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
I get those a lot on mobile, in particular, and it’s critical I specify my language, or it’s a guaranteed silent fail
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.
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Oooh, spicy!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I meant he’s not theoretical rich, he’s got actual money in the actual bank. But you’re right, his worth doesn’t come from salaries as he’s paid around 200K according to the internet.
Short Reddit on IPO. Give him a good farewell.
Shorting an IPO. Lol. The float will be tiny until the lockup comes off.
You basically can’t for the first few weeks.
Gonna admit my ignorance, I’m not sure exactly what is and using possible with an IPO. I know it can go poorly, and I know stocks can be shorted. I just hope they get no financial success.
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.
Yes, and he would like to graduate into being obscenely rich through a successful IPO.
Compared to musk? No. Not even close tongue same tier. But he’s still a 1%er
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
I’d love a self ddos of Reddit at this point tbh
You can’t lose something you never had
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
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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.
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.
That plus their own app being abysmal. The official Reddit app is a terrible experience without the necessary features of the old ones
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.
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
Idk where you got the idea that Google is in decline, but they’re still the leader in search and advertising on the Internet, plus video hosting and livstreaming with YouTube. Googles only problem right now is how behind they are on AI and that they can’t support a new product so no one is willing to try anything new they make.
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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I maybe check facebook once every few months, and that’s only if someone sends me a link to an event. And it seems like almost everyone has left or is at least not active. A few years ago (well, maybe more than a few, time flies) I was pretty active and my feed would be full of my friends’ status updates. I would actually see what they were up to if I went on Facebook. Now only a handful of my Facebook friends are still active, and they’re all 35+ and have their own business or project of some kind that they want to share updates of. Not mlm since they’re all hippies; things like a community garden, handmade stuff, musicians, but still something to promote. It takes me 30 seconds to see everything. Most of my Facebook friends haven’t posted anything in years or months, just like me.
Big social media companies are sometimes like lemmings- if one jumps off a cliff, others generally follow it because they did so
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 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?!’
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 🤦♂️
Is there some source on advertisers leaving in droves? I’ve heard a couple stories on people (big accounts ands advertisers) loudly leaving but is it really a noticeable trend? I wonder if there’s some publicly accessible way of knowing that.
CNN reported on it: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertiser-decline/index.html
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Holy shit that’s awesome thanks for the read. It’s more than half and it’s mostly the top buyers, I am now swimming in schadenfreude.
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.
It’s crazy how many products and situations go wrong because a super rich guy is being greedy
Oh my god, this is just too funnyMuch 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 think he just wants a private club with all the people already inside on a familiar and well respected platform imo, he just doesn’t realize that his 5 minutes of fame are over, people see for who he really is.
I’m convinced he just wanted to tweak the algorithm, so everyone could see and appreciate his tweets, flooding them with stars and retweets
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.
He just wants a private club with a familiar venue. He knows people like twitter, so he buys it for himself to play king among the plebs and rubbing it into the faces of his “critics” who truly know who he is. Sometimes I wonder if he actually acknowledges the outside world at all since his 5 minutes of fame. Anyways, the emperor has no clothes, and his self destruction is highly entertaining.
This actually isn’t right. It’s because musk has refused to renew twitter’s Google Cloud Services partition, which expired June 30th, and has been (unsuccessful obviously) frantically trying to move twitter’s cloud usage to in-house servers. Twitter has been the most popular social media website for almost a decade and never once have they had this issue. As usual everything musk touches turns to shit.
Are we sure on that? I’ve seen conflicting reports on whether they actually started paying or not (Ex. Engadget article from a week ago says they are). It’s not public information so it’s hard to verify.
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
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.How is that even possible? By limiting access the load should be lower, there is no way
How so? The load should be much lower if an user needs to be logged in
They caused a request loop - https://lemmy.world/comment/703788
Oh god this is SO stupid I can’t believe it’s a thing
Musk seems like the kind of person who would test his code in production
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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.
Yeah, 600/800 sounds like a lot until you realize that includes all the stuff you’re just scrolling past in your feed or comments, not even clicking on. I wouldn’t be surprised if they even overlooked the fact that ads might count against that cap too. I’m no heavy user but hit that cap in less than 20 minutes of reading people reacting to the news.
The hilarity is that these moves are the exact opposite of the so called Public Square he claims Twitter is or should be.
It’s just like how they forcibly remove you from public squares after you’ve passively listened to people for 15 minutes
The quintessential public square experience
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.
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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I think this really will be the straw that broke the camels back for a lot of people. I don’t think it will immediately kill twitter but it will have a lasting effect. And if not this I am sure he will come up with an even worse policy change within the next 2 months. Something like limiting it to only 10 tweets per day for unverified users.
Shows how much planning he does to change his mind in two hours flat.
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.
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.
Why are so many people suddenly against Twatter burning? I thought we all wanted that?
Twitter and Reddit both dying at the same time was not what I expected in 2023
