what. the fuck.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Transcription for the blind: Screenshot of a Twitter post from Elon Musk, Twitter handle @elonmusk, that says:
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
1:01 PM Jul 1, 2023 3.6M Views
-Transcription from a human volunteer. Let me know how I can do better.
I thought this guy was supposed to be stepping down - didn’t he even announce the new CEO?
This reeks of him scaling back infrastructure to reduce costs, gets overloaded, and the C-level talent remainings best idea to prop it up is rate limiting.
Pathetic.
I find this more mildlyhumorous than infuriating. I’m looking forward to a new era where every news article no longer includes a string of embedded tweets. :) As a non-twitter user, this certainly doesn’t encourage me to bother making an account.
It’s honestly extremely humorous. I made a Twitter account in 2015 because it was a requirement for a emergency management crisis communications class I was taking for work. After the course ended I didn’t log into it again until Musk bought Twitter. I knew it was going to be a hilarious dumpster fire and wanted to watch it melt down in real time. It hasn’t disappointed. But this most recent thing about the rate limits is so hilariously dumb I figured I’d seen enough. Deleted the app off my phone yesterday.
As you point out, Twitter’s death is going to mean a huge improvement to journalism. Someone on Lemmy mentioned yesterday how nice it is to not be on Reddit which had gotten to be like 80% Twitter screenshots. Twitter and Reddit diving like this at the same time is going to be a net positive.
Not sure how good it is that the only remaining Social Networks are owner by Meta (I don’t count YT as a Social Media as I never use it to engage in comments there).
Edit: Ig there is tiktok now, too. Still it makes Metas slice of the Social Media pie bigger.
But Meta doesn’t own social media. They have some social media platforms that are finding direct, open-source alternatives to their service…for FREE. The days of uncontested, corporate-controlled, AI-manipulated social media have come to an end.
I get it’s funny if you like don’t really have a use for twitter, but it sucks in some ways because twitter is one of the few ‘global’ platforms. I can follow and keep up to date with artists over in Japan because a lot of them use twitter and that’s accessible to me. Remove twitter however and their main posting platform defaults to something like pixiv or niconico…which isn’t very open and receptive to anyone who isn’t a Japanese speaker. And I’m sure anyone from the west who has their head in more Chinese or Korean spheres is having the same issue…and vice versa. I know apparently sites like tumblr aren’t very popular over in Japan because of how it works and at least from what I’ve seen in the last few days, that’s becoming a lot of artist’s emergency second platform
I never understood why they embedded tweets into articles instead of using screenshots. I figured it was a terms and conditions thing from Twitter. But it leaves them prone to a tweet being deleted or, you know, what’s happening now.
it made sense when it was making it trustworthy, harder to fake a link to the original than a screenshot
Therefore any company that puts out notices or alerts via Twitter should immediately exit the platform. Running their own server on mastodon would be a better bet
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?”
This is beyond speedrunning enshittification now…
I’m eager to see what twitter users think of this - lots of people are watching, and corpos taking notes.
Edit: He’s announced an increased limit but it’s hardly generous IMO.
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Anyone still on Twitter at this point is getting what they asked for. It’s like you drove past every “last restroom for X miles” sign, and now you’re in the middle of nowhere and have to piss.
Why are so many people suddenly against Twatter burning? I thought we all wanted that?
I bet the throtteling is not caused by data scraping but by Twitter not paying their Google Cloud bills and therefore now with the new month they got services suspended.
