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Comment by naillo | Hacker News Reader

Funny how the effect of the rate limit has barely affected bots and scrapers at all but severely damaged the userbase of the site.

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Very anecdotally, bot activity on my accounts was increasing in the last month and then it completely stopped after that recent rate limiting stuff.

I feel the same way. Don't know if it's because of the algorithm or something else but Twitter these days seems to be 80% bots shilling crypto and/or simping for Musk.

I am seeing more spam notifications since the rate limit, plus, the spam notifications are 75% of my notifications because all the humans quit.

tinfoil hat time: what if that was the point all along? twitter was a vital space for organizing protests - think arab spring, occupy wall street.

one of the richest guys in the world (who's also very anti-union, btw!) buys it up in a time where inequality is getting worse and worse and social fabrics are starting to tear and makes it unusable.

no more space for organizing. one fewer threat to capital.

He owns the site. If this is truly his intention then all he has to do is turn off the main switch. There's really no reason to give him the benefit of doubt and twist the narrative into "Musk is a genius and everything is going according to plan". The simpler theory is likely to be the correct one – he has never run a social network before and has no idea how to stop bleeding users and cash so is desperately throwing ideas at the wall hoping something sticks.

> If this is truly his intention then all he has to do is turn off the main switch

Putting on a secondary tinfoil hat to prevent stray signals from leaking in: the Simple Sabotage Field Manual suggests that you gum-up the works so to slow things down by a lot. You may not want to make the sabotage obvious, because it'd get fixed immediately (e.g. blow up a factory). Back to the topic: turning off the switch would result in an exodus to other platforms.

I don't believe the theory, but if you wanted to cut off protests, you'd want to leave the site up but severely degraded to delay migration away.

I too don't believe Elon is that dumb. He could let the site just be. Especially after rate limits, it really smells something. You wouldn't rate limit a social media platform even if you bills are hard to pay, if you want the platform to be around.

He would be really stupid if that is his thinking, because as we just saw these users would just move to a competitor as long as there is one. Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on short conversation-based social media.

A competitor that "isn't for news, politics or negativity" [0]. In other words, a place that won't let the same thing happen.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/7/23787334/instagram-threads...

> news, politics or negativity

They said they won't boost these, not that these are forbidden.

Given the dude paid $44B for a site clearly worth significantly less than that, and then promptly ran it into the ground, your "tinfoil hat time" answer honestly seems like the only rational answer. It checks out on more levels than any of his actions have.

Yes, it seems plausible. It was also funded in large part by the Saudis, American banks, and other wealthy individuals who are all strongly incentivized to hinder activist communication networks. Now everyone who used Twitter has to re-form their networks elsewhere. Mission accomplished. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/saudis-kingdom-hol...

Why is this downvoted? It makes a lot of sense, and it's not some outlandish conspiracy theory (it's very inlandish) as we've seen rich people do similar things before, more than once, and dictators do it very frequently.

It's true for a lot of cases.

Adding almost any restriction only hurts casual users, and attackers are rarely casual users.

I swear, the bots is only increasing ever since Elon bought the site. I've been getting more and more DM from spam accounts, somehow from Japan too (Whaaat?).

Whatever Elmo is doing, it's not working

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