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Comment by LordAtlas | Hacker News Reader

So 99% of accounts that are not verified are restricted to viewing max 600 tweets a day, which means if you do more than casually check Twitter once a day, you're fucked. No wonder everything is breaking.

But that's OK. Twitter has a big engineering team that should be able to sort this out soon. Oh, wait...

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Yeah my limit hit after 20-25 minutes of total screen time. What a mess.

Same- rate limited after 20 mins. Way to force me to move elsewhere.

Advertising must really be in the hole to force users off the site like this.

This kills any advertising revenue they have and I'm sure twitter blue subscribers won't be happy about this if it keeps going on. I wonder if they will give twitter blue subscribers an even higher limit so that they can actually use it.

/s or not /s? 25 minutes seems like plenty to me. But I also have HN noprocrast enabled.

I also have a Twitter screen time limit, just not for 20 minutes.

25 minutes is nothing when a major event is happening. Like just last week, I was intensely following the Wagner Group rebellion minute-by-minute without sleeping. A limit would make it impossible to watch history unfold in real-time.

Conspiracy theory of the day: He knows about something big that is going to happen soon and the breakage is intentional.

25 minutes is easy to hit when something is happening (be it a world event, sporting event, etc).

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.

Which Twitter replacement are people moving to (edit:looks like Bluesky if they can keep the servers up)?

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?

Bluesky is having some degraded performance due to "record-high traffic" (according to them).

As a casual user, it's noticeable how many people are posting now.

That’s still invite only though right?

Yeah. I think each user gets onr invite per week. Here's an invite code: bsky-social-ejzzv-3pehr

Thank you much. Greatly appreciated. Trying it out now

Looks like you got it. Have fun!

Yeah, noticed a lot of dormant follows pop up on my home feed again.

I created a Mastodon account yesterday before I even knew about this and it was surprisingly easy and user-friendly. The big thing it's missing, for me, is a way to find the Mastodon accounts for people you follow on Twitter. If more of the AI/ML community switched to Mastodon, I wouldn't have any need for Twitter.

I don’t have a problem for myself, but many non tech folks I know were not going to move over and I like to have a mix of folks I follow.

There used to be tools for this but they went by the wayside with the Twitter api changes.

had you done this before the API was closed you'd have had access to a bunch of tools that let you find twitter users on mastodon

Been on Mastodon since November. Signup was done in seconds. Finding people to follow was done gradually.

It's lively, and I use it everyday.

TBH, I don't really miss the people that don't want to come over.

Not an engineering issue. Compute, and in the end, energy, has a cost. You weren't aware of it because, as someone mentioned, it was subsidized before. Now you are aware. You're free to contribute by paying, if content is worth to you, or walk away. There are alternatives, but you can't escape the fact that moving all those bits is not free.

Why is it suddenly so costly only after Elon took over considering Twitter was borderline profitable before he took over?

it was never profitable

Wrong, they had net profits 15 out of 18 quarters from 2018-2022

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...

Also, probably fairly considered the cost of doing business, but that includes a substantial fine Twitter had to pay. And Covid troubles.

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?

> Compute, and in the end, energy, has a cost.

making sure that nobody can see ads by ratelimiting them too hard really helps with this, or so I'm told

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