Update on Twitter's Rate Limits | Hacker News Reader

Update on Twitter's Rate Limits

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52 pointstech234a79 comments

Twitter is the first social Network to publicly commit ritual suicide. It's somewhat fascinating to watch. Would be very interesting to see how much the login wall affected their traffic and thus ad revenues. But the real damage will be visible in Q4 when ads campaigns simply won't be booked anymore for Twitter because everyone begins to write it off.

Why Twitter is better now than before. I used to never use it and now i use it more than any other platform.

Don't really get why people are hating so much. Finally there is somewhere where people can post without being banned or having posts removed. Why do you want filtered social media it's fake.

Nice try Elon.

Genuine question you like your social media filtered by someone who says what you're allowed to see?

Genuine answer: Yes.

If I wanted an unfiltered experience, there's 4chan and the like. Notice that I'm not there, but somewhere I don't have to wade through mountains of crap. HN is very much moderated, that's what keeps it useful.

There have been a large number of accounts that have been censored by Twitter.

Musk even admitted doing so at the behest of foreign governments something Twitter 1.0 used to aggressively fight and prevent from happening.

Do you want to live in todays world but without laws and regulations?

Taking your question seriously, I would say mike masnick has the definitive answer: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

By the way, Twitter under Elon supposedly obeys more government censorship demands than before: https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2023-04/twitter-complying-mo...

So if you believe twitter is now a free speech platform, it just means that you’re no longer the one being censored. That doesn’t mean no one is.

People still get banned and get posts removed from the new Twitter all the time. Musk took no time at all to go back on his promises.

> Why do you want filtered social media it's fake.

There's no such thing as unfiltered social media. Every website is subject to laws, demands from the hosts, and business constraints. If you want ads, the advertisers want a say in what content you have.

> Finally there is somewhere where people can post without being banned or having posts removed

What you didn't know 4chan, 8chan/8kun, paler, truth social and a myriad of other "free speech fundamentalist" sites before?

Someone like PG gets his account disabled just for mentioning another social network. That's how far Twitter is going against the direction of free speech. This is coming from the guy who thinks it's fair play to accuse a rescue worker of pedophilia as retaliation for being insulted.

Musk wanted to destroy that guy. He repeatedly accused him of pedophilia and clarified that he specifically meant sex with young Thai boys. He then paid for an investigation to dig up dirt.

Correction: "the guy who thinks it's fair play to accuse a rescue worker of pedophilia as retaliation for feeling insulted"

People are hating because Elon == Bad. Twitter is pretty good these days, I see almost no spam and content quality has improved.

@elonjet

But I'm sure you've got a post hoc justification for that.

Reddit committed suicide, Twitter is actually not that bad.

Twitter literally banned all of its users from using it.

"banned all of its users from using it."

And I still see Twitter users on the platform still using it?

I don't. Used to get 30 notifications a day. Now I have 1, and it's a spambot.

Reddit didn't committed suicide but completely gave up on its core focus. Like an Athlete that decided "Screw it, I want KFC for every meal!" and then dies from morbid obesity related stuff a decade later.

Same thing but on a different time scale.

Arguably, Tumblr did this by removing NSFW, and Onlyfans did this by pivoting to mainstream content

Tumblr maybe though they did it to support advertisers, Twitter is doing it seemingly at odds with them.

Is OnlyFans really social media?

Tumblr was forced to remove NSFW content or risk getting kicked out of the iOS app store, iirc. Twitter's putting the gun to their own head for no damn reason at all.

Which, apart from legal requirements, was frankly stupid on the part of Tumblr

Maybe they should have kept the puritan version US-only (don't worry, glorifying violence is still PG only)

You can follow creators, they post content. It's a social creator platform. Is it the NSFW or the paywall aspect that's making you feel like it's not?

As with almost any time "RIP [someone/something]" trends in Twitter, the death of Twitter is greatly exaggerated.

(That's not to say I like the decisions that are being made)

I still don’t understand what Elon is trying to do. If you had asked me before he bought it what twitter’s core problems were I would have said “poorly moderated toxicity”, “lack of conversational depth”, “high friction onboarding”, and “excessive operating cost”. Apparently Elon only agrees about the cost part, because on all those other dimensions twitter is now worse?

In all his other businesses Elon started by offering a grand vision of where they were going: “electric cars for everyone”, “humans on mars”, “tunnels everywhere”, “direct mind machine interface”. It was often ridiculed, but the goal made sense. What is the vision for twitter? I still don’t know. Nothing he says makes any sense.

He now (not at first) wants to turn it into and 'everything app', like Wechat.

Impossible, I know.

Might have been possible before he sabotaged it

An absolute mess is what it is. The most consistent he’s been has been his claim he wants to make the “everything app” “X”. But that’s all it has been so far. A claim. He seems to think he can do it backwards. Charge for it first and later add the value that people would want.

People do pay for Tesla Autopilot though.

Also - "dumb automated moderation that matches keywords and ignores context" and "non-existent appeal process".

"electric cars for everyone" was the vision of the founders of Tesla, prior to Musk functionally stealing the company from them.

"humans on mars" is just repeating standard sci-fi tropes that have been around for 50+ years, while not actually solving any problem.

"tunnels everywhere" makes sense for public transit, and literally any other case it's just extremely expensive roads - making it a vacuum just makes it expensive and also impractical.

"direct mind machine interface" I dunno, it's just another sci-fi trope since basically the moment electrical computers, it has actual value for many injuries, _maybe_ it has value beyond that, but again he's not coming up with anything novel or new.

Musk isn't some amazing genius, or revelatory thinker. His "let's populate mars" to solve "over population" surely indicates the opposite.

I will say he’s a genius at one thing; raising funds. How on earth he convinced people to invest in this I’ll never know.

He convinced the Saudi government - who have been aggressively endeavoring to control content of Twitter, Facebook, and media in general for years - to get a controlling interest in Twitter. I assume they would have given money to literally anyone who could provide a plausible path to that.

> "tunnels everywhere" makes sense for public transit, and literally any other case it's just extremely expensive roads - making it a vacuum just makes it expensive and also impractical.

"tunnels everywhere" was, by his own admission, a ploy to destroy the public will to build public transit because it would have been a problem for selling cars. He never wanted to actually build tunnels, he just wanted to lure people into not supporting public transit.

> by his own admission

Do you have a source? Not that I don't believe it, but I'd like to see for myself where he was stupid/brazen enough to outright admit this.

- https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990

- https://jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-cali...

- https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...

It comes from a book, as is stated in this article (https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...) :

> As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.

We already have tunnels under bodies of water! And usually it results in massive bottlenecks at the entrance. Entering NYC from New Jersey, for example, is a nightmare and can result in hours of stop and go before you actually cross the tunnel.

Elon is trying to lose less money. It's very simple. Unfortunately due to his big mouth and impulsive, terrible management decisions, he's losing more money every time he moves.

> It was often ridiculed, but the goal made sense. What is the vision for twitter? I still don’t know. Nothing he says makes any sense.

You're missing the core. He wants Twitter to be a functional and inclusive town square for public, and world wide, discussion.

There is the bot and manipulation problem. Which is deeper and more extensive than anyone seems to really believe. Frankly, I'm not sure how anyone solves this without pretty stiff vetting during on boarding. Any community that provides free signups is going to have bot problems. Period. Facebook is losing this war. So is Google.

I think he should punt the prevention of AI data scraping as not worth the cost. But it's value he is leaving on the table if he doesn't, though I think this one is detrimental to the users. Put it in the EULA or content licensing or where ever and be satisfied. Don't throw it in front of your legit users.

> You're missing the core. He wants Twitter to be a functional and inclusive town square for public, and world wide, discussion.

Well, aside from people he doesn't like, and content he doesn't like. Let's face it: he wants Twitter to be a town square with topics he likes and with people who support him.

> Well, aside from people he doesn't like, and content he doesn't like. Let's face it: he wants Twitter to be a town square with topics he likes and with people who support him.

Thank you for the realistic correction.

You're welcome! The gaslighting attempts by his fans are getting more and more ridiculous. Musk's censoring and flipflopping are by now well-documented enough that nobody can honestly deny his MO.

It is hard to take those town square remarks seriously when his actions have pushed so many people off of the platform. Twitter was always a harsh place for moderate voices, and the lack of moderation has made it even less hospitable. Killing off third party apps only made that worse, because it took away tools people were using to filter out unwanted hate speech. Ultimately I can only judge Elon’s twitter by the outcome, and that means looking at my feed. It’s a ghost town now, mostly only the angry shouters are left.

I don't think even Elon knows what he wants to do. He bought Twitter out of spite - as he was active there and did not like all the things that were said about him on the platform.

This was not a "we are going to Mars" moment - it was more of a "I am a petulant child, why does no one like me when I am acting horribly" moment.

Needless to say, there will be fewer takers for a one-way ticket to Mars with this sort of management.

Actually, it's the second. Elon is not following far from Andrew Lee's playbook with freenode.

And of course Digg, Tumblr and onlyfans. That's just from the last few years, and just from the USA batch. I can think of several more local ones that you've never heard of. The graveyard of social networks that went under due to poor product decisions is huuuuuuge.

first? oh honey https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kil...

Maybe we could say that advertising revenue is toxic to community spaces? If they really want to be the town square, well nobody wants a town square that’s primarily billboards and advertising. People who actually live in New York don’t go to Times Square, and there is functionally no actual community there.

As an counterexample, Discord specifically is trying a subscription “free-to-play” model. I think this could work pretty well for future sites - a little more expression or some cosmetics to make you stand out, but still a very usable and unobtrusive service.

Too many people worth following still are using Twitter. Until they leave and there isn’t a reason to go on the site then there won’t be any mass exodus. I doubt the forced login is having a huge impact so far. Maybe Meta’s alternative will have a bigger impact.

It’s interesting, I’ve seen ton of my people I follow complain about Twitter yet they still keep posting. The site is only going to go under if people start if actually leaving.

A lot of people I followed moved to Mastodon. It will be the death of a thousand cuts.

Like people posting on Reddit right up til the end and beyond. If you want to make a real statement, delete your account before it is forced. Rip the band aid off in one go!

I was a supporter of what Elon was trying to do. I am against big tech censorship and felt that moving to a subscription model where they didn’t need to appease advertisers was a good step. I subscribed to support the model even though I barely use Twitter.

I also think the staff cuts were the right call in principle. I believe that tech products are better when you have a small team of really good people and get out of their way.

This paywall could be the thing that brings them down though. There must be millions of people per day being trained not to click on Twitter links. I myself have done this a few times on different devices and incognito windows and I’m a paying subscriber. They will also slowly be evicted from Google SERPs.

Engagement on the platform for creators was already terrible, and this must accelerate people looking at other platforms.

To do a paywall or forced login to reduce spam/bots/scraping is throwing the baby out with the bathwater unless it’s an existential risk.

This is content-free gibberish, but a particular highlight for me is the promise that "we will provide an update when the work is complete" that is immediately followed by "this work will never be done".

> To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform. That’s why we temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform. Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.

Ah, so they're intentionally making everybody suffer to punish the bad guys, and promising that everything will be peachy keen afterwards.

This sounds essentially identical to the Indian government's justification for suddenly demonetizing the 500 and 1000 rupee notes in 2016, leading to massive cash shortages.

This directly led to 1.5M people losing their jobs, a stock market crash, and GDP dropping by at least 1%. The silver lining was that it also kick-started the Indian digital payments system.

This justification makes zero sense to me. Why would they need to use rate limits to detect bots? They can trivially observe account behaviour without using rate limits.

Turing test.

It's corporate talk for "we f up and systems are failing". Musk's act of not paying people now bites him back. I guess they don't have enough servers to sustain the service.

The new "you need to log in to view this tweet" page has a bug that causes it to repeatedly try to load the tweet, about 10 times per second. This explains the increased server load.

About the only thing I could think of is, limit the rate and see what accounts keep trying to post even though they fail?

But there would be so many false positives on that idea. Would punish many that are legitimate users and probably harden those that have more sophisticated posting techniques.

Like you said, there are better ways.

> Why would they need to use rate limits to detect bots? Accounts that hit rate limits are more likely to be bots.

Any ideas on how to do this more trivially than toggling a global rate limit flag?

The post itself says that publicly announcing the policy in advance would be detrimental. The policy is now public and they clearly notify the offender of violation. It probably took bot maintainers less than an hour to update their scripts to pause attempts/switch accounts on first failed request. It's the humans who keep trying. Any heuristic they'd want to apply to detect bots would be applied to action history, tuned to acceptable false positive rates and silently rolled out. This circus doesn't align with the statements at all.

I'm pretty sure this is provided solely for the benefit of Musk's weird fans, who can now go "see? Dear Leader broke the site as part of the 4D chess!" Normal people probably shouldn't take much notice of it.

To be honest, it doesn't bother me because I've moved to other platforms. The main reason I log on to twitter is to see if anyone I follow has moved to another platform.

“Bill in IT says we need to reboot the router but no one knows the router password and Comcast says the password is on the router but Bill says Jim must have torn off the sticker so we called Best Buy and the soonest the Geek Squad can get here is Thursday. We tried unplugging it and plugging it back in but it’s not turning on.”

> To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform.

Well about that, I noticed heavy inflow of spam and bots traffic right after Mr Musk starts selling the blue patch for money. These spammers purchased and utilized the "first-class citizen" privilege to bend the display priority to their favor. Now days, you open a Tweet, the top replies are almost all spams.

You know, at this point, it is obviously apparent that the spammers knows better about Twitter than Mr Musk do.

But all and all, this (as well as the recent events related to Reddit) is a good thing. Because it serves a good reminder that we (the users) are products, sometimes the self-paying type.

So maybe next time you when plan to spend some chill time on some services, think how much you can get out if it for exchange.

> Currently, the restrictions affect a small percentage of people using the platform, and we will provide an update when the work is complete.

are they sure, it seem to have hit literally everyone I know who still uses twitter frequently

This is a CMA post. Nothing much to see other than mea culpa and the palpable disappointment of other (not their own) AI bots winning.

It feels like that the above comes directly written by His Royal Highness, just copy pasted in place by the site admins.

At this point I'm taking Elon to the 'politician' levels of lie detection

Where "verified" means you paid $8 or something, I see no reason to trust pretty much anything else coming from them

This looks to be complete nonsense.

Scraping services work by going through thousands of intermediate proxies run on unsuspecting people's compromised computers. Each scraping request will be a unique IP with a normal looking header.

They may be able to look at the number of unique requests per account but given the ridiculous amount of spam/bots that exist clearly creating new accounts isn't an impediment.

The far more likely scenario is that they were throttled by AWS/GCP for not paying bills and are behind on their migration project.

So all scrapers are viruses? Need to me.

Almost all "residential" proxies are run without the knowledge of the user used as the proxy. Either it's slipped in the ToS/install of other legitimate product or straight up malware. A popular method, iirc, was bundling with free VPNs.

Last I looked into the discussion, the consensus was there was no particularly reputable residential proxy service.

Edit: I probably should explain the distinction for residential proxies. Basically, if you run a site that isn't B2B, you'll find basically no organic traffic comes from data centers/server farms. So traffic from IP blocks like owned by Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS), Google (GCP), etc are all highly likely to be bot traffic and throttled or outright blocked by default. If you're running a scraper or a bot, you want to get your traffic to appear to come from residential IP blocks (owned by residential ISPs).

Strange they should mention spam when these last few days I've seen a steady stream of near identical advertisers appear in spam-like ads.

The advertisers have very similar profile pictures which look generated, use a particular colour palette, and all sell the same sort of unwanted junk. Despite a mix of blocking/muting, a new one pops up every few hours!

So I'm assuming this is because he thinks the data is so valuable for LLM training he doesn't want anyone getting it for free. Does he really think there will be that much demand for it that it outweighs the fundamental purpose of Twitter?

As I'm sure you've probably guessed, it's not about the bots. It's that his contract with Google for servers ran out on July 1st. So now they have to pay a lot more.

Absurdly, this is a cost saving measure. And yes, I've no idea how it ends up saving either.

As the twitter users would say, #TwitterIsOverParty

TL;DR - no change

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