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They do at least credit HN. > The Post’s analysis found that links to most other sites were unaffected — including those to The Washington Post, Fox News and s
by pityJuke 3y ago
They do at least credit HN.
> The Post’s analysis found that links to most other sites were unaffected — including those to The Washington Post, Fox News and social media services such as Mastodon and YouTube — with the shortened links being routed to their final destination in a second or less. A user first flagged the delays early Tuesday on the technology discussion forum Hacker News.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[flagged]
- thomasfromcdnjs 3y agoI don't know why you are being downvoted. It is completely unsubstantiated nonsense. Just because some sites seemingly have had a 5 second delay when opening doesn't prove anything. Yes, some of the sites it was happening to Elon might not like. But you have no idea how many sites it was happening on. It could have been affecting more sites Elon likes than he dislikes. But no one can prove otherwise, so it is by definition unsubstantiated. Even using the word throttle is not an overly apt description. You can still open as many links as you like, there was just some delay. (semantics I know) Down vote me too, but there is zero proof this was nefariously enacted. As techies, we should know systems fail often in bizarre ways.
- gamblor956 3y agoIt was substantiated by a few dozen HN users, and the Post journalists themselves: X is throttling traffic to some sites and not to others. It appears this throttling is based in part on the useragent since at least one HN comment noted that the throttling was observed when using curl spoofing a mozilla user agent.
- username332211 3y agoAnd at least one other comment noted that t.co uses completely different mechanism for redirecting requests from a browser and from curl and has been doing that since forever.
- lapcat 3y agoYou're missing the point, which is that a 5 second delay is added only to some very specific Musk-hated sites, such as Threads, Substack, and until the story blew up in the media, the NYT.
- gamblor956 3y agoThe point of the curl test was that the X-imposed delay also occurs in curl requests when spoofing a browser... Meaning, that the delay, which only affects a few specific websites that are either known X competitors or perceived Musk antagonists, is deliberate.
- mvdtnz 3y agoHow do you explain the delay being trivially reproducible for, say, NYT and consistently absent for Fox News?
- lapcat 3y agoIt's absolutely substantiated. I can easily reproduce the phenomenon myself using curl from the command line. The key is to use a web browser User-Agent (curl -A), because it doesn't happen for curl's own User-Agent. The delay is consistent and only affects certain Musk-hated domains such as the NYT and Threads. Here's an example, try it yourself: curl -v -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.6 Safari/605.1.15' https://t.co/d8KWBqT5v6
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoDon't need to try it for myself (tho I did try some Times links and their profile link, which doesn't delay btw). It's entirely possible with the number of domains, and technologies in play, that there's something more going on that causes the delay. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37136776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37136776
- lapcat 3y agoThe "cookies or not" comment misses the point, which is the domain-specificity of the phenomenon.