11 ms·

Incredibly 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

by __jem 3y ago

Incredibly 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 ago
This is the move that elevates “the Saudis funded this to kill Twitter” from silly conspiracy theory to maybe plausible.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by Elon’s incompetence.
  - fundad 3y ago
    Malice? He thinks he’s liberating us from the woke mind virus and defending poor oppressed Republican activists.
- rvense 3y ago
  Isn'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 ago
    In 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 ago
They 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.
- csiegert 3y ago
  I find the scraping explanation plausible. Some search engine bots are aggressive. With all the AI hype, I first thought of Microsoft Bing scraping Twitter at full datacenter speed to suck in more information for OpenAI.
  - randomfool 3y ago
    These limits are far below standard scraping rates and deeply affecting the casual users, have to presume intentionally.
  - cldellow 3y ago
    I would believe that scraping is why they now require users to be authenticated. But given that they now require users to be logged in, it should be computationally cheap to drop unauthenticated requests at the front door before they incur real expense. It'd also be cheap to just blackhole datacentre IP space. The sort of attack that would require this level of limits is malware on tens of thousands of residential machines that can use a user's existing Twitter session cookies. I'm really skeptical that's the case.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    > I find the scraping explanation plausible. How do you explain it suddenly being a problem today and not, say, during the recent World Cup when not only the AI scraping would have been happening but el Morko himself was crowing about how much extra traffic they were handling?
    - petesergeant 3y ago
      Someone with deep pockets flipped the ON switch?
ROTMetro 3y ago
Now imagine being on Elon's Mars colony and having your breathing rate limited out of the blue one day. Today switched my vision of that from wonder and hope to seeing it as volunteering to become one of the belters in The Expanse. I'm kinda sad to have moved from the 'let me in' to 'hard pass' on that dream. It was one of that last big future dreams 1990s me had for the 20X0's.
- lapcat 3y ago
  Give this people air! https://youtu.be/X8lT-Sn-HqE https://youtu.be/X8lT-Sn-HqE
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  I'm kinda sad to have moved from the 'let me in' to 'hard pass' on that dream. It was one of that last big future dreams 1990s me had for the 20X0's. Yep. Elon clearly lost his motivation for Mars at some point, either because he was confronted with unshakeable evidence that his goals were impossible to achieve, or because he just got bored and distracted. My guess is that the latter explanation is closer to the mark. But on the other hand, learning that his dream was out of reach could easily have led to the kind of dissipative, self-destructive loss of focus that we've seen from him over the past couple of years. For those of us who were on board with his original vision, he's just another Lucy, holding just another football.
  - fundad 3y ago
    Or it could be that the Mars narrative was more useful than it is now.
- wnkrshm 3y ago
  That hit me years ago when working conditions at Tesla came to light, I realized Elon can never have his Mars colony be self-sufficient or he'd be thrown out of an airlock.
wildpeaks 3y ago
The cherry on top is that even if you pay, you still get ads.
- dgroshev 3y ago
  That's the main problem with Twitter Blue (other than its very bad reputation): it's just not worth the money. Instead of adding value to the subscription or making it cheaper, Elon just makes the rest of the product worse. It's a very weird way to do business.

by __jem 3y ago

ceejayoz 3y ago

This is the move that elevates “the Saudis funded this to kill Twitter” from silly conspiracy theory to maybe plausible.

rsynnott 3y ago
Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by Elon’s incompetence.
- fundad 3y ago
  Malice? He thinks he’s liberating us from the woke mind virus and defending poor oppressed Republican activists.
rvense 3y ago
Isn'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 ago
  In 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 ago

They 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.

csiegert 3y ago
I find the scraping explanation plausible. Some search engine bots are aggressive. With all the AI hype, I first thought of Microsoft Bing scraping Twitter at full datacenter speed to suck in more information for OpenAI.
- randomfool 3y ago
  These limits are far below standard scraping rates and deeply affecting the casual users, have to presume intentionally.
- cldellow 3y ago
  I would believe that scraping is why they now require users to be authenticated. But given that they now require users to be logged in, it should be computationally cheap to drop unauthenticated requests at the front door before they incur real expense. It'd also be cheap to just blackhole datacentre IP space. The sort of attack that would require this level of limits is malware on tens of thousands of residential machines that can use a user's existing Twitter session cookies. I'm really skeptical that's the case.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  > I find the scraping explanation plausible. How do you explain it suddenly being a problem today and not, say, during the recent World Cup when not only the AI scraping would have been happening but el Morko himself was crowing about how much extra traffic they were handling?
  - petesergeant 3y ago
    Someone with deep pockets flipped the ON switch?

ROTMetro 3y ago

Now imagine being on Elon's Mars colony and having your breathing rate limited out of the blue one day. Today switched my vision of that from wonder and hope to seeing it as volunteering to become one of the belters in The Expanse. I'm kinda sad to have moved from the 'let me in' to 'hard pass' on that dream. It was one of that last big future dreams 1990s me had for the 20X0's.

lapcat 3y ago
Give this people air! https://youtu.be/X8lT-Sn-HqE https://youtu.be/X8lT-Sn-HqE
CamperBob2 3y ago
I'm kinda sad to have moved from the 'let me in' to 'hard pass' on that dream. It was one of that last big future dreams 1990s me had for the 20X0's. Yep. Elon clearly lost his motivation for Mars at some point, either because he was confronted with unshakeable evidence that his goals were impossible to achieve, or because he just got bored and distracted. My guess is that the latter explanation is closer to the mark. But on the other hand, learning that his dream was out of reach could easily have led to the kind of dissipative, self-destructive loss of focus that we've seen from him over the past couple of years. For those of us who were on board with his original vision, he's just another Lucy, holding just another football.
- fundad 3y ago
  Or it could be that the Mars narrative was more useful than it is now.
wnkrshm 3y ago
That hit me years ago when working conditions at Tesla came to light, I realized Elon can never have his Mars colony be self-sufficient or he'd be thrown out of an airlock.

wildpeaks 3y ago

The cherry on top is that even if you pay, you still get ads.

dgroshev 3y ago
That's the main problem with Twitter Blue (other than its very bad reputation): it's just not worth the money. Instead of adding value to the subscription or making it cheaper, Elon just makes the rest of the product worse. It's a very weird way to do business.