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That it’s this easy to get around the login ban shows how poorly executed and hastily planned this was. I imagine it will be rolled-back in the next week as it

That it’s this easy to get around the login ban shows how poorly executed and hastily planned this was. I imagine it will be rolled-back in the next week as it becomes clear to advertisers how much lower value tweets are

samwillis 3y ago
It was announced as an anti scraping "feature" but the reality is it's about encouraging signups, tracking for ads and starting the sales funnel for upgrading to Twitter blue. Every other social media site has done the same at some point to increase logged in users.
- jdiff 3y ago
  Combined with the other changes that were also hastily and sloppily implemented and are now getting slowly rolled back, I think that strengthens the theory that Twitter was facing extreme capacity crunch and threw a whole bunch of slapstick measures to reduce traffic at the wall to keep their remaining servers from toppling over.
- leros 3y ago
  It's probably also about getting people to use the API. With Twitter's data being public, bots and data analyzers can just scrape the site instead of paying for the now extremely expensive API. Not only does this mean Twitter isn't getting paid, but scraping puts a lot more load on Twitter servers than equivalent API usage.
  - samwillis 3y ago
    Anyone doing industrial scraping already knows all the tricks for user agent swapping and making headers, including their order, look like "real" browsers or bots. It's not about pushing people to the API.
dgrin91 3y ago
To play devil's advocate a bit - you can call their solution good from an engineering standpoint because they were able to do it quickly and cover the vast majority of cases. Yes you can seemingly easily get around this with a quick user agent switch, but 99.9999% of users won't do that, so this solution is good enough.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  To play the... angel's prosecutor (?), but how can it be good from engineering standpoint when they're not trying to block users without login, supposedly, but this army of scraping AI firms and botnets? Who ever scraped a page and doesn't know to try referrer, user-agent and all other 101 tricks in the book?
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    God's Advocate, in fact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_advocate) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_advocate). These used to be _official posts_ in the Catholic Church; the devil's advocate's role was to argue against the canonisation of a prospective saint. (I can't, offhand, figure out if they got a special uniform, but I do hope so.) They now use a more civil law-ish approach to this.
    - proamdev123 3y ago
      You’re right, but OP’s “angel’s prosecutor” has a nice ring to it. I love it!
- wunderland 3y ago
  It immediately broke embedded tweets all over the web, something which was unique to Twitter. This lowers Twitter’s overall value in hopes of reaching some short term sign-up goal.
- addisonl 3y ago
  Didn’t they ddos their own website on Saturday when they rolled this out?

samwillis 3y ago

It was announced as an anti scraping "feature" but the reality is it's about encouraging signups, tracking for ads and starting the sales funnel for upgrading to Twitter blue. Every other social media site has done the same at some point to increase logged in users.

jdiff 3y ago
Combined with the other changes that were also hastily and sloppily implemented and are now getting slowly rolled back, I think that strengthens the theory that Twitter was facing extreme capacity crunch and threw a whole bunch of slapstick measures to reduce traffic at the wall to keep their remaining servers from toppling over.
leros 3y ago
It's probably also about getting people to use the API. With Twitter's data being public, bots and data analyzers can just scrape the site instead of paying for the now extremely expensive API. Not only does this mean Twitter isn't getting paid, but scraping puts a lot more load on Twitter servers than equivalent API usage.
- samwillis 3y ago
  Anyone doing industrial scraping already knows all the tricks for user agent swapping and making headers, including their order, look like "real" browsers or bots. It's not about pushing people to the API.

dgrin91 3y ago

To play devil's advocate a bit - you can call their solution good from an engineering standpoint because they were able to do it quickly and cover the vast majority of cases. Yes you can seemingly easily get around this with a quick user agent switch, but 99.9999% of users won't do that, so this solution is good enough.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
To play the... angel's prosecutor (?), but how can it be good from engineering standpoint when they're not trying to block users without login, supposedly, but this army of scraping AI firms and botnets? Who ever scraped a page and doesn't know to try referrer, user-agent and all other 101 tricks in the book?
- rsynnott 3y ago
  God's Advocate, in fact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_advocate) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_advocate). These used to be _official posts_ in the Catholic Church; the devil's advocate's role was to argue against the canonisation of a prospective saint. (I can't, offhand, figure out if they got a special uniform, but I do hope so.) They now use a more civil law-ish approach to this.
  - proamdev123 3y ago
    You’re right, but OP’s “angel’s prosecutor” has a nice ring to it. I love it!
wunderland 3y ago
It immediately broke embedded tweets all over the web, something which was unique to Twitter. This lowers Twitter’s overall value in hopes of reaching some short term sign-up goal.
addisonl 3y ago
Didn’t they ddos their own website on Saturday when they rolled this out?