Image Transcription: Twitter Post:
Elon Musk, @elonmusk
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits
- Verified accounts are limited to reaching 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
^I’m a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.
The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.
These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.
Oh my god, this is just too funny.“The DDOS is coming from INSIDE the HOUSE!”
My lord. And they can’t/won’t piece 1+1 together? Hanlon’s razor dictates they are indeed idiots.
In order to quickly fix it they would probably have to roll back the change to require login to view tweets, which would be admitting that it wasn’t caused by “attacks” on Twitter, which Elon won’t do. Rock and a hard place.
My guess is that they are severely understaffed. Happens when the new boss is a noob in the industry and fires the people he needs…
you commented 3 times btw
Sorry! kept getting lemmy network error
Elon was right, firing off many engineers didn’t cause any DDoS attack from outside- as DDoS attacks are now happening from within
The self-DDoS truly the height of idiocy. It’s been a good couple of weeks watching billionaires who have never faced consequences fuck around and find out.
I find it especially bizarre that spez took inspiration and guidance from Musk. I can entertain the possibility of Musk intentionally driving Twitter to the ground (though he sure is taking the scenic route), but Reddit? It just seems like the rich tech bros have collectively lost their minds
Is spez rich?
Yes. While he loves to talk about how little reddit makes, he doesn’t mention how much reddit pays him for that.
He’s rich not because of his salary (what Reddit pays him). He’s rich because of his equity/ownership in Reddit. But he can only monetize that if there are buyers.
For years this wasn’t a problem because private buyers and banks were happy to buy his shares or lend against them as collateral. However that market has been drying up over the past 18 months.
So he desperately needs to get to an IPO so he, and his Board of Directors and other stockholders, can dump their shares on an unsuspecting retail public market that doesn’t realize that the “profitability” was only achieved by destroying the user base, and that what they’ve actually bought is a ticking time bomb.
I really hope the IPO bombs just to spite all the people, including Spez, that drove Reddit into the ground.
The problem is that if the IPO bombs, it’s the public investors that will lose money, as fuck u/spez and other shareholders will have dumped their steaming pile of shit shares onto the market from the start to reduce their shareholding and cash in.
When people say that, they don’t mean they hope it bombs after the IPO…
They mean they hope It bombs before the sale so Huffman and the others with a stake don’t make much money
Anyone that buys the stock after the IPO would get a lower price.
It would be the Institucional investors that have the opportunity to buy before the share is open in the market. After that is fair game to anyone stupid enough to buy it.
It’s not just spez , there are going to be a LOT of folks in reddit willing to burn it to the ground to create valuation for an IPO. The next Mod blackout need to happen the night before and the day of the IPO.
Nah I’m pretty sure he got some preferential liquidation a few times and is cash rich.
Thank you for making my point. That’s not salary. That’s equity sold in a secondary.
Short Reddit on IPO. Give him a good farewell.
Compared to musk? No. Not even close tongue same tier. But he’s still a 1%er
Yes, and he would like to graduate into being obscenely rich through a successful IPO.
Already has more money than he should have.
He’s valued over $10mil
I really don’t believe at all that he would intentionally drive it to the ground. I can see him claiming that if he manages to actually kill it tho
You can’t lose something you never had
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I really don’t believe at all that he would intentionally drive it to the ground. I can see him claiming that if he manages to actually kill it tho
They never had their minds. They just now have enough money to make that all of our problems… This is why no one deserves billions of dollars. It makes you go megalomaniacle.
I’d love a self ddos of Reddit at this point tbh
They just don’t want LLMs scrapping their websites
Yo for real, what’s up with all these social media sites literally shooting themselves in the foot as we speak?.
Youtube planning to antagonize adblock users and limiting video watching, Reddit killing itself with
bureocracystyle and now Twitter doing this shit. Hopefully shit sites like TikTok or Facebook jump on the wagon too.For reddit at least, The money from VCs dried up. They have to monetise fast or go broke.
Elon way way way overplayed for Twitter and the company is hemorrhaging money paying the loans he took out to pay for the purchase.
Google in general is in decline. Ad sales are down as the net becomes SEO’d to death. Marketing teams just aren’t willing to pay for Google ads like they used to since the roi isn’t there anymore.
But there are so many ways Reddit could have played this better. It wasn’t just about monetizing. The API changes were in bad faith and meant to kill 3rd party apps without flat out doing it. Users would have been understanding if they charged a reasonable amount of started injecting ads into the API feeds, but instead they went full aggro and disrespected not just the devs working to make their platform better, but the users as well. If they wanted 3rd party apps to show their ads or charge a fee to remove ads I would have been understanding, but because of the disrespect I’ve dropped them.
I forgot the actual numbers, but it’s downright bizarre that Reddit can’t figure out how to make money. They have a massive platform that is user-moderated for free, filled with free user-created content, with third party developers creating solid apps and features, again for free. Reddit should be able to do fuck all and make money
but it’s downright bizarre that Reddit can’t figure out how to make money.
Because of (venture) capitalism…
They made more from people giving it to them. If the company posted a profit, they’d have to pay taxes
So they pay themselves and amass assets.
If it fails you keep your salary and sell the assets. If you owe more than that’s worth, declare bankruptcy. If not, collect a check.
Startups stay in this phase right up till IPO, where they try to flip to profits as fast as possible. Then you can not only declare x profits, but y% increase in profits.
Tldr:
They’re nonprofitable by choice. This method just doesn’t work during a recession.
That plus their own app being abysmal. The official Reddit app is a terrible experience without the necessary features of the old ones
In general, i agree with your post, but GOOG is up ~ 30% in the last 6 months. Specific parts of Google may be dwindling but their overall business is thriving right now.
The stock is not the company, that’s important to remember. The PE ratios for tech companies are totally out of whack compared to basically any other company.
Google stock is doing ok in part because they have Bard which means they’re participating in the AI boom. I think that’s going to turn out to be mostly hot air, but in the meantime it’s helping a small number of companies stay afloat
I really hope this the end of an era of milking the users for data and then selling that for ad money. Twitter and Facebook are switching to a subscription model, but I’m not so sure it’s actually going to reduce the amount of data they try to get from everyone.
Twitter successfully sold itself to a private investment firm for over market value. That’s the dream for tech startups and never-made-a-profit digital services.
Anyone still using Twitter is an addict or a boomer, but that’s exactly the audience that Musk wanted to purchase.
The only reason twitter was popular is because you could check it for information. Towns and organizations would post updates there, it drove traffic, eyeballs, ads and revenue. This is the dumbest thing ever, even if he wanted to promote nazi ideology, it’s idiotic because your only preaching to the choir. You cannot convert people when you drive them all away, so even if it wasn’t about money, it’s dumb.
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The world is starting to wise up to the fact that online advertising is nearly 100% fraudulent so they aren’t buying online ads as much.
The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’
The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’
It goes deeper than that.
This all started with the API changes. Before they were charging a fair price for the API and companies happily paid it for the convenience. Then Elon got greedy he started charging a ridiculous amount for the API so those companies decided it would be worth it to just deal with the annoyance and switch to scraping the website instead. But when you hit the website it’s way less efficient than hitting the API because it’s doing a bunch of mixing and ranking which is a lot more complicated and costly than serving static content, which costs a small fraction of real time algorithmic ranking. So now instead of making money off companies that want their data they’re losing money on the cloud costs to serve the scrapers.
More recently, they haven’t been paying their hosting bills to Google and their service was set to expire at the end of last month. What just happened at the start of this month? They added the limitations. That can’t be a coincidence. Now the Google services weren’t hosting the site itself, otherwise they’d probably be fully down right now, but it was hosting their trust and safety services for things like fighting spam. That could have also been hosting anti scraper services as well. Since they’re so under staffed they probably couldn’t swap the services in time, so instead of having anti scraping services like every other big company on the internet, they decided to cut service instead. It’s just built up incompetence coming to a head.
There are several negatives to the limitation too. Advertisers (which are already leaving in droves) are even further discouraged from placing ads that have a much smaller chance of being seen.
Edit: spelling
Yeah, that’s the extra stupid part. Not only limiting the amount of content people can see, but also the ads he needs money from.
Not just less likely to be seen, but now a greater percentage of those views will come from Twitter blue subscribers as well who might not be their intended audience.
Does Twitter Blue show ads? I guess I assumed if you’re paying you don’t have to see those, but that would make too much sense 🤦♂️
Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
This is really, really bad for Twitter. The whole reason so many groups and people use it for official communications and announcements is because their audience can easily and freely see it. Rate limiting and requiring an account completely destroy that. And without it, Twitter really doesn’t have much to offer.
Plus this goes directly against advertising lol
How is that even possible? By limiting access the load should be lower, there is no way
Much like the case of Reddit, Musk might want to reflect on who actually produces all the content he’s guarding so jealously, and ask himself what’s likely to happen to the value of his site if he makes it difficult for millions of us to write all his content for free
I don’t think this is that complicated. The hypothesis Musk and Spez are pursuing is that right wingers are easier to monetize because they are stupid. They are basically purging the old, liberal web2.0 userbase, under the premise that they are going to build back something which is more friendly to the conservative social media space.
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It’s part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism’s status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we’re in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn’t be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
“Extreme levels of data scraping” my ass. This is probably meant to reduce server costs because Elon put a huge hole in this boat and now he does a very loud “look-what-you-made-me-do” scream. And what on earth would “system manipulation” exactly mean? Sounds like some pseudo-profound bullshit.
Elon Musk, the latest billionaire owner of the online screaming match known as Twitter, sat slumped at his desk, staring at a wall of monitors blinking with a technicolor smorgasbord of error messages. The reason? He’d just let Twitter’s hosting contract with Google lapse because he thought it’d be fun to see if he could migrate it somewhere else. The results? Not so fun.
A comment on Reddit had caught his eye, and he couldn’t shake it. “Every now and then Elon must have a moment of clarity. Where it occurs to him ‘Maybe I am just stupid?’ But then he violently buries the thought.”
“Stupid?” he scoffed aloud to his empty office, sending a mini landslide of Mars Rover prototypes tumbling off his desk. “I’m a genius.”
He remembered how smart he’d felt when he decided to axe the account verification system, only to reinstate it after a week of high-profile mix-ups that included the Dalai Lama being mistaken for a llama enthusiast.
And the content moderation! Who needs it? Well, as it turned out, everyone. Without it, Twitter had turned into a feral wilderness of conspiracy theories, insult slinging, and more unsolicited pictures of eggplants than a greengrocer’s catalog.
And then there was Kanye. “Free Kanye!” he’d declared one afternoon after one too many rocket fuel coffees. But after the notorious rapper had declared war on flannel shirts and clogged up the site with CAPS LOCK tweets, the ban was back on faster than you can say “Kim Kardashian for president.”
“Stupid?” he muttered again, watching as Twitter spontaneously DDOS’d itself like a robotic bull in a digital china shop.
There was a pause. Then a grin spread slowly across Elon’s face, as if he’d just understood the punchline to a particularly tricky joke. “Naaaah,” he laughed, slapping the desk.
He looked at the chaos on the screens, the digital calamity his decisions had wrought, and couldn’t help but chuckle. There was something amusing about being this absurdly, cosmically, hilariously brilliant.
“Back to the drawing board,” he chuckled, picking up a Mars Rover and making it do little jumps across his desk.
Remember elon musk isn’t smart
We shouldn’t credit him for Tesla, spacex, etc because it’s the employees that actually put in the effort and contribute
Elon is just a Mr moneybags that thinks he smart because the things he funded have been good ideas when he actually never contributed anything to those ideas
I can’t wait until the companies he’s finding push him out completely
People call him an inventor. He’s not an inventor, he’s an investor. He’s not an engineer. He doesn’t know how to make cars or rockets. He didn’t invent the Tesla and he just plowed money into SpaceX. His brilliant ideas are things like having the Tesla make a fart noise. His experience is in coding and, based on comments of former Twitter engineers, he’s not even very good at that.
He doesn’t even have experience in coding either. He always pretends to but the only degree he has is in business or something.
Honestly this is probably more close to reality than anyone wants to admit.
More please!
This is art!
Almost certainly this isn’t anything to do with scraping. Like with Reddit, those with a stake in Twitter stand to benefit from AI and, as far as I know, there’s no mass reposting (retweeting?) effort to something like Mastodon.
That would be trivial to block anyway, since it would be easy to identity the service accounts and source IP’s of the requests. No need to impact average users.
What’s more likely is he hasn’t paid the bill for his cloud infrastructure and no longer has the capacity to serve so many users.
IMO, that’s what you get when you fire half of your staff.
IMO, that’s what you get when you fire half of your staff.
And pander to extremists, drive advertisers away, refuse to pay your bills, etc.
I’m not so sure, there are a lot of businesses and people training their AI models right now and sites like reddit or twitter are very attractive huge collections of user generated content. It’s not the most outrageous assumption that they’ll try to get that data for free by scraping instead of paying for API access.
I don’t think however, that it is that hard to differentiate an AI scraper between an actual user, since AI scrapers would be scraping huge amounts of data, which the average user doesn’t. Correct me if I’m wrong. wdyt
No, you’re correct. Service accounts can consume data way faster than a human user ever could. A smart business always implements rate limits or you could bankrupt them with a simple curl command. They could bankrupt themselves in testing with a simple loop!
This can be fixed in many ways, not just by putting limitations on credentials but also on source addresses. If a certain address or range of addresses seems to be running multiple service accounts and pulling huge amounts of data, you can deny requests from those IP’s.
In short, this AI angle smells like BS to save face. Musk effectively fired the SRE team who looked after critical infrastructure. It was their job to ensure service reliability, so it should not be a surprise that Twitter now has issues with service reliability.
They could bankrupt themselves in testing with a simple loop!
You mean exactly like what Twitter did this past weekend?
But also, hasn’t that boat left already for several AI companies? They’ve already trained it up, no need to scrape again, they just use what they got last time for their core training, it’s only the last couple of years/months they’re missing.
That would be trivial to block anyway
Is just ridiculously false. If you think it is true, make a service to do this trivial thing for people, and become a millionaire overnight.
Funnily enough, I do. I’m an SRE myself.
Services like Akamai have tools that are literally designed to block requests from known bad locations and IP ranges.
Reading limit reached, please drink a verification can to continue.
I see that a lot of people complain about reddit, twitter, and whatever mainstream website completely fuck the consumer, but fail to realize one crucial thing. The only time change happens in mob settings is when the pain of no change is greater than the pain of change. I applaud Elon, spez, and who ever else wishes to put there services behind their paywall whether it’s an API or just simply viewing tweets. Anyone in the know knows that it’s a crock of shit and anyone who isn’t is annoyed to the point where change is preferable. The sooner people figure out posting information, entertainment, and other forms of media/knowledge to the benefit of a company is horrendous the better. Now we have the opportunity to get rid of the corporate greed and basically open-source peoples knowledge from around the globe. Although like with reddit, mob mentality poses a real threat to communities like this one, I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother (as corny as that sounds). I much prefer it over giving more information to companies who use it to profit off of my content, while I receive nothing.
*Edit: Thank you kind stranger for the reddit gold! Glad you spent real hard cash so I can have reddit premium and reddit coins! The lovely people at reddit will be spending your money sitting on a yacht eating grapes in one hand and lobster in the other. I’m sure they are real thankful too! :) *
I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother
Not me!
I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother
First day as a human being? 🤣
I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother
Not me!
Username checks out.
That man has got to legitimately be one of the stupidest motherfuckers to ever luck his ass into a pile of money.
intergenerational wealth is a interesting topic for sure
Mmmmm remember that time Elon offered 1m dogecoin to whoever could prove he owned an emerald mine? And then his dad was all like “can I play too I have the paperwork here!”. Elon tries not to.
As a former individual who understands the underlying systems, it seems like they botched deployment of a new feature causing issues and cannot figure out how to solve them.
Most of Twitter is and has been in maintenance mode since acquisition (think of 10 man engineering team and 1 left to handle maintenance).
I am a dull and simple lad, but I’ve held a belief ever since Musk purchased Twitter he did it to wreck the platform. I’m still undecided if he’s just looking to liquidate its assets, or drive off reasonable users so he can turn it into his personal soapbox.
I mean I see why Reddit and Twitter are doing it. We’re in a really weird transitional period of the internet right now, for better or for worse. They’re doing it to prevent scraping, because why would you read all these garbage tweets to get to the information you need when an ChatGPT can spit out the exact information without fluff? It’s taking their content without any funding back to them, effectively stealing their revenue.
So what are these companies to do? Honestly I hope this is birth to a new form of social media, and this benefits the fedi greatly. It will be unsustainable to run large social media companies like theirs who profit off of user data and content. Whereas tons of fedi servers ran by hobbiest, effectively ran out of pocket or by donations, is much more sustainable. They’re doing it for community and more pure content that everyone wants without corporate fluff. If ChatGPT scrapes the fedi community, that’s okay because the fedi isn’t designed to make money so nothing is lost.
At the start of social media, companies ran on investment money and did their best to grow as fast as possible. Now they are trying to start supporting themselves and their efforts are often counter productive. As boomers retire, less and less investment money will be available, so you should expect more of this mess in the future.
It’s taking their content without any funding back to them, effectively stealing their revenue.
But enough about Reddit.
well Reddit at least links to the original source, which gives them clicks and ad revenue.
with LLMs, who knows where the hell they get their info from
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Question, what happens when ChatGPT comes for the fediverse? Will it kill small instinces?
What would we possibly lose to ChatGPT? We’re here for human discussion, aren’t we? There’s no monetization motivation to write fake ChatGPT comments, and I don’t see anything wrong with scraping our public comments for info, like it’s already doing. Reddit/Twitter don’t like it because it takes clicks and ad revenue from them, we don’t have that issue.
ChatGPT writing is actually pretty obvious to spot. Also, ChatGPT is expensive to run.
The Future
Come on Cohagen, you got what you want! Give these people air!
That quote sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I’m embarrassed.
Since I googled it up, I may as well put the link… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANa9Oku-JM
Musk will be dead by then, so which one of his 200 kids will be running the empire?
That rate limit is insanely low, even for verified. I’m not verified, but I hit the limit in like 10 minutes of very distracted usage.
Maybe I’m dumb, but this is starting to seem like these Tech CEOs are dumber than we thought.
Why not just make 4000 accounts and have distributed scraping? What are they going to do next? “Unverified Twitter accounts can only be accessed 10 times?”
