Musk commented on this: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505
"Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"
"Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"
The last few months showed he’ll silence people whenever he wants (his right— it’s his platform— but clearly he lied)
And now you can’t even consume that limited speech on Twitter without letting Twitter track every single thing you read and link you click on.
Remember when Twitter used to give archives of tweets to the Library of Congress? And had a firehose for folks to consume as many tweets as they could?
My second reaction was “I wonder how hard it would be to take a list of twitter handles and scrape their feeds into an S3 bucket that’s fronted with a CDN.”
It's a shame that he's not able to escape his pathological belief that his product approach is the right approach, regardless of the grotesque impact he's making on what was a good thing for all of us.
I can't tell if it's different people talking now or if people really are that fickle. Probably a bit of both.
I hold both views.
The subtlety is in whether the User is beholden to Twitter Inc in a Just Along For The Ride sense, or is Creating a Burden for Innocent Others.
Former is most of us, latter is institutions incapable of acting insightfully considering the possible future (this one we now live in).
Then I realized... hello there! (:
I was going to host the screenshot on imgur, but I'm not sure if we can trust them anymore...
Secondly, that "data pillaging" was exposure, he just removed exposure from people's tweets to save money, again.
Good work Elon.
It's the same with reddit, the user is the product, which is why they don't want you using third party apps/frontends.
The more Musk makes changes, the faster it degrades.
Stuff like this will happen more often in the future. It's downhill all the time.
With all the public officials on Twitter (and FaceBook) publishing "public-facing" information, I'm surprised both are allowed to be/remain walled gardens.
To do my business taxes this year I had to DEMAND paper form acceptance, which was begrudgingly accepted once I went, in person, to the tax authorities [they want you to provide all sorts of tracking JUST TO FILE STATE TAXES, under the auspices of "two factor authentication"].
As a technosophisticate that intentionally avoids email and doesn't carry a cellphone... I weep for what my public-interfacing world will yet become.
There’s lots of legitimate reasons to criticize, but making a more efficient company and firing valueless employees is not one of them.
Seems just another day at Twitter dot com.
What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674898695534309378
"1. Scraping is already disallowed by T&C.
2. The scraping orgs dgaf & mask their IPs through proxy servers or through orgs that appear legit. For example, a recent massive scraping operation originating from Oracle IP addresses was just using their servers as a laundromat.
3. We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now."
What does “our” refer to here? Does Twitter (i.e. musk) own the data in any sense? Or does he mean it as “we the people’s data”?
Very off-putting to read that sentence. Obviously he’s trying to monetize the user generated data in this LLM rush as other avenues to monetizations have flopped.
But I'm happy to speculate: Organizations violated the twitter TOS by scraping, and he's going to sue the organizations for it.
> In a second ruling in April 2022 the Ninth Circuit affirmed its decision.[5][6] In a November 2022 ruling the Ninth Circuit ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's User Agreement and a settlement agreement was reached between the two parties. [7]
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I'm not saying you owe CEO billionaires or billionaire CEOs better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here. If you'd please review and follow the site guidelines, we'd appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
As far as snark, I see several other examples of that—also intended for Musk—in this thread. They don't strike me as either offensive or particularly constructive, so it's not clear to me why my comment was called out here. (Especially considering that there are a few other comments that definitely go beyond the acceptable levels of user-to-user snark as I understand them.)
I can avoid sarcastic comments about billionaires in the future, if that's a problem. If the issue was snark directed at another user, that wasn't my intention.
I'll also say that the "snark" rule you cited, while well-intentioned, seems very broad and selectively applied here.
It does not say “don’t be snarky unless scarasm is directed at a billionaire because then it’s ok because they have a lot of money and power, so we will allow it”.
You would then need to define some amount of money that would put someone in then “can be flamed” category.
The rule is not applied selectively here; it is applied to everyone, Musk included.
I'd say what's not clear to me is what to avoid in the future. I'm not trying to be difficult here—and dang is one guy dealing with the internet version of a city, to be sure—but I see sarcasm all the time on HN. The really toxic, demeaning stuff, sure, that has to go. In this case, it never even crossed my mind that what I said would be interpreted as targeting the person I was replying to. (While I wouldn't have flagged it, your snarky response, by contrast, was pretty clearly targeting me.)
Looking over the thread—and HN in general—there are no end of snarky posts, including yours, and especially in regards to wealthy tech guys like Musk. The vast majority of them are permitted. That's what I mean by "selectively." Going by your interpretation, no snark would be welcome at all; if that isn't the case, which I didn't have the impression it was, then what was it about my post that warranted a response more than the others?
Genuine question. I can observe consistent rules, but I'm not seeing consistent application of this one.
The reason I saw your comment rather than the other ones is that it was heavily upvoted and right near the top of the page—and that's just the problem: snarky, shallow comments attract upvotes, which causes them to occupy prime real estate, crowding out better discussion, and that distorts the character of the thread and ultimately of the site itself. This is one of the biggest problems HN faces, if not the biggest.
You can say that this problem is caused more by upvotes than by comments, and I agree - but we can't address the problem at the upvote level (at least not publicly), and anyway if the flypaper weren't hung in the first place, the flies wouldn't have thronged to it.
It's impossible not to "selectively apply" the rules, the same way that not every speeder gets a speeding ticket, and of course when you've seen other people speeding worse than you (which they invariably do), it feels unfair that you're the one who gets pulled over. The main things to realize are (1) it's nothing personal; (2) the randomness evens out in the long run; and (3) the only way to keep HN going in a good way is for enough commenters to understand this and take up the work of following the site guidelines (or really, the intended spirit of the site) even when they see others not doing it. I hope this helps explain things a bit...