21 ms·
Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
Elon Musk:
"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
- intunderflow 3y agoIf this stays around that's Twitter dead and buried as a product.
- davidw 3y ago"Something went wrong. Try reloading." Edit: I think this made more sense when the thread linked to a tweet.
- damedesfleurs 3y agoRemember when he said twitter would have 1 billion users by 2024
- madars 3y agoTo those getting "Rate Limit Exceeded" or without an account, this is Elon Musk's tweet: 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/day
- damedesfleurs 3y ago600 tweets is like 1 timeline reload for me and i follow less that 100 accounts
- minimaxir 3y agoFrom comments and personal experience, it is incredibly likely Elon screwed up the rollout and the "600 posts/day" isn't accurate and is triggering much, much sooner than expected.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TillE 3y agoI think a ton of users will hit 600 "posts read" really quickly, if that's what they're measuring. Refresh your timeline, load 20 new tweets. Tap a tweet, load 10 replies, etc.
- minimaxir 3y agoEven if Twitter loads 20 tweets, it doesn't mean you've read 20 tweets. 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.
- filleduchaos 3y agoPersonally I wouldn't assume that the app that's been demonstrated to count "views" in extremely sketchy ways has suddenly started caring about the distinction between loading and reading a post. Especially when the intent is pretty obviously to herd users towards subscribing.
- minimaxir 3y agoFair counterpoint: Tweet views are a vanity metric (which is why Elon likes them), but tweet impressions are a required metric for advertisers to track ad CTR and any shenanigans there will actually kill Twitter.
- sidibe 3y agoAnother master stroke of genius from this first principles maverick. Everything in every field is so simple for him, it's a wonder every one else has been just too stupid to try these ideas before. Horribly mismanaged Twitter that was before Elon failing to the tune of around break even is now going to have hundreds of millions of paid blue checks for sure
- climatologist 3y agoHe's trying to get more people to commit to giving Twitter $8/month. I'm not sure if it's going to work because I suspect people will just change their browsing habits and continue not paying. Next CEO will have to figure out how to continue getting more advertising dollars to continue paying for the servers and the bandwidth.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoNeedless to say, with those limits, Twitter is basically unusable. I really doubt these ridiculous limitations can be explained just by a sudden urge to scrape. Why limit verified accounts, for example?
- sylware 3y agoBecause they could be compromised and used by a careless third-party?
- mackie342red 3y agoWhy would Twitter's new verification system be compromised?
- rideontime 3y agoThere’s nothing to “compromise.” Being generous and accepting that this is meant to deter scrapers, a scraper could simply pay their eight bucks to avoid the rate limit.
- sylware 3y agoStolen credentials of such an account and hardly ever used by its legit owner. The hard part is the 'hardly ever used by its legit owner', not the "stolen credendials".
- x86x87 3y agoI am guessing twitter fucked around and now are in the finding out phase. I bet some of their infra is crumbling under the stress of all bs Musk pulled.
- soneca 3y agoI am 100% sure that I didn’t load 300 tweets in the official app today. I was only accessing an account where I follow 17 people. I just counted and there were 14 new tweets (RTs counted as 2 tweets) in my feed from today (the average for a typical day in this account). And I was rate-limited today. 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.
- climatologist 3y agoI guess he's trying to get more people to pay money for access to Twitter but in exchange they still must view intrusive ads in the replies. If Twitter is unsustainable without such measures then it's unlikely that the changes he's making are going to make it more sustainable. Whoever steps into the CEO role will have to continue constantly shoving ads in people's faces to pay for the data centers and bandwidth.
- blablablub 3y agoGood, back to do some real work.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nperez 3y agoAll these Twitter Blue subscribers who thought they could buy views and engagement must be thrilled that they're now competing for a very limited resource
- r721 3y agoMy first thought on reading this was: "I'm going to unfollow some high volume posters in that case", so they will lose some followers too.
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoMy first thought was: I delete my twitter account and get more productive.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoI refuse to believe that Twitter is so hammered by scrapers that it can’t even serve text content.
- nperez 3y agoI don't think it's about servers getting hammered so much as it's about AI causing them to rethink the value of their data, then deciding user hostility is the best way to extract said value
- ethanbond 3y agoOr just another stick to try to get people to pay. It’s like watching a precocious 7th grader play product manager.
- cududa 3y agoOr that they haven’t paid Google server bills for 4 months and Google threatened to cut them off on July 1st
- spaceman_2020 3y agoCan't wait for Elon's AI startup sending me answers in 1/35 threads. 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.
- gmerc 3y agoAnd do tell us, what value would thar data actually have ? 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?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 3y ago
- ezoe 3y ago600 posts/day... seriously? I'll exceed that limit in 10 minutes(I probably browse tweets like 1 post/second in my native language, Japanese).
- michilehr 3y agoActually it seems to be 900 detail views. So it is 15 minutes. Response headers for me: X-Rate-Limit-Limit: 900 X-Rate-Limit-Remaining: 0 X-Rate-Limit-Reset: 1688318503
- duped 3y agoI can't use Twitter today after about an hour of browsing my feed this morning. Which is hilarious because it's the first day I stopped using Reddit.
- EA-3167 3y agoIt's a brilliant plan, AI means the data is more valuable (for today at least), users generate the data, so punish the users until they flee and... profit? Even for Musk, even for a debt-ridden Twitter with no hope of survival, this is impressively terrible.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smy20011 3y agoPeople getting rate limited message cannot see that due to rate limit.
- uni_baconcat 3y agoSo, this is an account-associated limitation, even when browsing with the official app and website.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aqme28 3y agoInteresting that he doesn't even want my ad revenue anymore. Well good riddance. The sooner I can be off this addictive website the better.
- michilehr 3y agoLess active users -> lower AWS invoice. Smart move... not.
- x86x87 3y agoWhy not just pull the same move they did with gcp and simply stop paying?
- TillE 3y agoI'm increasingly concerned that Bluesky has missed its moment. It got a ton of hype when it started rolling out invites, but that died down pretty quickly. Now it's been a couple months and they're still not open. Events like this would be a perfect opportunity to grab users from Twitter. But they're not ready.
- davidw 3y agoYeah I signed up for the wait list, but it's been months, and...nada. Seems like if they're that bogged down, it's got some real problems.
- __jem 3y agoThe site seems like its creaking under the strain of everyone checking it right now.
- TechBro8615 3y agoWhere is the bluesky site? I tried to find it recently and ended up on the app store where I saw that I needed an invite to join, and then I closed it and never came back.
- Macha 3y agoSounds like Google+ in a way, they limited it to invite only for a long time which caused a lot of the second wave users to get fed up, only for the low interest on actually opening it up causing Google to feel the need to ram it down everyone's throat, and both periods contributed to its negative perception.
- 3y ago
- HL33tibCe7 3y agoThis is suicide
- __jem 3y agoIncredibly bizarre way to intentionally kill your app, even after all the other nonsense he's been doing. Even if I were willing to pay for something as cringe as verification, 6000 posts a day is laughable for an app like Twitter. I hit the rate limit on my "unverified" account in about 5 minutes. I've been waiting for $newApp to get enough users to be fun, and this only motivates me more to be the change I want to see.
- ceejayoz 3y agoThis is the move that elevates “the Saudis funded this to kill Twitter” from silly conspiracy theory to maybe plausible.
- rsynnott 3y agoNever attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by Elon’s incompetence.
- fundad 3y agoMalice? He thinks he’s liberating us from the woke mind virus and defending poor oppressed Republican activists.
- rvense 3y agoIsn't Musk personally liable for a lot of this burnt money? In this scenario, does Musk gain something or was he just outsmarted?
- throw2022110401 3y agoIn that scenario Musk fills the "useful idiot" role. I am not really convinced though, I think it's just plain old incompetence and hubris. But then, it's 2023 so who knows.
- throw2022110401 3y agoThey are literally throwing away revenue with every denied impression. An act of desperation obviously. My take: they broke something and need to shed load to keep the site running. The "extreme scraping" thing is the usual Musk BS.
- LordAtlas 3y agoSo 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...
- pphysch 3y agoYeah my limit hit after 20-25 minutes of total screen time. What a mess.
- randomfool 3y agoSame- 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.
- bardak 3y agoThis 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.
- Tempest1981 3y ago/s or not /s? 25 minutes seems like plenty to me. But I also have HN noprocrast enabled.
- pphysch 3y agoI also have a Twitter screen time limit, just not for 20 minutes.
- publius_0xf3 3y ago25 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.
- pawelduda 3y agoGood guy Elon, giving people time to contemplate on each tweet, helping them unlearn mindless scrolling habits Can we also have it closed on Sundays?
- Quarrelsome 3y ago> 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.
- cududa 3y agoThat was from the book
- Quarrelsome 3y agowow _really_? Sorry, I had no idea someone could be capable of writing a book about virtual worlds and then imagine shutting them down two days a week. My apologies Mr Spielberg.
- zemo 3y agoit’s a story about how all of society takes place inside of a video game and at no point in the story does it ever contemplate whether or not that is a good thing. The story is just “save the princess from the dragon” but the princess is the oasis.
- spideymans 3y agoI’ll really be able to get my procrastination under control, now that Reddit has banned third party clients, and Twitter has limited users to viewing 600 tweets/day.
- ALittleLight 3y agoThis is an absolutely baffling change. Blocking unregistered and now now throttling normal users? Why? Handling scraping should be a cost of doing business - not a motive to kill your actual business.
- rideontime 3y agoI’ve got the requisite three twitter accounts (one for being nice, one for trolling, and one for porno) and each of them got rate limited after less than two minutes of scrolling. Wasn’t he just yesterday crowing about their “user-seconds”?
- tennisflyi 3y agoI love that you were honest. I two of those three.
- rafabulsing 3y agoSo, is the second account nice or for trolling?
- tennisflyi 3y agoJust personal and porn. No trolling.
- fundad 3y agoI think it was a pro-DeSantis move because Trump had a rally Saturday
- hoppyhoppy2 3y agoSee also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552231
- dang 3y agoComments moved thither. Thanks! 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.
- JadeNB 3y agoAll moderation is better when accompanied by descriptions of going hither and thither.
- idlewords 3y agoNeeds some yon.
- Freedom2 3y agoAll? Even important service announcements or serious notifications? 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.
- SushiHippie 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33768503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33768503 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&query=hither%20author%3Adang&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=thither%20author%3Adang&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- JadeNB 3y ago
- epistasis 3y agoIf Musk had shut down the site completely, he could have had the same effect without looking like he was completely incompetent. 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.
- HWR_14 3y agoI doubt it's a reaction to him hurting internally. I think it's a consequence of being disconnected from the rest of the world. I think he thinks what he's doing is both right and popular, and in his bubble that's true. 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.
- epistasis 3y agoThis is really classic divorced guy stuff. Even if he is showing a stiff upper lip, this behavior seems very transparent. 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.
- rsynnott 3y agoIt probably doesn’t help that he surrounds himself with these weird sycophants. I mean, Jason Calacanis! I’d completely forgotten he even existed. You cannot convince me that his involvement was for any other reason than he’s really into Musk. 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.
- s5300 3y ago[dead]
- partiallypro 3y agoElon is truly running the platform into the ground. This doesn't even begin to make sense on any level.
- lonk11 3y agoAt first I read it as a limit on the number of posts per day you can create, which seemed very generous. Realized that it was the number of posts you can read which is unreasonably low. Maybe it's a test to see how many power users would convert to verified?
- Avshalom 3y agohttps://mastodon.social/@sysop408@sfba.social/110639833123724530 https://mastodon.social/@sysop408@sfba.social/11063983312372... Like I don't know if this even counts as analysis let alone if it's right, but damn it would be funny if this was self inflicted.
- user_named 3y agoThey're calling him Space Karen in the comments. Hilarious.
- r721 3y agoI wonder if there will be a counter somewhere in the corner: "You had read 95% of today's quota".
- TechBro8615 3y ago@elonmusk: Good idea! Rolling out next week, along with payments to creators and Tesla FSD!
- ericzawo 3y agoWhy are tech elite types continuing to be supportive of this guy? Never seen $44 billion get lit on fire so plainly.
- ssnistfajen 3y agoBecause members of the same collective interest groups cover for each other.
- kalleboo 3y agoThey're all temporarily embarrassed unicorns
- sarcasmatwork 3y ago"following temporary limits" 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.
- ulrischa 3y agoFor many official goverment channels public Tweets was the only reason to stay in twitter. In many countries (e.g. in europe) the information from these organisations need to be public by law. Could be the turning point for many agencies etc. to leave twitter
- simplicio 3y agoHard to imagine limiting the ad views of your non-paying users is going to help fix your revenue short-fall.
- 18pfsmt 3y agoThat's why none of the explanations given can possibly be thorough, and I'm finding very few plausible explanations on HN either. Most seem to be happy to blame whoever they view as their opposing team, which rarely leads to wisdom.
- slowhadoken 3y ago[flagged]
- epistasis 3y agoThe "rrrreeeee" is coming from inside the headquarters of Twitter...
- slowhadoken 3y agolmfao
- throwaway106382 3y agolol, I created an account yesterday after it went into authenticated only mode and was hit by rate limiting after like 3 minutes - gg elon
- ck2 3y agoSo when's that first billion-dollar-per-year payment due? Just trying to calculate the number of years before twitter becomes myspace. Two? Three?
- jl6 3y agoThis is great. Reading more than 600 posts a day is probably unhealthy anyway.
- ummonk 3y agoSteve Huffman and Elon Musk both seem to be so mad about scraping (especially for ML training) that they're willing to make the user experience vastly worse for their users in pursuit of preventing scraping.
- tedunangst 3y agoCan I get a refund for tweets that I didn't want to see so I'm not locked out? If viewing a bad tweet means I can't view a good tweet, that seems unlikely to increase my unregretted minutes.
- jacquesm 3y agoWith the SNR of Twitter that would mean 100 bad tweets and maybe one good one.
- faefox 3y agoIt really feels like we're witnessing the end of an era. Elon is doggedly piloting Twitter into the ground and Reddit seems strangely compelled to follow his lead. Reddit may recover - I'm not so sure about Twitter. What technologies will take their place? In a time where it's never been easier to stand up your own website/forum/what have you, could we possibly see a gradual return to a pre-corporate Internet?
- HL33tibCe7 3y agoIt’ll probably get worse if anything
- jacquesm 3y agoI'm all for a complete reboot of a 100% non-commercial version of the web.
- lamontcg 3y agoReally it looks like the commercial web is about to lock itself down hard into strongly walled gardens. It is definitely time to rebuild. I don't know if that'll be ActivityPub and decentralization, but it needs to be something else.
- TillE 3y agoInstagram doing a fediverse thing is a big deal, and makes me really optimistic about the future of ActivityPub. We don't have it all figured out just yet, but I do think we're going to see a decentralized future of social media, which is pretty exciting.
- olah_1 3y agoTheir use of ActivityPub is just a way to quickly bootstrap social media functionality using time tested libraries. Just like they did with XMPP.
- 3y ago
- timetraveller26 3y agoWith Reddit API changes, and now this I think the universe is sending us a signal to start being productive
- Razengan 3y agoSince Amazon & Microsoft own the hosting infrastructure, could they not cook up a Twitter/Reddit clone without having to rely on ads?
- epistasis 3y agoInteresting to imagine how a Mars colony might be run under this sort of leadership.
- stubybubs 3y agoExactly like in Total Recall when Cohaagen cuts off the air.
- rideontime 3y agoNon-verified colonists are now limited to 600 breaths per day.
- paxys 3y agoAre people really under the delusion that Elon will be alive in time for a Mars colony?
- lopkeny12ko 3y ago[flagged]
- aaomidi 3y agoYeah no, people are aware of the stupid excuse.
- epistasis 3y agoTo those who are blindly accepting this supposed reason, the answer is simple: engineering.
- minimaxir 3y agoThe "stop AI data scrapers temporarily" excuse doesn't hold under scrutiny since there's nothing Elon can do to stop scraping temporarily. If it appears in a web browser, it can be scraped, no exception. And to what end? If the limits are dropped, the data scrapers will start scraping again.
- jljljl 3y agoTwitter managed to withstand high load and scrapers before. Did this suddenly get significantly worse? Is it bad enough that caching or engineering solutions couldn't address the problem? One reason it _could_ get worse is because Twitter effectively disabled and paywalled their API, which many of these groups could use instead of scraping
- ummonk 3y agoFlagged for linking to a tweet I can't view since you haven't written what it says
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoYou're complaining that I didn't copy and paste the text of the tweet in my comment? In the time it took for you to decide to reply, write this comment, and submit it, you couldn't have clicked on a hyperlink? Elon's tweet speaks for itself--I'm not sure what kind of "gotcha" you're trying to play here.
- mumumu 3y agoIt seems the limit does not apply to Quotes and Liked tab on users profiles.
- Jach 3y agoThis made me giggle because when they turned off the free API I was using to copy images from tweets I liked so I'd have a backup copy, I replaced my script with a selenium using one that surely costs twitter more in resources. All it does is load my liked page and scroll down for several minutes collecting media as it goes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- user_named 3y agoLet's see what happens to twitters ad revenue when they reduce the V in CPV to 0.01% of what it was the day before.
- K5EiS 3y agoSad week for the internet, both twitter and reddit gone to shit
- the_mitsuhiko 3y agoA 24 hour reset window for rate limits seems dumb for engagement. I ran out of rate limits on my non paid account in the early afternoon.
- charcircuit 3y agoHopefully the data scrapers give up so that these restrictions can be lifted.
- victorbjorklund 3y agoThis is just insane. He really wanna take this app to zero users. Can't believe there exists people who think Elon is smart.
- x86x87 3y agoPeople are not unidimensional creatures. It's possible to be smart when it comes to certain things and a complete dumbass for ALL other things.
- tennisflyi 3y agoUnfortunately. And specialization pays.
- victorbjorklund 3y agoYea. Perhaps elon is good at other things than sound business decisions.
- sidibe 3y agoSome people will stick to their priors through thick and thin. I've learned to just enjoy watching the blue check mark crowd contort to whatever is the new thing they agree with Elon about and then vehemently back it up with other reasons too. Pretty sure a lot of the Twitter accounts that are famous because he interacts with them started out as liberals who liked EVs and are now tweeting about how they're worried about too few white babies
- skc 3y agoThis is actually pretty disastrous. 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.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoAh yes, people are getting screen times. That will be appreciated by lot of parents.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Inocez 3y agoThanks elon for helping me quit twitter addiction.
- loso 3y agoI knew the end of the cheap money era would cause some businesses to be exposed but wow. We are basically in the middle of watching someone flush 44 billion down the drain. I could understand if it was a 600 posting limit. But a 600 viewing limit? wow. For example, NBA free agency just started. There are types of trades & signings being talked about. Just looking at that information I'm going past the 600 limit in about 30 minutes just by scrolling to see if anything is new. Twitter was nice to get this information from & they showed me a few ads. Decent transaction. But now I'm just going to refresh ESPN to see the latest signings.
- x86x87 3y agoStop complaining or it's going to be 600 characters or less! Including the headers for your requests! /s
- Kye 3y agoAn account on an ESPN Mastodon instance that comes with and logs in with that Disney+/Hulu/ESPN bundle would probably be popular. Doesn't even have to federate.
- freewizard 3y agoThere will be cost and consequence of moderation, with very limited benefit given its content subscription model.
- Kye 3y ago
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoLooks like I was right all along.. Elon Musk, the covert agent :) Hint from years ago https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-spacex-secret-service-special-agent-filing-donation-2021-4?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-spacex-secre...
- jljljl 3y agoThis seems like death for an ad supported model on Twitter. Why would you buy ads on a social network that deliberately restricts the number of posts (and thus ads) that a user can view?
- mcculley 3y agoI have no idea how my browsing of Twitter via the web UI is exceeding any rate limit, but I want to thank Elon for breaking my Twitter addiction because now it won't let me see anything. Please keep limiting the ways in which people can use Twitter.
- marban 3y agoAh, the AOL era is back. First 500h free everyone!
- hugg 3y agoReducing the amount of time spent on the app will surely make advertisers happy!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hn_20591249 3y agoThinking about how both The Flash and Indiana Jones 5 are doing disastrously at the box office, and likely spent a lot of ad budget on Twitter that is now getting zero return. Can't imagine Disney and WB are going to be thrilled.
- Barrin92 3y agothere's no way on earth they cannot trivially distinguish between a normal user hitting the backend a few times and scrapers so blatant they grind the site to a halt. Is this yet another lame attempt to get people to sign up for his subscription?
- al2o3cr 3y agoThere's also some radical rate-limiting going on, to the point where expanding a tweet on the timeline (to see replies) usually results in an "You have been ratelimited please try again in a few moments" message on the first couple tries.
- dpedu 3y agoHonestly? Since the Elon drama started, I've been addicted to this website. This is actually helpful in breaking that.
- summerlight 3y agoThis is going to hit their impression numbers really hard? And probably avg. CTR as well since most of those hardcore users will not be able to see most of tweets. 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!"
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThat seems plausible. Which is incredibly sad.
- flappyeagle 3y agoYes it will
- coldcode 3y agoElon is fixing Twitter by reducing the amount of ads people see. Brilliant strategy.
- basisword 3y agoWill blue subscribers be getting refunds?
- kunalgupta 3y agoThis is probably good for humankind?
- nbtcla 3y ago[flagged]
- folugna37 3y agoIt has been absolutely hilarious watching the death of Twitter but also concerning because Twitter served (until this terrible decision) as an important tool for popular personalities and important local services or government officials to communicate with the general public or their audiences and without that, getting important information might become a little more difficult which concerns me.
- Apocryphon 3y agoAnd here I thought Silicon Valley’s Datageddon concept was just something Mike Judge and his writers cooked up to make Gavin Belson seem like a lunatic: https://youtu.be/YPgkSH2050k https://youtu.be/YPgkSH2050k
- minimaxir 3y agoElon has slowly become new model of the comedically eccentric tech CEO parody (e.g. Knives Out: Glass Onion)
- abhiminator 3y agoZDNet published an article just yesterday that looked into Twitter's engagement data and it looks like Twitter is bleeding users like never before. [0] [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-seeing-record-user-engagement-the-data-tells-a-different-story/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-seeing-record-user-eng...
- Reptur 3y agoMy theory is the demise of Twitter is intentional, giving people a voice on a platform that competes with the MSM is too uncomfortable for those at the top who had control for decades. They want it like they had it before, where they had total control of all media dissemination. Consider right now certain words and phrases get automatically shadowbanned. That many far left political commentators have been outright banned. The goal of this system is monopoly, control of mass media is part of that.
- damedesfleurs 3y agoI genuinely don’t understand what he’s doing, twitter is an ad supported businesses and and how is making it so that no one can see ads going to work? Engagement is going to absolutely tank when no one can use the site
- revskill 3y agoBusinesses gonna go bankruptcy due to "tech debts".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dylan604 3y agoIs openAI (and all new upstart model training data scrapers) really this scary to Twitter's existence? I understand that their desire to scrape all of your content for free is absolutely total bullshit, and I actually find myself sympathetic to this. So I get the rate limit idea, but can you really not detect a bot vs a user?
- MuteXR 3y agoIt isn't. This is a nonsense excuse.
- kredd 3y agoTwitter is a crack pipe for dopamine hits, which OpenAI has no business in. Highly doubt bots is the actual reason, since they have had that problem since forever. Now, infrastructure bills could be a real reason.
- dylan604 3y agowhich makes me wonder what's wrong with me that i get absolutely no pleasure from twitter like that or any socials really. i see no difference in reading twitter than watching kardashians, yet everyone else clearly does making me the outlier. i spend so much time solving for edge cases that i am one
- thatsadude 3y agoI’m speechless as a regular user. This is so dumb, sure Twitter will die within a year or twos.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wzy 3y agoThis 600 tweets/per-whatever strategy certainly is an interesting approach to cutting cost.
- mahimamanik 3y agoI wonder if they made this decision because data said revenue from subscriptions from power users could be a lot more than ads. Reducing dependency on ads, reducing bots & creating their own LLM on top of twitter data may not be a bad idea.
- disgruntledphd2 3y agoOnly if they are making up numbers. Ads are incredibly lucrative, and people don't like spending money.
- william- 3y agoNoticed this earlier but didn't realize how intentional it was until now. Since Musk claims the account-wall for guests will be lifted eventually, I wonder how this rate-limit will be enforced for those browsing without an account. If by IP address, guests using any somewhat popular VPN would have permanently maxxed out limits. If it is done with some sort of guest cookie / ID, then it will be instantly evadable by clearing cookies. I believe this is similar to what you can do with Quora's account-wall. I am very curious to see what happens.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- user_named 3y agoThis is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself. 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 https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- moose_man 3y agoYou mean to tell me that you can't actually run a tech company with three engineers and a Mac Mini?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WinLychee 3y agoSounds like a really interesting challenge, would be fun to see how far you can get.
- WJW 3y agoWithout specifying scale, this seems pretty easy. Pieter Levels has been able to manage a tech company with just a single engineer and with some optimization he could probably fit it all onto a mac mini without too much trouble.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- drumhead 3y agoElon seems to have adopted the same business model as Reddit. Lock down the data and sell it to the LLMs. Quite short sighted, but if you're desperate for cash then its probaly an inviting option. Im hoping the alternative to twitter start becoming more generally available soon.
- minimaxir 3y agoSteve Huffman got the lock-down-the-API idea from Elon.
- albybisy 3y agoFor me twitter become unusable. I can't verify myself and i don't know really why. After 2 minutes of scrolling i reach my daily limit, so for me Twitter is dead.
- saltysalt 3y agoRight at the beginning of Q3 is suspicious timing. Cloud billing cycle?
- bsuvc 3y agoMore and more, I'm starting to root for Zuck in the fight.
- meepmorp 3y agoI really want to see cage match between them; pretty sure Zuck will wreck Musk.
- lawn 3y agoZuck did compete in a BJJ event, so yes pretty sure he'd crush him.
- gremlinsinc 3y agoI'm not a fan of Zuck, but Elon and Spez have worked really hard to become even more unlikeable and detestable than Zuckerberg, that's a huge feat.
- thom 3y agoNoteworthy if true that Twitter's Google Cloud renewal date was June 30th and they were attempting to migrate away as quickly as possible: https://twitter.com/RiverTamYDN/status/1675164339274240001 https://twitter.com/RiverTamYDN/status/1675164339274240001
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- simplyinfinity 3y agofinally, society can have a break from all the doom scrolling. I wonder how much mental health benefits we're gonna see overall from this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brycewray 3y agoWill obviously hose Tweetdeck, especially if you follow a lot of active accounts (e.g., reporters and other news sources) and have several columns. OTOH, there are few or no ads on Tweetdeck so Musk et al. likely couldn’t care less.
- vvilliamperez 3y agoCould be they are trying to identify bots. Real users will probably leave the app/website on rate limit hit.
- ncallaway 3y agoSo will bots
- yread 3y agoScraping using a verified account (6000*30=180k tweets for 8$) seems to be cheaper than using the API (you would need 4 basic accounts (50k tweets, 100$/month) - is this pricing for real?)
- tennisflyi 3y agoI used to think tech/VC was smart…
- Beeeaans 3y agoIf feels weird that this is happening on the same day that Reddit is also limiting their API. Both are citing AI as a major reason for this. 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
- paxys 3y agoAs always, follow the money. Yesterday was the last day of the financial quarter. Q3 reporting starts today. What better way to show that hockey stick graph to investors?
- publius_0xf3 3y ago>Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won't happen again. Are there any Musk dickriders still willing to defend this guy who just lies to your face?
- user_named 3y agoReminder that Elon didn't even intend to buy Twitter 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
- kuchenbecker 3y agoMost of the money was loaned, and the debt is now Twitters and not his.
- FrankWilhoit 3y agoWhat are your counterexamples from ancient history?
- ben_w 3y agoThere's the guy who gave away so much gold he broke half of Africa's economy for a bit; the motivation might be different, but I think it counts if the category is "got money badly wrong". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa
- fredgrott 3y agoNote, twitter communities was down is it still down?
- 2-718-281-828 3y agois this a symptom of something going beyond twitter? i'm experiencing loading and lagging all over the place. also hn and google are unusually slow.
- sys_64738 3y agoThe sooner Twitter dies the better. Let's hope Musk loses big when it craters.
- minroot 3y agoMan, this is beyond reality, rate limiting on reading?
- minimaxir 3y agoUpdate from Elon: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754 > 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 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.
- rideontime 3y agoSo, like, two more feed refreshes per day? Watching the requests in dev tools, it's definitely based on fetches and not impressions.
- cududa 3y agoA cool so I get about 3 more minutes of looking at tweets My guess is he got rate limited himself after a few hours as a verified user so he’s already upping it
- jsheard 3y ago
- 7e 3y agoElon gutted infrastructure, and now Twitter can barely handle Internet loads. It’s one DDoS attack away from service unavailability. Cheap bastard.
- xbiitx 3y agodidnt he bought twitter for free speech
- mk89 3y agoIn the era of "if it's free, you're the product", I have to admit that this is a strange move. 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!
- u_name 3y agoMaybe i am wrong, but isn't that what happens currently with different services a sign that the "it's free, you're the product" thing kinda starts to fail or needs to get renamed into "it's free, you're our product"? 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.
- firebirdn99 3y agoIt's actually a blessing in disguise. I don't get much productivity, and instead waste hours sometimes on there. Thanks!
- minroot 3y agoIn early days people left because of leadership reasons, but the tech was still fine. But now, although the tech is there it is caged. I guess early people knew the future better than others and took initiative to leave. At this point no one have to decide between the two.
- yodsanklai 3y agoLot of Musk bashing in the comments but I'd love to have more technical insight behind this decision. For instance, what rate limiting policy is reasonable for such a service. What was the policy before this decision?
- rideontime 3y agohttps://mstdn.social/@maxkennerly/110640373859329500 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.
- bob_theslob646 3y agoIt's definitely not a data scraping decision because there are more effective ways to do this. It's something to do with the actual system itself and he wants to delay the truth.
- minroot 3y agoHow can that genius make such decision?
- olliej 3y agoBecause twitter is no longer publicly visibly can HN stop accepting submissions pointing to it?
- rifty 3y agoIf there really are excessive scrapers i wonder if they will actually attempt to fan out across a bunch of accounts immediately or play chicken with Twitter here. How long does Twitter have to play chicken with them to get them to pay? 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.
- afro88 3y agoHas it been reversed already? I'm actively trying to hit the limit on my unverified account without success
- stainablesteel 3y agothis is news because its twitter 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
- landon-young_ 3y agoPossibly. It is definitely notable that a CEO of a web product of this scale made an announcement that is essentially saying "Either myself and or my employees don't actually know jack shit about how to run a large scale web product". The problems he pointed out are the kind of things you hear in questions in a mid-level swe interview.
- esskay 3y agoOh awesome, yeah I hit the limit by about 5pm. How damn stupid do you have to be to not only restrict viewing to logged in users, but to then limit how long those eyeballs can look at your adverts. Between Reddit's implosion and Twitter being run by a moron it's making it incredibly easy to get work done.
- sergiotapia 3y agoI burned through the 600 limit in 13 minutes. This will kill this app, no question about it.
- aljadooa 3y ago[dead]
- wnevets 3y agoIt's almost if those "extra" servers had a purpose after all
- dopa42365 3y agoSemi related: it looks like twitter is currently winning the battle vs adblockers, which made me notice how every third or fourth post is a "promoted" advertisement. I guess it's the same (or even worse) in their mobile apps. There's no way that twitter isn't making money (A LOT) with 1/3 the site being ads? Especially with twitter being much less media heavy than other sites (very far from youtube or even twitch that can easily add up to tens or even hundreds of gigabytes of traffic every month just for myself).
- puttycat 3y agoNo ads for me, using uBlock origin.
- optimalsolver 3y agoWhich adblocker are you using? I don't see any on UBlock Origin.
- klyrs 3y ago1. Hit the account wall imposed, what, yesterday? 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.
- verytrivial 3y agoThis is so strange. Why on earth wouldn't you start with a randomly higher threshold for these apparently abusive use patterns then march them down over the next couple of days? You know, see if the magic smoke comes out. It's just .. weird. It's been down for half a day for me.
- sigmar 3y agoPeople that paid the $84- are you going to seek a refund? Doesn't seem like 8000 tweet-reads/day was the service you paid for, particularly if this lasts more than a few weeks.
- whalesalad 3y agoI wish Twitter was a public company so I could short it.
- lovvtide 3y agoDon't forget about Nostr, which has seen lots of development this year with multiple interoperable clients. (iOS) Damus - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/damus/id1628663131 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/damus/id1628663131 (Android) Amethyst - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitorpamplona.amethyst https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitorpampl... (Web) https://satellite.earth https://satellite.earth https://primal.net https://primal.net https://iris.to https://iris.to https://snort.social https://snort.social https://app.coracle.social https://app.coracle.social
- lolinder 3y agoI don't know whether or not Twitter is actually seeing unprecedented levels of traffic due to ChatGPT plugins or whatever else—I personally doubt it, but I'm willing to believe it's possible. 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-staff-has-evaporated-under-musk-234247201.html https://www.engadget.com/80-percent-of-twitters-full-time-st...
- spike021 3y agoThis may have already been discussed. But, if Musk is being honest and this has to do with blocking efforts to scrape content for ML/AI models, then why not block IP ranges from the most common compute services (i.e. aws, gce, digital ocean, etc.)? 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.
- mkl95 3y ago> New unverified accounts to 300/day 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 :-)
- choward 3y agoThis has to be the dumbest idea I've ever seen any social media company make and that says a lot. 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.
- choward 3y agoI can confirm that scrolling through replies does count. So reading the replies to Elon's tweets to figure out what's happening makes you hit the rate limit.
- nullsmack 3y ago"temporary" Elon Musk is an idiot that doesn't know what he's doing. Literally anyone would instantly use up those views.
- mazurnification 3y agoAfter hitting rate limit I cannot even read my own tweets (Profile->Tweets). I find it hilarious. 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.
- ultrasaurus 3y agoIt's amazing how much a rate-limited Twitter isn't Twitter any more: - 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
- tlogan 3y agoElon Musk's abrupt requirement for users to be logged in to view tweets, along with rate limiting, suggests a problem with the backend. Why do I think this way? Because the decisions does not make sense from the business perspective. The engineering is probably struggling to deploy the fix in scalable way.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- papito 3y agoAs a compulsive Twitter user who follows the Russian invasion of Ukraine non-stop, I thank Elon from the bottom of my heart for ridding me of my addiction. I am also trying to launch a product, so the timing is [chef's kiss]/
- cactusplant7374 3y agoDid Elon not pay the AWS bill? Is that what this is about?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- agluszak 3y agoIs it really because of scraping? Or because he didn't pay the GCP bill? xD
- iFred 3y agoThe past seven months of Twitter as observed through HTTP response latency of various endpoints exposed to the client. 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/3jzi7qzjzzd2v https://bsky.app/profile/ifred.bsky.social/post/3jzi7qzjzzd2... The Grafana - https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/0ybkyhO4k/twitter-death-watch-http-latency?orgId=4&refresh=15m&from=now-24h&to=now https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/0ybkyhO4k/twitter-death-wat...
- werid 3y agowhile rate limited i could still view tweets that was sent to my phone via the notification feature. i have it turned on for a few users, so these weren't tweets sent at me. 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.
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoHe's clearly trying to cut costs.
- CmdSheppard 3y agoTwitter is unable at this point. I deactivated my account just now. Sad but it was becoming an increasingly frustrating experience.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dysoco 3y agoYou can't even see your own tweets while rate limited, so if I tweet something it goes live but I have no way of deleting it if I made a typo or for example shared sensitive information by mistake; I have a feeling this might be a GDPR violation or similar?
- runjake 3y agoPart of me is loving this effective dismantling of Twitter and Reddit. 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.
- RadixDLT 3y agoSomething went wrong. Try reloading.
- SirMaster 3y agoProbably a good thing. People should use less social media.
- mackeyja92 3y agoNot sure if it is intentional or not, but it appears that you can still load tweets you received notifications for even after hitting the limit. So a workaround is telling twitter to notify you about all tweets from people you care to read and then scrolling the notification feed (after new tweets come in). If you don’t actually want notifications for these you can turn it off in phone settings and it still works.
- ismaelvega 3y agoThis is history
- throwaway743 3y agoSo foes anyone have a solution for circum eating this using something like twint or the likes? 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...
- goscots 3y agoCan somebody explain to why all these social media platforms are suddenly clamping down? It’s not that complex or expensive to deliver text at scale in the cloud. If twitter wants to make more money off it’s users, it should add premium features that users will actually pay for instead of killing their golden goose.
- ctoxyz 3y agounwinding user success = product death
- nurettin 3y agoI wonder why amazon doesn't/can't do this. Either Twitter is doing something terribly wrong by rate-limiting logged in users, or it is absolutely brilliant and innovative.