Less active users -> lower AWS invoice. Smart move... not.
Why not just pull the same move they did with gcp and simply stop paying?
Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
181–190 of 761 posts
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always assumed Yaccarino was merely a figurehead installed in an effort to make Twitter more palatable to advertisers. Elon never stopped making policy pronouncements from his personal account despite nominally giving up the CEO title.
Yes, but if he wakes up at three in the morning to go the bathroom who will make major decisions?
The poor wretch who’s on call
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#183I knew the end of the cheap money era would cause some businesses to be exposed but wow. We are basically in the middle of watching someone flush 44 billion down the drain. I could understand if it was a 600 posting limit. But a 600 viewing limit? wow. For example, NBA free agency just started. There are types of trades & signings being talked about. Just looking at that information I'm going past the 600 limit in ab…
Stop complaining or it's going to be 600 characters or less! Including the headers for your requests! /s
O noes, not the headers!
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#184See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552231
It’s notable that it’s Elon, not Yaccarino, making this announcement (and likely decision).
It sounds like they are facing a novel denial of service attack that was near to the point of being able to imperil their service. This is an obviously temporary remediation to keep the systems up, not a new policy for the site. And all of that falls right under the purview of the CTO.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#185See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552231
Comments moved thither. Thanks! Edit: actually, since that source doesn't appear to have a paywall workaround at the moment, I'm going to merge the thread back hither.
All moderation is better when accompanied by descriptions of going hither and thither.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#186ZDNet published an article just yesterday that looked into Twitter's engagement data and it looks like Twitter is bleeding users like never before. [0]
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-seeing-record-user-eng...
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#187Incredibly bizarre way to intentionally kill your app, even after all the other nonsense he's been doing. Even if I were willing to pay for something as cringe as verification, 6000 posts a day is laughable for an app like Twitter. I hit the rate limit on my "unverified" account in about 5 minutes. I've been waiting for $newApp to get enough users to be fun, and this only motivates me more to be the change I want to…
This is the move that elevates “the Saudis funded this to kill Twitter” from silly conspiracy theory to maybe plausible.
Isn't Musk personally liable for a lot of this burnt money? In this scenario, does Musk gain something or was he just outsmarted?
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#188So 99% of accounts that are not verified are restricted to viewing max 600 tweets a day, which means if you do more than casually check Twitter once a day, you're fucked. No wonder everything is breaking. But that's OK. Twitter has a big engineering team that should be able to sort this out soon. Oh, wait...
Which Twitter replacement are people moving to (edit:looks like Bluesky if they can keep the servers up)? I’m a big fan of Elon and what he’s built so I wasn’t planning on leaving, but can’t even use it now. Mastodon still seems too complicated to get the masses on. Where will non-tech folks go?
Bluesky is having some degraded performance due to "record-high traffic" (according to them).
As a casual user, it's noticeable how many people are posting now.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#189My theory is the demise of Twitter is intentional, giving people a voice on a platform that competes with the MSM is too uncomfortable for those at the top who had control for decades. They want it like they had it before, where they had total control of all media dissemination. Consider right now certain words and phrases get automatically shadowbanned. That many far left political commentators have been outright banned. The goal of this system is monopoly, control of mass media is part of that.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#190Incredibly bizarre way to intentionally kill your app, even after all the other nonsense he's been doing. Even if I were willing to pay for something as cringe as verification, 6000 posts a day is laughable for an app like Twitter. I hit the rate limit on my "unverified" account in about 5 minutes. I've been waiting for $newApp to get enough users to be fun, and this only motivates me more to be the change I want to…
They are literally throwing away revenue with every denied impression. An act of desperation obviously. My take: they broke something and need to shed load to keep the site running. The "extreme scraping" thing is the usual Musk BS.
I find the scraping explanation plausible. Some search engine bots are aggressive. With all the AI hype, I first thought of Microsoft Bing scraping Twitter at full datacenter speed to suck in more information for OpenAI.