"To address extreme level of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits:
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day"
Source: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz94eReWYAEhkHS?format=png&name=900x900
Source (backup): https://i.imgur.com/WvwtHez.png
Edit: actually, since that source doesn't appear to have a paywall workaround at the moment, I'm going to merge the thread back hither.
edit: why the downvotes? I'm simply trying to engage in curious discussion. Apologies, I'm neurodivergent and I can't often discern between humor or not.
It is just that dang likes these words and uses them always when he moves comments from one post to another.
See: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I appreciate your willingness to ask questions, and your candor about neurodivergence. I wish it were easier to tell the difference on the internet between someone who's trolling and someone who just doesn't get the day's in-joke, and, unfortunately, since trolls are really good at seizing on the benefit of the doubt, it's often expedient to err on the side of harshness.
I was making a whimsical remark—not especially a joke, since there was no intended punchline. The words 'hither' and 'thither' used to be more common, but nowadays have more of an archaic flavor, so I found it funny to see them here. (I had not been aware of the context provided by SushiHippie (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36555921), so it was only an in-joke by lucky happenstance.)
You're welcome.
Would be even better if HN would automatically rewrite Twitter links to use the current workaround. Especially if the point is to foster discussion here around a single comment, no need to load the whole application.
Given that this outage and rate limiting may legit make Twitter's business infeasible, I change my prediction that Yaccarino will leave Twitter from within 3 months to within 3 weeks.
I've heard Elon really seems like he's listening and that he's actually going to take advice. Yoel Roth actually believed that Elon was going to implement his trust and safety recommendations. Then he would go and tweet what he was actually going to do as soon as he was out of the meeting. At this point it's pretty well documented.
Fat severance package, a post-termination book deal and international name recognition?
And name recognition too. This is the first I had ever heard of her. So, good move there.
It was a flight attendant he offered a horse to.
You must be crazy to work for Musk.
I heard a rumor (who knows if it’s true) that in the early-ish days of Amazon, they had an entirely separate backend and frontend just for Bezos that would only display if his account was logged in. So when he asked for something crazy they could just implement it in the Bezos-Amazon and not fuck up the main product.
Most people cannot take radical ideas and don't understand that Elon Musk does not need to care and foes not care if he fails with Twitter after first trying to construct something with a social impact.
Elon Musk can fuck up every company he has and (as long as he doesn't get sued by angry investors) he will still be able to live a great, amazing life.
Edit: I get down votes but no replies. If you disagree, it would be beneficial to write why.
It might help the credibility of the free speech absolutionist if said absolutionist didn't assist a certain Turkish dictator shut down free speech, didn't mute journalists covering his actions against elonmuskjet, didn't censor the blocktheblue campaign, didn't try to erase the existence of substack from twitter, didn't help the Indian gov censor tweets that Gov didn't like ... off the top of my head.
An individual using their position of power to silence unliked speech - and help authoritarians do the same ... it just isn't very radical.
He has moronic ones. The only reason any of his companies have done well is because they have people that can manage HIM well enough to do well in spite of his idiotic moronic stupid ideas.
When I try to imagine this, what I do is think about US or British politics after 2015 or so. And then I feel enraged. And I conclude that this is what it would be like, only closer, more immediate, and more sickness-inducing.
Musk, Trump, Boris Johnson: ever-present, narcissistic sociopaths who inject themselves into everything and ruin lives, up close and further afield.
I have no idea whether the Bezos story is true, but the sound engineers working for the Beach Boys apparently really did eventually set up a mixing desk for Murry Wilson (the Wilsons' overbearing, abusive father and interfering manager) so he could make his idiotic changes whenever he wanted, but that only affected what he heard:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/featu...
If there is any sort of novel scraping going on, and their only response is to shut down the site for all the accounts, their engineering capabilities have been pretty much zeroed out, and it's a massive indictment of the leadership decisions.
Plus, at this point believing anything that Musk says is extremely foolish. If this was something that was meant to believed, it would have been posted by somebody with more credibility in the organization who actually has something to lose by lying. That person is literally anyone except for Musk.
It's really hard for me to believe that a uniform 600 tweets read per _day_ limit for almost _all_ accounts is the best tool they have to mitigate a scraping attack. They likely have great insight into the risk profiles of each account based on age, size, past engagement. This is an incredibly coarse banhammer -- very close to just turning off the servers, IMO. Reasonable if it lasted for an hour, debatable if it lasts for a day, idiotic if it lasts longer.
Would love to see the inside story, hopefully it gets leaked/reported at some point.
> Lest anyone doubt that Twitter was idiotic enough to release code that would cause a race condition and result in its own users executing a DDOS attack on it, here's the network console readout from Firefox showing all the network requests blasting away.
Edit: looks like they fixed that issue with a login screen and no 10 requests per second issue. rats
The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.
In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.
The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.
This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.
Unbelievable. It's amateur hour.
#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS
A mostly still movie of a Twitter feed showing a rate limited error message and a jiggling scrollbar indicating repeated attempts to load a resource.
Firefox network console showing 10 requests to twitter.com zooming by per second. https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057
Now obviously firing entire teams changes that metric some. Probably why there's been some high profile outages like MFA. But most companies can sacrifice large portions of their workforce if they only want to maintain the status quo.
https://joinmastodon.org/de/about
Four.
The Monthly Active Users (MAUs) per engineer for Twitter is approximately 600,000, while for Mastodon it's around 280,000.
Only one good programmer could probably create a clone.
Of course the scale matters, but it’s not like you’d be writing an OS.
The problem is that Twitter organized itself as an overstaffed company, with complex structures, complex code, lots of R&D, etc... Than Elon Musk came in and did a Thanos snap and immediately fired half of the workforce, and I guess quite a few others left, especially among the best who would have an easy way finding a good job elsewhere. But while the workforce was drastically reduced, the complexity of the system wasn't reduced and probably never will. So, you get what happens now.
It is possible to run a Twitter-like website with much less resources than Twitter had before Elon Musk bought it, but you can't run Twitter as it is now.
From people that ensure your Kelloggs ads don't appear below literal neonazi movies, to people that close deals on large advertising campaigns, to people that ensure the place where those ads appear (Twitter, the product) actually keeps running.
Hey, just as an FYI, this comment doesn't make any sense.
Why would blocking people from viewing the TL on the home page cause Twitter more stress?
If you block stuff somewhere in the microservie hell in the backend, but forget to update the frontend code properly, and everything was built with the assumption that authentication and authorization is not a thing, and suddenly it is, there's bound to be craploads of stuff that can start spamming network requests.
20 Wait $timeout for new content; if a load failed, it was probably a mobile network glitch or something else we should ignore
30 GOTO 10
But I don't believe on that because Twitter is a billion dollar company and that kind of mistake is dumb. So idk.
This sort of mistake is very common especially when a product is going through a period of change, so it seems very believable to me that recent rate limiting features (or older features that have not been used in a long time or maybe ever) on the backend hadn't been adequately tested to make sure there are no unforeseen side-effects on the front-end when they are activated under pressure.
Isn't Elon supposed to know this shit himself?
I guess we learned alot about the state of the company as well as elons own coding skills with this event, didn't we?
I'd say that shortly after Elon bought it twitter effectively became a start-up rather than an established company.
Arguing otherwise is like saying Xerox Park would have been the exact same institution even if all the staff were swapped with interns and management fundamentally change mission statements etc.....
Kind of absurd when framed that way, huh?
Probably twitter can even do worse.
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
You know what I mean?
You need to understand that there is a huge gulf between "this doesn't make any sense" and "I don't understand this".
to = 2;
while (!request(timeout=to)) {
to *= 2;
}
He wanted to sell ~$2.5 Billion Tesla stock at all-time highs without causing the stock price to significantly deflate, so he used the Twitter purchase suggestion as a cover. He did similar pump and dump schemes with crypto - like Dogecoin - but because Elon is fundamentally a dumb guy, he did the extraordinarily stupid thing of signing a purchase agreement with Twitter
Elon thought he'd be able to wiggle out of it because he assumed the SEC would be the regulatory body he'd be up against - and to his credit he has made a career out of making the SEC look like spineless chumps - but much to Elon's horror he actually found himself before the almighty Delaware Court of Chancery
So in an effort to slyly make a couple Billion $'s, Elon torched ~$40 Billion of his personal wealth, in what is arguably the biggest bag fumbling in modern history
> According to some Arabic writers, Musa's gift-giving caused a depreciation in the value of gold in Egypt. Al-Umari said that before Musa's arrival, a mithqal of gold was worth 25 silver dirhams, but that it dropped to less than 22 dirhams afterward and did not go above that number for at least twelve years.[95] Though this has been described as having "wrecked" Egypt's economy,[83] the historian Warren Schultz has argued that this was well within normal fluctuations in the value of gold in Mamluk Egypt.[96]
Seems like this might a misleading folk tale.
Twitter had traded above that price as recently as five months earlier, and had traded in the $60s and even $70s for most of 2021. Twitter's stock had cratered in early 2022 along with many other tech stocks (Facebook went from $330 to $220 in that period).
At the time, the Board could have argued that the current stock price was artificially low due to market forces, and that it wasn't an accurate reflection of the company's prospects. That's especially true because Boards have access to non-public information and longer term forecasts.
When the board agreed to the merger, it signaled to investors that sophisticated insiders on the Board and their financial advisors did not believe the stock would be reasonably likely to reach the offer price in the near/medium term, on a risk adjusted basis, and thus the acquisition is superior. That's important intel for investors, and one of the reasons why failed mergers are so risky.
The 38% is just the one day premium. The offer was at a discount to the stock price less than six months earlier. It was possible that the stock price had overreacted to a tech sell off, and if the market had rebounded by the summer the bid could have looked genius.
Market pricing in M&A is somewhat opaque and different than trading prices because it's based partly on synergy value to a bidder. To use your house example, if the house next door was willing to pay $1.5 million for your house, then the $1.38M is not above market even if Zillow and the list price say it's $1 million.
There were other potential suitors for Twitter, like Microsoft, Disney, Salesforce and private equity. They might have valued it more than Musk based on the benefits it brought their firms. Twitter would be a lot more valuable inside Amazon, Google or Meta but there were probably antitrust issues there.
Plus Twitter's board and management team had access to a lot of material non public information that investors did not. Even if you thought the market price in early April accurately reflected all the public info on Twitter, the Board was looking at 5 year projections and much more detailed pricing/demand/customer info.
The Delaware Courts give a lot of deference to board judgment in these situations, and Twitter's board would have been well within their rights to say "no, that 38% is not good enough" if that was their conclusion after a good faith and reasonable process.
So he just made it private?
It's a rather dramatic situation.
Your basic assumption already makes no sense. Please list the businesses Elon has started after his PayPal days with the goal of enriching himself.
Also, money is a means to an end, is it not? So what do you think he’d do with more money? Again, you can look at what he did with his Zip2 money. And then his PayPal money. That might give you a clue.
If Twitter stock hadn't sunken immediately like a stone, he probably would have pulled it off, too, even after the signing the agreement.
If indeed the Twitter deal was manipulation to leave poorer investors holding the Tesla bag, it's hard to feel sorry for him.
So maybe that's not the goal. Or maybe it is but the CEO is vastly more incompetent than those underwriting his bid anticipated.
Him losing 40 billion is like us losing 400. It just won’t matter in the grand scheme
Other random ideas for what you would consider counted? you replied, you liked, you clicked a link through the tweet, you expanded a shortened version of a long tweet. There are so many ways to determine "read" and assuming it's always the naive "it was served" is like building a business based off of page views and not actual engagement.
In this case it doesn't matter though because the aim is to mitigate cost, so equating an impression with engagement is fine.
I've read books, like actual paper ones. Spent some time making a simply 2-d space shooter, just for fun. Spent more time engaged with people I care about. Turns out social media is the least social thing ever and basically sucks.
Explain just about all platforms doing revenue adjusting user hostile actions then? Examples include Reddit with the API fees, YT with the Ad Blocking blocking. etc
This is all a reaction to the end of cheap money, aka the cost of capital is going up, so companies need to actually make revenue instead of chasing free capital
>>I don't think this high interest rate environment will last that long
There is no indication this true, most likely the "new normal" is going to be on the order of rates before the 2008 housing crash, not going back to the insanity of 0-1% fed rates...
Bad example. Reddit actions (and Twitter actions) are definitely not due any user hostile actions.
> YT with the Ad Blocking blocking.
This one may be has some merit to it, but we only have Google's word for it, and Google itself doesn't seem to be hurting because of all the bad-no-good ad blocking. Is Youtube hurting? No idea.
The actions are hostile to the users.. Twitter, Reddit, and YT (and others) have changed policies in a way to maximum revenue at the expensive of the users of the platforms.
> There is no indication this true, most likely the "new normal" is going to be on the order of rates before the 2008 housing crash, not going back to the insanity of 0-1% fed rates...
There's no indication that your statement is true either, I think in a 5-10 year span we'll have lower rates simply because virtually every economy is in population decline. In any case, the Twitter and Reddit flubs weren't due to higher interest rates. SVB was, this isn't.
* High returns from interest means the cost of capital is higher. Comparable safe investments return more, so investors demand more of a return from a riskier one.
* As a result, a lot fewer venture investments make sense with the higher discount rate.
* Companies cannot count on going back to the venture till, so high volatility strategies of chase-IPO-now or monetize-now are increasingly employed.
* Similarly, public companies desperately seek better fundamentals now, because future revenues are discounted so much in investors' opinions.
* As a result, a lot of companies enshittify, going after short term wins that risk the entire company's reputation..
As to the interest rate environment: the Fed has suggested a couple more interest rate hikes are likely later this year. It is likely to take quite awhile to walk rates down after inflationary pressures reduce. Current market prices imply rates will stay relatively high for the next few years.
No one really knows what an aging, contracting population will do to the interest rate environment. It's likely governments will have to borrow a bunch more, which can push up rates... And older workers seem to be more productive than models expected, which adds further upward rate pressure.
"When the tide goes out, you see who's been swimming naked."
Really should provide a source when stating things like this, as many will want to check out for themselves exactly what was said.
I went and found the tweet that I assume is being referenced. It's here :
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675205751902486529
Elon says "He is right". So he is referencing the Imam in the video of the tweet he is replying to (not the tweeter, who appears to be female). The video of the Imam's speech has subtitles, so you can see what Elon is saying 'is right'.
Normally I'm inclined to think that Musk is a great product person but this one move seems like a jerk reaction to some numbers not meeting expectations and designing a product to improve numbers without thinking about how the product actually works.
Interestingly, we have had (for the first time in years) decent advertising traction on Twitter in the first half of 2023 and I was planning on expanding that.
Advertising a product like ours has been very difficult because the venn diagram of "people who understand rsync.net" and "people who don't use an adblocker* has a very tiny overlap.
So between suspending our reddit promotions due to the dysfunction there and seeing some (very marginal) success with Twitter ads called into question I suspect we're headed back to square one ...
Rendering engine is all Safari on iPhone, so trying another brand of browser won't help with rendering issues.
Odd statement given that Fidelity just cut its valuation of reddit, but increased it valuation of Twitter.
From today, according to https://apnews.com/article/twitter-fidelity-musk-value-08c64.... It doesn't sound like it increased its valuation of twitter in any way tbh.
In reality that was a month ago, and on June 30th they increased the value
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/30/fidelity-deepens-valuation...
Still significantly down.
It is definitely time to rebuild. I don't know if that'll be ActivityPub and decentralization, but it needs to be something else.
By basing it on an open protocol they can be one of many trusted clients rather than a closed, proprietary service.
Hahahahahhhaha
Human generated content will become rare and more valuable, which is why the remaining non walled gardens (Reddit and Twitter) are quickly raising the drawbridge.
Video will be the last medium to fall to AI generated content pretending to be human generated, and by cloning tiktok across to YouTube shorts they remove the barriers to entry for humans.
Social media nowdays is not about friends, it’s about algorithms & creator monetization. YouTube is #1 on monetization by a huge margin.
Any text based social media network will be absolutely overrun with LLMs.
That's pretty damn sad. Limiting discussion to some video link is just not very social to me. Facebook was the best overall to me until they fucked it up. As a concept, it is the most diverse in allowing users to be social with the various types of posts. Sure, you can do videos, images, text only, but also the events, direct messaging, and other features that i don't really remember because i haven't been there in 10 years.
Does it? I mostly use YouTube on my Apple TV, and the few times I open it elsewhere, I barely check the comments other than to check the audience reception. There are no conversations there.
I’d theoretically trust Apple/Google/MS to own the data and governance, but I don’t think any are capable of executing.
Google had their foray into social media more than a decade ago and it failed miserably. Starting from that point they've produced a continuous stream of failed products that never received enough support to last long enough to see viability.
Frankly I feel Google would be more motivated to challenge Reddit. Since so many of Google’s search results go to Reddit, they might as well try to take over that part of the web rather than leaving it in the hands of mercurial leadership of Reddit.
The only problem is possible retaliation from Reddit and potential antitrust problems if other similar sites feel threatened.
Surprised they aren’t visibly scrambling to get it done anyway though
Every cool startup that people loved started by burning cash. This made Uber cheap, DoorDash cheap, Youtube helpful and creative, Facebook about connecting with classmates, Twitter a free public forum, Reddit a playground for forums of all possible varieties, Imgur an ad-free alternative to ad-laden image hosting sites, 0% loan available for purchasing anything, etc, etc.
But all of this was possible because all of these companies spent more than they made. In fact, most of these listed still do spend more than they make but they're going through contortions trying to change that and many might not survive it. For those that do their products will unquestionably be inferior to what we had in the 2010s.
There's this belief that technology can only go forward, only get better, but what I think we'll see as we move into the 2020s is a growing realization that things were substantially better in the 2010s... but only because we were putting everything on a credit card and not worrying about the bill that eventually had to be paid.
They fail because they need to become billion dollar behemoths to support the VC funding they've gotten. But plenty (not all though) of them could be profitable if they were ran as a "lifestyle" business.
With the debt that Elon has saddled them with I doubt they will ever be profitable again without declaring bankruptcy.
Without the $760M settlement, they'd have made about $270M in 2021[1].
[1] "2021 operating loss of $493 million, or an operating margin of -10%, includes a one-time litigation-related net charge of $766 million" - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...
Who on Reddit wanted chat or live streams. Why is Facebook spending so much money on videos. does Uber really make any money off hellocopters rides. These aren't what people came to these platforms for and are just costing them a huge amount of money.
Reddit was doing fine as a text-only forum supported by advertising and Reddit Gold. Then they went a billion dollars in debt building the redesign which is widely disliked by power users (who are responsible for most of Reddit’s actual activity thanks to volunteer moderation combined with the Pareto principle), and at the same time decided to add native image and video hosting and take on all the costs associated with that. Everything since then has really been chasing whatever’s popular. After Twitch got big, they added livestreams, which didn’t go anywhere. After Discord got big, they added chat, which didn’t go anywhere. During the NFT boom, they invested big in those, which wasted a lot of money and didn’t go anywhere. Now AI is the new hotness, and they’re following Elon’s lead by treating the site as a static text repository which more value being sold to people training AIs than any value that could be gained from just...running the site. This boom will end, either by way of hitting the peak of what’s currently possible, updates to copyright law or other regulations, or just by the AI companies remembering they can just download the Common Crawl database for free and get the exact same content without paying Twitter or Reddit (or even specific dumps of Twitter or Reddit content if that’s what they really want; those are widely available in places like the Internet Archive).
Imgur was never going to be sustainable on its own, since it’s basically impossible to monetize an image hotlinking service by definition. However, they brilliantly decided to pivot the site to being its own image sharing community (with all of the monetization opportunities that allows), while still supporting the original use case as a sort of “unintended” feature (while actually being the whole reason the site was originally made in the first place). Then they suddenly forgot that was the plan, probably after several managerial/executive swaps, and started shutting down everything that wasn’t part of the “community” system, even though the “community” was really created just to subsidize everything else.
Facebook’s adventures with video are probably the single most damaging thing to ever happen to the Internet. Basically, they saw that video ads were wildly more profitable than anything else they were doing, proceeded to inflate their video stats by counting anyone scrolling past an autoplaying video as a “view”, told the entire web that text was dead and video was the future (causing hundreds of major sites to shut down their writing departments in favor of mainly producing videos), used all of these manufactured stats to get massive investment in video ads, and then just kind of shrugged when everything eventually collapsed.
YouTube has been in a good place consistently since the mid-2010s, and just really likes pretending that they aren’t. Like I said with Facebook, video ads are really profitable when done right, and YouTube operates at a big enough scale that the bandwidth and storage costs of hosting all of humanity’s video content is offset by the number of people watching Mr. Beast eight seconds after he posts a new video. The problem is that they’re always trying to optimize for more revenue, leading to massive pushes for family-friendliness to keep advertisers happy, pushing whatever the latest “format” is (at the moment, Shorts) because that’s what advertisers are most interested in since it gets the most views, and just generally trying to hyper-optimize every aspect of the website to further improve their margins.
All of these sites could have simply continued with their original business models and maintained small but lean businesses, and they’d probably be able to even keep getting moderate growth thanks to network effects. But they wanted all the money and they wanted it right now, leading to extreme overextension into whatever else is currently popular, and it only ever leads to the core business collapsing because the people who were maintaining it are off selling NFTs or trying to build a video player.
I never heard of twitch as a non-streaming site and discord as a non-chat website.
Another is that it incentivized companies to try for the Uber strategy of burning investor cash to become a monopolist player rather than targeting a sustainable growth plan. Low-key this has led to long term consolidation to a greater level than otherwise would have occurred.
I am convinced that the overuse of cloud computing has largely been a byproduct of the money firehose of excessive funding. If money was tighter, massively overpaying for compute and bandwidth should be less attractive.
As someone who is deeply interested about performance, efficiency and scalability, I'm hoping there is a partial industry reversal to caring about these things again.
Twitters current issues are entirely the creation of Elon Musk.
And ironically enough, blue currently works as a crappy version of advertising thanks to the reply ranking. The promises of prioritizing "high-quality content" never came true; all we see are mid takes and, if you speak Mandarin, AI-powered sex scambots.
Well, worse for us plebs. Not sure if it's worse for the buyers.
I don't know, I think the hope is there. With these rate limits and some Fermi estimates, we can guess what Twitter's hoped-for revenue per user might be.
Suppose that this move is designed to move regular users over to Twitter Blue, and a regular user might ordinarily see 2000 tweets per day. Suppose further that Twitter would show 1 ad per 10 tweets, and ad sells for 3$CPM on average, and a Blue user sees 33% fewer ads.
An ordinary user would then expect to give Twitter 200 ad impressions per day, at $0.60/day of ad revenue or $18. By seeing 1/3 fewer ads, that ad revenue drops to $12, but Twitter picks up $8/month in Blue subscription fees, increasing the gross revenue to $20.
That feels about right, and the math gets better in the short term for Twitter if it's having a hard time filling its ad spots — a proportionally greater share of its revenue would then come from the pushed-for Blue.
Likewise, if Twitter is having a hard time filling its advertising spots, kicking non-Blue viewers off the platform is not a short-term revenue loss: the marginal eyeball is unmonetized. In the medium to long term, of course, Twitter is strangling the very content that attracts those eyeballs, and this is still a bone-headed business decision.
"Half ads: See approximately 50% fewer ads in the For You and Following timelines. As you scroll, you will see approximately twice as many organic or non-promoted Tweets placed in between promoted Tweets or ads. There may be times when there are more or fewer non-promoted Tweets between promoted Tweets. The half ads feature does not apply to promoted content elsewhere on Twitter, including but not limited to ads on profiles, ads in Tweet replies, promoted events in Explore, promoted trends, and promoted accounts to follow. Blue subscribers will have access to this feature after their account has been reviewed for eligibility and the blue checkmark has been applied."
Twitter has over 12 billion USD in debt though, and with rising interest rate the interest payments are going to be an absolute drag on financial performance. Those payments MUST be met, otherwise Musk will not own Twitter at all. Scaling down user numbers is unlikely to help. Even 3% interest rate on 10b is 300 million per year.
I hope you don't work in marketing. Why would a non-paying user watch Twitter arbitrarily limit the number of Tweets a _paying user_ can view per day, and think "yeah, I'll pay for that".
Hell no, but also don't mistake me for thinking that this was a good idea.
However, particularly when I don't understand a subject well, I try to take all reasonable-sounding claims seriously at first and give them some back-of-the-envelope analysis. It seemed to me that the original claim was that Blue sales couldn't replace ads, but it seems like the numbers are close under some reasonable approximation.
I do agree that this move is likely to drive many users away from Twitter entirely, but a short-sighted company could still think that an acceptable tradeoff if they're having trouble selling all available advertising space.
AirBnb was maybe the worst of the bunch, because it has such a dramatic negative externality on housing markets. Entire areas of Barcelona have essentially no real residents because even those who didn't sell to AirBnb investors found it unlivable with drunk tourists screaming around the apartment buildings at 3 am. I stopped using AirBnb because it was making it enjoyable to visit other cities, but destroying my own. It's also a lot more expensive for fewer amenities.
Spotify hasn't made any money yet. I wonder if they're going to start charging $30/month. Time for the return of CDs, vinyl, MP3s?
The graph of subscribers shows really no change in the rate of subscribers:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/244995/number-of-paying-...
Probably just more stock-pumping ZIRP big exit nonsense.
We (consumers) didn't put anything on a CC. VCs did.
And I count that for the blessing it was. I ordered tons of subsidized food on DoorDash, cheap rides on Uber, etc.
Now that golden era is over, and I will not be ordering any more of that stuff at the now exorbitant prices.
Thank you based VCs, for comping a bunch of stuff for me the last 10 years.
The only structures that were torn down were things that required capital and upkeep. So for example, once you starve the beast of the taxi industry, then the fleet decays and they can’t compete without new capital investment.
For a small restaurant delivery, they can at any point hire another person to run orders just as they always could, with no loss. The reason this is not viable is because the whole economy got disrupted by covid and now it’s not actually feasible for someone to earn a living just moving parcels of food around locally. Like literally the unit economics don’t resolve positively because CA minimum wage is $15 an hour and you need even more than that to have a decent life.
New reddit launched 5 years ago, and many people still prefer using old reddit. Twitter also did not add any feature in the past 5 years the majority of its users cared about losing. If most of your users are fine with giving up everything you’ve built in the past 5 years, and you have a large staff of engineers, then you’ve not been running the business effectively.
So far it's been the attention of the users that has been monetized, primarily via advertising.
But now the content generated by the users has value as input into AI training sets. And AI companies are scrambling to gather as much as they can as rapidly as they can.
The data itself, not the attention of the users, is what is now being harvested.
The companies hosting the data are right to intervene, there's no reason to allow incredibly well-funded AI organizations hoover it all up for free.
Where it's going wrong is how the social companies are intervening. Their goal is correct, their methods are not.
You can believe what you want. I choose to believe what I see with my eyes.
However, you mentioned that today is an admission that the bot problem is worse. However that not true, the restrictions are specifically on viewing data (scrapers) rather than creating data (bots).
I’m not inclined to take Elon’s words at face value, he has an incentive to pump any statistic that makes it seem Twitter is growing.
A famously trustworthy source.
In theory the goal would be to push people like me to register and get an account to at least view, and force me into their platform/ecosystem so I can be measure and monetized.
Unfortunately, much like ape pics, printscreen key exists and people will simply pivot to posting png’s of twitter instead of direct linking
Someones going to say Lemmy and Mastedon - they're wrong.
Only a few power users cared about it and no one cared about them.
Power mods suck, but power users are the backbone of the site. I predict information quality and density will continue to decrease rapidly on Reddit until it becomes no different from Instagram.
(I’m not personally a power user, I’ve just been on Reddit for a while)
Apollo finally went dark yesterday, I deleted it, and haven’t felt a single compulsion to check the mobile Reddit site. About the only Reddit related thing on my mind is whether I’m petulant enough to mass overwrite my posts - I’m only too familiar with the struggle of searching for something and finding dead blogs and forums a few years back.
I don’t think Reddit the company owes me anything, but I wonder how many other “high value” users (in terms of both content and value to marketers) simply drifted away once the iOS apps went dark.
On social network websites, the vast majority of people are only lurkers, a relatively few people commenting, even fewer people posting, and fewer people still who want to put in the effort to build up a community.
Reddit's soul sits in those handcrafted small communities, the big ones sure will stay around and be popular, but there's lots of other places where one can get 5 second cat videos, and memes.
This event eroded a lot of the remaining trust between moderators and the admins, and while that can feel like it's not relevant to normal users, over time this will cause fewer people to be interested in starting a community on Reddit.
You could only join by invitation, so as to make F2F social networks in self-hosted instances, or in a Discord-esque "server". I think the value here would be in exchanging opinions, information and new interests with an expanded social network (you woukd probably like and find interesting your friends' friends). Although I admit this model would be a closed community, if it's only one instance then it's not a problem because there are not a lot of people, and if it proves to be successful, it could span a renaissance of blogs or independent content-generation, i.e. these communities would be closed but reinforcing an open Web, instead of mega-silos with captive audience.
I think that a limit in size for each community would be essential, the first member/admin can invite, let's say, 80, people, each of those can invite 40 people, and the third "generation" just another 20 people. This way you get at most 64k people to interact with. There was a post here on HN a couple months [0] ago with a back of the envelope calulation of subreddits being hostile when reaching a 300k userbase.
[0] https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/scaling-problems-in-soc...
I am not really convinced though, I think it's just plain old incompetence and hubris. But then, it's 2023 so who knows.
But given that they now require users to be logged in, it should be computationally cheap to drop unauthenticated requests at the front door before they incur real expense.
It'd also be cheap to just blackhole datacentre IP space.
The sort of attack that would require this level of limits is malware on tens of thousands of residential machines that can use a user's existing Twitter session cookies. I'm really skeptical that's the case.
How do you explain it suddenly being a problem today and not, say, during the recent World Cup when not only the AI scraping would have been happening but el Morko himself was crowing about how much extra traffic they were handling?
Or hard pushing for Twitter Blue subscriptions, which have 10x the rate limit.
Now there are only very low-quality ads by drop-shipping companies left. I bet they don‘t pay as much as the big brand names before.
Fwiw there's a post trending on mastodon that they DDOS'd themselves as a result of forcing logins to view tweets.
Any estimates for how much?
Right. I just don't grasp how people don't understand he is surely flat out lying.
Yep. Elon clearly lost his motivation for Mars at some point, either because he was confronted with unshakeable evidence that his goals were impossible to achieve, or because he just got bored and distracted.
My guess is that the latter explanation is closer to the mark. But on the other hand, learning that his dream was out of reach could easily have led to the kind of dissipative, self-destructive loss of focus that we've seen from him over the past couple of years.
For those of us who were on board with his original vision, he's just another Lucy, holding just another football.
> Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified
lolwut. Quoting a post from Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@maxkennerly/110640373859329500
> LOL this is not how you deal with "data scraping," this is how you deal with a catastrophic loss of system capacity.
> You limit data scraping by blocking things a human user couldn't do, like access a thousand posts a minute. This is aimed directly at reducing normal activity across the whole system.
My guess is he got rate limited himself after a few hours as a verified user so he’s already upping it
Needless to say, if true, this would be extremely funny.
This isn't accurate at all.
Standard operating procedure for large-scale scraping is to use a botnet, it's a sybil attack where you can have tens or even hundreds of thousands of IPs ticking away at 10 requests per minute or some such. Done correctly, it's nearly impossible to detect which nodes are complicit from their access patterns or user agents.
That said, rate limits work relatively poorly against this. A proof of work approach like HashCash might work though.
That said, someone mentioned that the login page alone involves 11 MB of data transfer, so maybe that is the problem they are confronted with.
Could it be that they just stop paying bills for Akrose and they shut down their service?
Well, at least he's engaged over a holiday weekend.
If it was my company, this would be a fifteen meetings, a six-month series of sprints, and we still would only decide on a new color for the icon.
But that's OK. Twitter has a big engineering team that should be able to sort this out soon. Oh, wait...
Advertising must really be in the hole to force users off the site like this.
Case in point: I was watching the F1 sprint race this afternoon, taking part in a few discussions on Twitter about it as I always do. It took 10 minutes for my rate limit to come up, so thats me done on Twitter for the day, and advertisers not getting impressions.
I’m a big fan of Elon and what he’s built so I wasn’t planning on leaving, but can’t even use it now. Mastodon still seems too complicated to get the masses on. Where will non-tech folks go?
As a casual user, it's noticeable how many people are posting now.
It's lively, and I use it everyday.
TBH, I don't really miss the people that don't want to come over.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...
Just good to know for context.
I’m really not sure where this narrative is coming from. It‘s always so weird to me. Why be so wrong?
making sure that nobody can see ads by ratelimiting them too hard really helps with this, or so I'm told
Events like this would be a perfect opportunity to grab users from Twitter. But they're not ready.
I am active on both Mastodon and BlueSky, but I'm finding my self way more on BlueSky lately.
Damus (ios) - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/damus/id1628663131
Amethyst (android) - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitorpampl...
Satellite (web) - https://satellite.earth
Primal (web) - https://primal.net
Iris (web) - https://iris.to
Snort (web) - https://snort.social
Coracle (web) - https://app.coracle.social
All interoperable. All open source.
I made a test post and was immediately pinged by two crypto bots. Yeah no thanks.
Pretty odd to see somebody burn up all their public goodwill, at the cost of billions of dollars. The man must be hurting internally, there's no other explanation for such self destructive behavior.
Leaving aside completely that one of the luxuries you can buy as a billionaire is that you can develop an impermeable bubble, I've seen lots of people do similar actions at a smaller scale.
A bubble would probably manifest a bit differently, from my very limited experience. The billionaires of the past that did this had a lot more dignity as they fell apart, because they were at least more private and not trying to put on a public show.
But this is all arm-chair psychology, who knows what's actually going on. I believe none of the public statements from the PayPal mafia, it's all meant to influence public opinion and the statements have little bearing on their true reasoning.
And the bluetick-reply-promotion thing will only have reinforced that. Presumably the reason he’s so keen to encourage all this is some sort of inadequacy, so the “hurting inside” thing still kinda works, mind you.
Or he's high AF.
The hard part is the 'hardly ever used by its legit owner', not the "stolen credendials".
I bet some of their infra is crumbling under the stress of all bs Musk pulled.
In the best scenario, the change is really intended, but they messed something with the implementation and Musk will never admit it.
In the worst, their infra is crumbling and they are inventing excuses to save face.
This will show that you cannot run it with a skeleton crew and that the decisions made were either extremely naive or extremely dumb and filled with hubris
“Things will be broken. Things will be broken more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in more severe ways,” he says. “Everything will compound until, eventually, it’s not usable.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
An easier way of thinking about this is, 12 followed tweets with 50 replies each, 600 limit reached.
Do that in 10 idle times throughout your day (lots of people do more, like, say, Elon), and you hit even the verified limit.
When you make the good faith assumption that people are actually reading through the content, the numbers start to seem a bit more rational.
The good faith assumption here is that Twitter only counts tweets read but does that mean the client reads the tweet or the user? The server delivered them all the same, whether a human reads it or not. So does delivery of the tweet by loading it onto the device count or some nebulous amount of time spent lingering on the tweet?
> "I'm certain I scroll at least 100 tweets/minute."
Many Twitter users, including literally the person you are in conversation with, scroll through dozens/hundreds of tweets a minute.
Not sure if you're actually used Twitter before, but many tweets are only a line or two of text, and it doesn't take more than a second to process them.
Additionally, if you're quickly scrolling through replies or someone's history to try to find something, it can render hundreds of tweets in a matter of seconds.
I leave it running in a window while I do other things, and check in a few times a day. Thanks to Twitter product "development", the feed now auto-refreshes itself when you get back to it.
Are you kidding? 6,000 tweets is literally like 10 minutes of scrolling through twitter. You're assuming each tweet to be worthy of being read. They aren't. You scroll through hundreds of them to find good threads.
Twitter with 600 tweets a day is clearly unusable. That’s one large thread, and you’ll scroll past most of it anyway.
That sounds like a miserable user experience in general, what compels you to seek out that experience?
This sounds more like unresolved personal grudges rather than an issue with the platform itself and the masses that use it. If you have a problem with the 600 tweet limit you can pay $8.
Everyone seems to forget that Twitter was bleeding money under the previous leadership. Unlimited free shit has its practical limits.
This isn’t theoretical; look at any high-traffic tweet (well, you can’t now; it’s broken. But if it comes back.) The top replies these days are virtually guaranteed to be nonsense.
Again I must ask, have you actually used the bloody website? It’s hard to imagine a regular user not being aware of this; it’s hard to miss.
Interesting Tweet Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweet x 20 Related Replies x 20 Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweet x 20 And so on.
The sea of bullshit to me is the huge chunks of Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweets that are thrown into the reply chains.
If you for instance open the @elonmusk tweet announcing this, it will load dozens if not hundreds of replies, and those will all be counted against your quota. Do that a few times and you’re done in a few minutes.
I got rate limited after a few minutes of normal use. (Like most users I don’t have Twitter blue.)
I guess Elon probably decided this something like "ok, 99% of those users are reading less than 300 tweets a day! If it's more than that, then those are all bots! Why don't we block them? It will save API cost a lot!"
However, that Twitter can't keep up with the load is completely unsurprising after the way Musk treated Twitter's engineers. You can't indiscriminately shed 80% of the company[0] and expect to have magically retained the key people who understand your distributed system well enough to adapt it to new strains and pressures. There were people in that 80% who knew how to solve this problem and are no longer available to help. There are probably people in the remaining 20% who know how to solve it but are afraid to speak up because Musk has created a hostile work environment.
[0] https://www.engadget.com/80-percent-of-twitters-full-time-st...
I think Elon's real plan is to ride the AI hype train, and the best way to do that is to pretend that Twitter is their "moat".
With his capacity for bullshit and the market's willingness to give gobbles of money to bullshit, I'm sure he can ride his bullshit AI startup to $50B valuation easily.
I mean apart from maybe training a model to run influence operations on failing twitter?
In which world is the ‘data’ from twitter actually of any real world value with Chinchilla law pushing us from quantity to quality?
I absolutely love that the solution is to penalise users for engaging with the platform; looking at replies for one tweet must be, what, a hundred tweets? And better not reply to something yourself because it’ll cause a timeline refresh and cost you another hundred quota!
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-seeing-record-user-eng...
Even for Musk, even for a debt-ridden Twitter with no hope of survival, this is impressively terrible.
Can we also have it closed on Sundays?
I'm getting flashbacks to the awful luddite boomer propaganda Spielberg crowbarred into the end of "Ready Player One" where he made the online virtual world closed on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Right now people are logging onto Twitter to catch up on events in France...and it's not working.
I never believed that the exodus of users after the takeover would be terminal for the platform, but this definitely could be if they don't fix it fairly quickly.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/dayRefresh your timeline, load 20 new tweets. Tap a tweet, load 10 replies, etc.
This is not semantics, as tweet impressions are a separate metric Twitter tracks and would more intuitively represent reads.
Unless Twitter engineering did some malicious compliance for Elon.
Especially so considering how quickly some people are reporting the rate limiting impacts them
(iOS)
Damus - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/damus/id1628663131
(Android)
Amethyst - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitorpampl...
(Web)
Are there any Musk dickriders still willing to defend this guy who just lies to your face?
First, I can't find any documentation explaining the rate limits. Just his tweet. Is this a rolling limit? Where do I see how many posts I've allegedly read? Do replies count as posts? Also, you can't go back and re-read the tweets that counted toward your limit.
His tweets are getting over 20,000 replies. That means that if posts count, even if you paid for your account you still can't read all the replies for a single tweet. This also worsens the experience for existing paid users because the whole point of posting something is so that your followers see it. And if he's trying to get new paid users, why would anyone pay to get a far worse experience than they were just getting for free yesterday?
To add to the absurdity, the error you get is "Something went wrong. Try reloading." And once you hit the rate limit you can't even view the Twitter Support account or your own profile. You can however still see Tweets in your notifications.
On top of that, this isn't how you handle bots/AI. That's not the purpose of rate limiting. Wrong tool for the job. This is incompetence no matter how you look at it. None of this makes any sense.
Not because I’m addicted to them but because the barrier to access them is sufficiently high that I virtually never access them and for Twitter especially (my Reddit/Apollo just shut off yesterday) it’s decreasingly occupying space in my mind, creating more “boredom” which is super useful for imagination and introspection.
Interesting to see the drop of latency in May inline with BlueSky and the rise in the latency of backend services which looks like a “robbing Peter to pay Paul” situation with compute.
https://bsky.app/profile/ifred.bsky.social/post/3jzi7qzjzzd2...
The Grafana - https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/0ybkyhO4k/twitter-death-wat...
- It makes the "for you" tab even worse, now their discovery mechanism takes away quota from the Tweets you wanted to see
- I have no idea how many tweets I view in a day: but now that I'm thinking about it I'm actively closing after a quick check
- I feel pressured to read to the end of what's loaded before refreshing (I paid for those!) but it's new content that makes Twitter special
- 6000 is awfully low for your highest paid tier
- I bet most new users don't hit 300 -- but most new power-users will. I don't know if there are any future-power-users who haven't already tried Twitter but they might never get hooked, especially since your first day is going to have the highest junk:goodstuff ratio
It’s suicidal for the platform, I think it’ll be reversed - in less than 24 hours probably.
In the unlikely event it isn’t, there’s more to this. Wild conspiracy: OpenAI is about to open source their code. Sam Altman is on the board at Reddit and gave them a heads up, maybe Twitter caught wind of this and is locking things down whilst they still can
Maybe it's a test to see how many power users would convert to verified?
None of them are worth paying for, not a single one.
Would I pay for ad-free access to a giant catalogue of music (even though I can use an ad blocker) or to support talented people putting hours into composing and editing content I like? Sure, why not. Would I pay to see people's random short-form thoughts? Hell no.
There's nothing like that on Twitter, FB, Reddit, etc.
Who on Earth would want to pay $8/month to join a site where you can effectively only interact with that kind of person?
This rate limit may stop the most extreme scrapers, but it won't come close to stopping moderately large operations. AFAIK nothing is stopping you from creating as many accounts as you want, each of them associated to either an email address or a phone number. Even if they made it more strict and required both a phone number and an email address, it would still be a trivial process. They will give up in the near future and implement some annoying Amazon style captcha, which scrapers will again circumvent with rotating proxies and captcha solvers :-)
Response headers for me:
X-Rate-Limit-Limit: 900 X-Rate-Limit-Remaining: 0 X-Rate-Limit-Reset: 1688318503
Between Reddit's implosion and Twitter being run by a moron it's making it incredibly easy to get work done.
Most seem to be happy to blame whoever they view as their opposing team, which rarely leads to wisdom.
While I personally would never pay 8$/month for the blue check (who cares?), I can understand that someone might want to pay to be up-to-date. 600 posts per day in some cases might not be enough, considering how easy it is to navigate through tweets in an hour or so. However, I think this is the wrong move.
I would have added the possibility to monetize with tweets, only accessible to blue checks - like premium content. This way, you pay the content creator and who wants to access special content will have to pay for it (with the subscription first, eventually with micropayments). But never block access to free content, never ever!
Let's assume it's all about ML/AI learning or data mining. Then you either keep a free, but walled garden (to be the only one to mine the data of your users) or you offer a "for pay" service (to offset the cost of the increased load on your network / systems), not mining your users data and allowing them to share content public.
So there is a targeted attack on twitter?
Long term, it would kill Twitter which is the opposite of what Elon has said before about being the town square.
Time will tell.
> LOL this is not how you deal with "data scraping," this is how you deal with a catastrophic loss of system capacity.
> You limit data scraping by blocking things a human user couldn't do, like access a thousand posts a minute. This is aimed directly at reducing normal activity across the whole system.
Does anyone have any ideas as to how they would approach this differently trying to achieve what twitter is? It seems like a proof of work captcha cost, balanced to the api fee, in the background or past a threshold of post views could drive scrapers into paying for the api. But that still requires playing cat and mouse well at the new accounts gate.
2. Begrudgingly make a new account to view Elon's latest meme
3. Scroll for a few minutes
4. Boom!
Now that is how you make a conversion stick. What a genius.
That's what streaming services do to block VPNs as far as I understand it.
I would think most efforts are by orgs using those platforms.
One more thing - it look like rate limit is per client. When hit on mobile app I could normally use TT on web interface till fresh allowance was exhausted. Which did not lasted that long, too.
Edit: I think this made more sense when the thread linked to a tweet.
I legit just started scraping twitter for competitor info three days ago with it and now that's gone to shit. Could use selenium too but these rare limits...
Reducing dependency on ads, reducing bots & creating their own LLM on top of twitter data may not be a bad idea.
now i'm just waiting for Huffman to do something similar on reddit. he could get rid of some of those moderators he dislikes by charging to be a moderator. also, to access to nsfw subreddits.
Just trying to calculate the number of years before twitter becomes myspace.
Two? Three?
The engineering is probably struggling to deploy the fix in scalable way.
Handling scraping should be a cost of doing business - not a motive to kill your actual business.
Hint from years ago https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-spacex-secre...
Elon Musk is an idiot that doesn't know what he's doing. Literally anyone would instantly use up those views.
because people love having the chance to say something bad about elon
because the new cycle is just circular negativity
lol
see you next week when the site is back to normal