them.
You seem uniquely qualified to solve this mystery.
The Twitter before last year seemed more careful about changes that could disrupt users and businesses, as is appropriate for a company with millions of users. The current Twitter don't seem to mind as much.
DMs are erroring for me, and the Android native app just tweets into the void. This issue seems to be roughly aligned with the announcement that paid accounts will have a 4000 character limit. As expected, status.twitter.com suggests Twitter is, in green-colored text, operational.
As is well-known, no service will ever switch its status page to red unless people moan about it on Twitter first. So, well, you can see the problem.
Elon managed to completely cure this in a few months. Between the constant bugs, the erratic changes, the slowness of the site, getting logged out randomly and being banned at one point for what I can only see as me tweeting a link to my mastodon account, I don't even have the site in muscle memory anymore.
Thanks Elon!
Rome didn't fall in a day.
Freenode didn't either, but this Twitter thing seriously gives me the same sort of vibes.
But the risk of a major outage -- one that the remaining engineers are ill-equipped to handle -- grows. There are way fewer people paying down tech debt, and the ones still trying to deliver features are now doing so in a minefield.
the expression is "Rome was not built in a day."
When dealing with issues like "the Sack of Rome", they pretty much did take place on particular days
http://web.archive.org/web/20180318005947/https://www.histor...
and while plays on words are great, when they're counterfactual it gets confusing what is mean, and becomes unclear if the author knows what's being said, and Rome did fall in a day, 6 times
I’d took much more than one of those for Rome to fall. Which was the point.
When I was in one of these positions, I negotiated bonuses to allow for some failures specifically to avoid this type of conflict of interest. I think it’s also mentioned in the seminal SRE book published by Google.
"New Twitter" feels like the worst version of private equity LBO capitalism. Suddenly the rationale for every decision is entirely extractive finance; load the company with debt to juice your shareholder returns, fire everyone who can't be proven to be profitable, break your leases, close your offices, kill all perks, cease all meetings of your employee affinity groups, make sure nobody is working on projects that don't have a straight-line to revenue growth, squeeze every dollar out of your users, monetize any surplus that you were previously providing while relying on inertia to keep your users through the much worse user experience.
Elon-era Twitter is basically 2000s-era Sears -- and man is it depressing that people are cheering it on.
“2 day a week office requirement = 20% voluntary departures,” Calacanis wrote. “Day zero…sharpen your blades boys."
[1]: https://www.yahoo.com/video/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-messag...
But a few hours were enough for Pompeii.
There's always hope :)
I really dislike seeing (mega-) corps usurping the public domain, and find it highly offensive and dangerous to democracy.
Twitter isn’t the public square, it’s a private revenue stream for Twitter. It shouldn’t be allowed to sway people into believing it’s a free speech platform, nor should it be used as the public space for official announcements by governments and other authorities.
AFAICT at the time, that was more a strawman crea5ed by Musk defenders than the normal criticism/expectation of people who viewed the actions as unwise.
Twitter shipped more features in the last 6 months than in the last 10 years. And that’s with a quarter of the staff too.
Or maybe we're counting a feature that was developed but not released for N (reasonable) reasons, now discounting those N reasons and releasing it anyway as a signal that there's some sort of innovation occurring?
https://fortune.com/2022/12/16/elon-musk-shuts-down-twitter-...
That said, I don't know what bar for "feature over the last 6 months" is actually meaningful. The problem with Twitter was never the user-facing product, it was the thing that actually made them money - the ads. Twitter usage exploded under the Trump years while revenue lagged. The product that Twitter should be innovating isn't user facing.
Instead we have a false dichotomy and more Musk cult of personality.
the whole saga still gobsmacks me to this day. one of the wealthiest men in america tantrum-spends 44 billion dollars on a website, then goes through an agonizing six months pretending he didnt have to buy it and is eventually forced by a judge to complete the acquisition. next, said oligarch fumbles the execution so badly the company basically winds up firing everyone it can and accidentally lock themselves out of the headquarters for the weekend in the process. Eventually the man himself, Musk, desperately pleads for "anyone who writes code" to meet him in the dead of night on the tenth floor of his now empty office only to wind up with midlevel managers pledging their fidelity as the vichy scramble to find their place in the new order and various services begin to fail. Finally, mercifully, Musk is hauled back to Tesla where share prices are tumbling almost as quickly as twitter users are jumping ship, but not before unshackling a prison full of reprobates and racists to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts.
Your point about what a total mess this was is absolutely spot on though. It didn't have to end like this. This was a tragedy of blunders.
Every day is a day closer to when Twitter will vanish, curing public addiction to and dependency upon it. Something else will come later, and slowly be corrupted again as well.
It would have been easier and much less costly to just have made an app from scratch and to have left Twitter to it's prior dysfunctional obscurity.
I think a lot of people with experience understood this fundamental concept but the issue is that it seems difficult to convey this into a headline grabbing series of news articles.
Therefore, it seems as if the whole hubub at the beginning of this saga was this concept but massively overinflated(OMG twitter is going to collapse overnight). In fact I guess you can argue that it was so overinflated that it was lying but thats the standard we have to live with for now.
precisely. entropy tends to increase in this universe. humans are special because our phenotypical effect of creating order is unparalleled in scale, precision, and sophistication.
I remembered always being told growing up that capitalism was superior to communism because it intelligently allocated resources based on the market. But by giving a few people billions of dollars, we're seeing them do the same things communist dictatorships did; throwing money blindly into vanity projects. Like The Line [2], or Telosa [3]. I have to wonder if the modern billionaires are creating a similar instability in society, even if it is lessened by their not being the head of government.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telosa
I might be misremembering but it didn't actually end up as a judge's decision, did it? I remember that they were starting discovery, lots of amusingly embarrassing things old Elno did/said were coming out and he said "OK NEVER MIND I'll buy it then" which suspended the court case pending him actually doing that (which, as we all sadly know now, he did.)
> The Delaware Chancery Court judge has given Mr. Musk until Friday to close his long-promised, $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter. If he doesn’t, Chancellor McCormick will preside over a trial in November that could end with Mr. Musk being forced to make good on the deal he made with Twitter in April.
Close enough.
The imperial administration never really recovered from Commodus (who had a bunch of high-ranking officials murdered), although there were plenty of good emperors after him (e.g. Diocletian, Constantine, Justinian), but their achievements tended to be lost by their successors.
Probably not, but Crassus did live in the time of Rome's centuries-long inflection point.
It's hard to use a phrase like "richest person in the world" in an age where living standards and currencies varied so much, but he was extremely, notoriously, extravagantly wealthy.
He cornered the housing market by showing up to burning buildings with a fire brigade, and offering to put out the fire only if the owners sold the property to him at a steep discount. If they didn't, he let the property burn.
He was eventually killed in a war with the Parthians, and legend has it that they found him so repulsive, they poured molten gold down his corpse's throat as a message.
Many of the worst decisions have their fingerprints all over it.
Journalists Remain on Twitter, but Tweet Slightly Less
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter...
I'm kinda holding out for the slash version.
Let me fix that for you:
> but not before unshackling a prison full of [people we disagree with] to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts.
Okay he immediately fired a ton of people from a company that was notorious for setting money on fire. Is that really surprising, that he guts his newly acquired company, so he can rebuild it the way he sees fit? Especially considering every single other huge tech company has laid off enormous amounts of employees in the last year? Are you just as mad at them as you are Elon?
Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad? Elon is going to do Elon things, and if it bothers you so much maybe try blocking him on Twitter, and ignoring any news you see about him. It’s not worth the stress. Especially if it causes you to take time out of your day to write such a rage filled post. Just go about your day, and don’t worry about how Elon chooses to run his companies. I doubt everyone cared this much about how Twitter was run before this, just go back to that and we’d all be happier.
The anti Elon group grew pretty massively when he laid off people in the way that he did. Anecdotally, I was neutral of Elon before the layoffs but that changed when I saw the way he conducted himself.
> I doubt everyone cared this much about how Twitter was run before this
There are two very separate issues. Some people are upset and mad (so good question, and I bet you get some good answers). Other people, including me, are not at all upset or mad BUT we think it's extremely interesting. And important.
Quite the patronizing tone to say basically nothing.
But I’ll add: tech forums (like this) are built for discussions about tech stuff (like twitter), so of course you’ll hear people floating their opinions about these topics. That doesn’t mean they care more/less than you.
We get it, you’re above such petty discourse, but many tech employees see a difference between market layoffs and the richest man in the world buying a company on a whim and firing people over printed code reviews. Does holding that opinion mean that they’re stressing? Probably not. I’d bet most are just replying on the toilet.
It's because a lot of people have invested time into curating their little social sphere on Twitter and Mad Car Guy has set the company on a path to utter destruction. People don't like to have their things taken away.
You may think Twitter "set money on fire" before Musk but objectively they were approximately breaking even and now they clearly are not.
For reference [1] [2] [3] and so forth.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33999369
Hmm, I've heard that phrase before.
The people who are mad are the type of people who were used to having the illusion of influence, or thought they had the social currency to do/get what they wanted with Twitter.
They've lost that perceived control, and are suddenly anxious that they're addicted to a service they cannot influence or use for social power. They get happy for being able to drill in Musk's failure. To them, Musk is a convenient "rich" that they can finally apply "eat the rich" to.
Okay he immediately fired a ton of people from a company that was notorious for setting money on fire. Is that really surprising, that he guts his newly acquired company, so he can rebuild it the way he sees fit? Especially considering every single other huge tech company has laid off enormous amounts of employees in the last year? Are you just as mad at them as you are Elon?
Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad? Elon is going to do Elon things, and if it bothers you so much maybe try blocking him on Twitter, and ignoring any news you see about him. It’s not worth the stress. Especially if it causes you to take time out of your day to write such a rage filled post. Just go about your day, and don’t worry about how Elon chooses to run his companies. I doubt everyone cared this much about how Twitter was run before this, just go back to that.
The idea that blocking the billionaire owner would prevent me from noticing Twitter is struggling is a little silly.
Yeah when I think of innovation I think of Twitter, and when I think of stagnation, I think of Elon Musk - the guy with the rocket company /s.
I’d also wager that a not insignificant amount of time and effort is spent insulating Musk from anything important, rather like how an oyster coats an irritant in layers of nacre.
Twitter’s problem is that they no longer have competent management. Plus they’ve never needed the kind of organisational immune system that can deal with something like Musk before and are therefore wide open.
It's all out in the open, Musk played an important role in getting it going and still plays an important role in running the R&D side of the company, leaving the 'operational' stuff to Shotwell. There are plenty of testimonies from current and previous employees showing this.
It's pathetic to be inventing stories just because you can't accept that someone you dislike has been successful in some things.
"Surely this next success is ALSO due to luck" - the loser comforts themself on the sidelines. "Surely, this is simply the 14th time they have gotten incredibly, improbably lucky."
It’s fine to have opinions but drawing bold conclusions is best done with factual data over a longer time horizons.
Not sure if you've heard of the McNamara fallacy, but it's something I see a lot on HN.
Point is, the twitter saga is happening now. I'm sure a retroactive analysis of twitter's financials, user growth, activity, etc. would be fascinating ten years from now... but at that point it would have become an academic curiosity. Perhaps a curiosity we can learn from, but in that timespan the tech industry might be totally different.
It's thus silly to brush away obvious qualitative observations and dismiss conclusions from them as irrelevant. Worth noting their limitations, sure.
A bit silly to call this whole saga an "experiment" either. Musk didn't even want Twitter. He decided to axe a good chunk of the folks arbitrarily. By many accounts, a good chunk of the folks left don't want to be there either. Is it an experiment? If so, it's one of the least controlled and poorly set up experiments I've ever seen.
This new twitter incident could well be a result of layoffs and the resulting loss of institutional knowledge, but that's hardly a foregone conclusion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-outage-on-june-21-202...
Twitter is starting to feel very broken in ways that seem counter productive to growth and daily usage.
Just like millions of other people.
Sounds like the clock for rate-limiting is improperly centralized, in my speculation.
Dear brilliant tech-obsessed entrepreneur…this could be you.
Couldn't think of a better way to kill the user retention and engagement.
Well done, Twitter!
Some people haven't been able to tweet at all.
Note that I'm obviously not saying any online discourse is for naught.
But during and after your "social media experience", for lack of a better term, do you feel better or worse, and if not better, did you at least accomplish something?
This also goes for answers to tweets, where even on highly technical, niche topics, a pretty large share of the replies seem either performative ("I'm going to ask a question to impress OP, the answer does not really matter!"), or useless (some tired meme, if it was ever funny), or just plain nonsense ("I don't really understand the technical matter behind that, but here's some nonsensical technical question that seems vaguely related").
I think in face-to-face social situations, most people would be much better at weighing whether their interjection is worth the effort and the attention.
But you have to then be honest about the answer to that. Especially if religious or political conversion is what you hope they get.
I know people say just move away, but for certain communities (I'm not even talking about small communities: like in Japan, all the people from individuals to companies to artists post and only post all the updates on Twitter), Twitter is the only place to follow the news. I don't need anything fancy I just need it to work.
I haven’t tested it, and it doesn’t seem to work for replies (no way to schedule those) but it seemed worth mentioning.
EDIT: Twitter seems up now. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1623454832257548288
I'm now over the limit for sending tweets.
(I pay for Twitter Blue)
I recall the XBox support team having to juggle 8 or more different handles to get around that limitation.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/08/twitter-tweet-limit-bug-er...
[0] https://twitter.com/TitterTakeover/status/162312359733297971...
For want of tweets the subscribers were lost.
For want of subscribers the channel was lost.
For want of a channel the platform-users were lost.
For want of platform-users the platform was lost.
And, all for the want of an API.
I only noticed because it didn't have the constant "(20)" text injected in the titles for once (I never look at that tab anymore because it's always "recommended tweets" spam and it immediatelly fills it with more notifications if I open it to clear the number).
tl;dr:
* 500 DMs (yes, direct messages)
* 2400 tweets
* 4 account email changes
* 400 follows
* Additional restrictions once an account following 5000 people total
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20221129122631/https://help.twit... 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20221213164704/https://help.twit... 3. https://web.archive.org/web/20180103202353/https://help.twit...
it has always been this way, afik. That is a lot of tweets. Who is going to tweet that often in a day?
Isn't Twitter banning 3rd party clients?
...time to move to spacehey I guess
The quality of Twitter's launches has visibly gone downhill.
- twitter prevented me from posting any more tweets "for the day"
- "#facebookdown" started trending on twitter
- "#instagramdown" started trending on twitter
all of this happening around the House hearing. curious.
Where’d you learn about that?
There is always going to be something happening somewhere also.
This is not any disaster. This is the disaster after 99.
Plus, please do not assume that people are only trying to use Twitter. They post addresses of loved ones to anywhere they can find: Twitter, Instagram, FB, Tiktok, local social media etc. and surely Whatsapp before all these.
However, the very nature of posting openly in social platforms are different than platforms which are predominantly used for private communication. People cannot think of building massive groups through Whatsapp. Plus, there's a barrier to reach hub people.
Yup! And they squandered it.
See comment here:
Imagine if the money had been spent on seismic retrofitting so that fewer buildings would collapse during an earthquake? Los Angeles spent $1.3 billion to retrofit more than 8,000 of their most vulnerable buildings. With much lower cost of labour and a $30 billion pot, Turkey should have been able to retrofit far more buildings.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/10xyybj/eu_p...
Let’s wait for the official before pouncing
Interesting how many here took early conclusions, especially many writing that it’s the fault of Elon.
Which is that there is a common thread between Facebook, Instagram, Shopify, Fox and Twitter that doesn't cause outages at lots of other sites like a network link down or routing table misconfiguration would cause.
Now imagine the satisfaction you would get when they very publicly reveal that they aren't a super genius, just a huge rich asshole.
This is why people are enjoying the Musk Twitter saga.
Let’s be honest, Hate is a team sport now.