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Musk commented on this: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 "Temporary emergency me
by jamesgreenleaf 3y ago
Musk commented on this: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505
"Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"
- INTPenis 3y agoSo first of all HE scaled the infrastructure down to save money. Secondly, that "data pillaging" was exposure, he just removed exposure from people's tweets to save money, again. Good work Elon.
- odd_perfect_num 3y agoWhat a shame the his post requires an account to view...
- PopularUsername 3y agoI am unable to read the tweet, I'll have to take your word for it
- celsoazevedo 3y agoScreenshot: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2023/twitter.png https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2023/twitter.png
- denysvitali 3y agoI was confused at first on why a random dude posted a link to a screenshot hosted on Celso Azevedo's website (the Google Camera port index creator). Then I realized... hello there! (:
- celsoazevedo 3y agoHey! Yep, that's me. I was going to host the screenshot on imgur, but I'm not sure if we can trust them anymore...
- glogla 3y agoThey announced plans of only allowing sharing images with account and deleting all "unowned" ones.
- bombcar 3y agoSomeone needs to make a dead simple “clipboard to URL on your server” shortcut/applet/script. If you have a domain you should t need Imgur.
- Freedom2 3y agoIt's fairly trivial to write your own - if not, many open source solutions exist out there. This is HackerNews, after all.
- _zzaw 3y agoYes, it was definitely the "data pillaging" that was degrading service, and not the fact that Twitter is now hosted on a Mac Mini under somebody's desk...
- dang 3y ago"Don't be snarky." "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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- _zzaw 3y agoI'm a little surprised at this response, dang. I could understand if I was being hostile to the poster, but my sarcasm was directed at Musk (who they're quoting), whose comment about data pillaging I find highly dubious. 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.
- IMTDb 3y agoTo be fair the rule says “don’t be snarky” 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.
- rlpb 3y agoPresumably this is because I have to download an entire JavaScript app in order to view 280 bytes of tweet.
- DistractionRect 3y agoThey want your location, contacts, and a profile they can associate with habits/traffic so they can better serve you ads... I mean, tweets It's the same with reddit, the user is the product, which is why they don't want you using third party apps/frontends.
- consumer451 3y agoI wonder what percentage of legitimate traffic is blocked by this. I would imagine that the majority of users don't have an account, by a large margin, correct?
- cmckn 3y agoI would not assume that, no. Following accounts is fundamental to using Twitter; I absolutely think the majority of people using Twitter are logged-in.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoMaybe to using Twitter on a sustained basis, sure. However I imagine there’s a decent-if-not-majority chunk that accesses tweets via Google/friends/news articles/etc
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoI ha[d] a bookmark folder with about a dozen twitstreams — no login/acct. I'm not signing up. Too bad nitter is broken, as well. 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.
- johannes1234321 3y agoThere are tons of usages of Twitter which don't need an account. All those Twitter links on this site for isntance. Some of them provide interesting input, however the urge to participate in those threads is low, as the need to follow those authors. The browser I use for HN is not signed in to twitter. Neither is my phone, where I sometimes get Twitter links in messages from friends.
- deweywsu 3y agoLike anyone believes for a second anything that comes out of this guy's mouth. Even if true, who cares Elon? You're so good at shooting yourself in the foot, you might consider being a professional Russian Roulette player.
- matteoraso 3y agoThis is a bald-faced lie on Elon's part. It takes a bit more time, but you can still archive tweets using archive.today[0]. [0] https://archive.ph/Y91cJ https://archive.ph/Y91cJ
- NelsonMinar 3y ago"Data pillaging", WTF does that mean? 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?
- russdill 3y agoI love how the town square model gets completely thrown out whenever it's inconvenient.
- NelsonMinar 3y ago[flagged]
- asah 3y agoIt means Elon is a genius about cars and rockets, but apparently hasn't heard of "Cache-Control: public"
- labster 3y agoIt means Musk wants OpenAI to pay him.
- eropple 3y agoNot sure anybody wants to be training AI models on the outputs of his Twitter Blue posse.
- charcircuit 3y agoIf someone donated an art piece to a museum does that mean that anyone should be allowed to steal from them?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- londons_explore 3y agoI think it means "someone is crawling our data, perhaps because we made our API cost money, and we don't like it".
- rurounijones 3y agoI wonder if he considers Nitter "data pillaging"
- chris_wot 3y agoHaven’t we been predicting twitter’s degradation for some time? When Musk removed half of his employees many of us realised systems would remain running for some time, but at a certain point they would start degrading without intervention. The more Musk makes changes, the faster it degrades.
- fallingknife 3y agoHow much time is it that the systems will remain running? Because it's been 9 months now and Twitter is still running fine. Time to admit that theory has been disproven.
- chris_wot 3y agoAnd yet, it’s not running fine.
- frodowtf 3y agoTwitter just DDoSed itself because it is run by a genius and a team that does not know how the site works. Stuff like this will happen more often in the future. It's downhill all the time.
- mhoad 3y agoWhy do people humiliate themselves like this?
- ineedasername 3y agoSo much for those here & elsewhere who believed Musk’s lies about “radical free speech”. 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hackernewds 3y agoperhaps they should increase the pricing of their API
- raverbashing 3y agoWhat he means is "we can't deal with a regular amount of traffic because we fired most people, also we don't know the value of SEO"
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoThey’ve done fine with these employees for the last while. Trimming the fat is healthy, especially when Twitter has historically over-hired hard for no reason other than “growth for growth’s sake”. There’s lots of legitimate reasons to criticize, but making a more efficient company and firing valueless employees is not one of them.
- Angostura 3y ago... and you can do just fine without regular maintenance on your house ... for a while.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoWhat makes you think all of those employees were useful? An employee does not have inherent value. It’s not as though Twitter never had problems before the acquisition.
- Angostura 3y agoI don't recall Twitter running a denial of service on itself previously? Do you?
- raverbashing 3y agoMaybe related to the "load issues", maybe not but ny timeline stopped showing images this morning. Seems just another day at Twitter dot com.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 3y ago
- RoyGBivCap 3y ago"Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience. What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674898695534309378 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." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674898695534309378 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674898695534309378
- agnosticmantis 3y ago> 3. We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data… 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.
- RoyGBivCap 3y agoI can't speak for him, just relaying the information. But I'm happy to speculate: Organizations violated the twitter TOS by scraping, and he's going to sue the organizations for it.
- mhh__ 3y agoUnless someone was pulling in everything to build a new AI dataset or something like that then I'm filing this in the "bots bots bots" stuff from the takeover - a real problem that is completely blown out of proportion.
- justapassenger 3y ago$5 that antiscraping backend was one of the non-essential services he shutdown after acquisition.
- Zuiii 3y agoEasy solution: Regularly upload dumps of public tweets to the internet archive, like how stackoverflow used to do. Twitter's value is in live engagement, not in stale tweets.