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Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#201

Post by TechBro8615 »

diegocg wrote: post #171
faefox wrote: post #85

It really feels like we're witnessing the end of an era. Elon is doggedly piloting Twitter into the ground and Reddit seems strangely compelled to follow his lead. Reddit may recover - I'm not so sure about Twitter. What technologies will take their place? In a time where it's never been easier to stand up your own website/forum/what have you, could we possibly see a gradual return to a pre-corporate Internet?

The weirdest thing of this era is that we don't see the big players (eg. Google) trying to take advantage of this situation and create an alternative.

Meta is reportedly working on some mastodon thing

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#202

Post by housemusicfan »

dang wrote: post #123
hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #53

See 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.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=16751879694...

You're welcome.

Would be even better if HN would automatically rewrite Twitter links to use the current workaround. Especially if the point is to foster discussion here around a single comment, no need to load the whole application.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#204

Post by dbish »

rjtavares wrote: post #188
dbish wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s still invite only though right?

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#205

Post by runarberg »

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #124
TillE wrote: post #34

I'm increasingly concerned that Bluesky has missed its moment. It got a ton of hype when it started rolling out invites, but that died down pretty quickly. Now it's been a couple months and they're still not open. Events like this would be a perfect opportunity to grab users from Twitter. But they're not ready.

Bluesky is great in comparison. Not sure it's going to ever be as big as Twitter, but it's a great alternative to Mastodon

I concur. For me the lack of an algorithm is a bug, not a feature, and the way bluesky lets you pick your own algorithms (via feeds) is an amazing improvement.

I am active on both Mastodon and BlueSky, but I'm finding my self way more on BlueSky lately.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#206

Post by Jach »

mumumu wrote: post #94

It seems the limit does not apply to Quotes and Liked tab on users profiles.

This made me giggle because when they turned off the free API I was using to copy images from tweets I liked so I'd have a backup copy, I replaced my script with a selenium using one that surely costs twitter more in resources. All it does is load my liked page and scroll down for several minutes collecting media as it goes.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#207

Post by x86x87 »

amatwl wrote: post #169
x86x87 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am guessing twitter fucked around and now are in the finding out phase. I bet some of their infra is crumbling under the stress of all bs Musk pulled.

There was reporting that they were scrambling to move some infrastructure off Google since they were going to be cut off after refusing to pay their bills. The deadline was June 30, though there was additional reporting saying Linda Yaccarino restarted payments - https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-google-clo...

Hahaha. If this caused it and it's actually googlw cutting them off this is beyond hilarious.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#208

Post by epistasis »

somenameforme wrote: post #184
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A more plausible explanation would be that they no longer have the engineering capability to maintain the site, or its prior attack resistance.

If there is any sort of novel scraping going on, and their only response is to shut down the site for all the accounts, their engineering capabilities have been pretty much zeroed out, and it's a massive indictment of the leadership decisions.

Plus, at this point believing anything that Musk says is extremely foolish. If this was something that was meant to believed, it would have been posted by somebody with more credibility in the organization who actually has something to lose by lying. That person is literally anyone except for Musk.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#209

Post by crote »

throw2022110401 wrote: post #151
__jem wrote: post #39

Incredibly 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.

Alternatively, the costs outweigh impression revenue, they are actively running out of money, and trying to stall while desperately trying to find additional cash.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#210

Post by dylan604 »

Is openAI (and all new upstart model training data scrapers) really this scary to Twitter's existence? I understand that their desire to scrape all of your content for free is absolutely total bullshit, and I actually find myself sympathetic to this. So I get the rate limit idea, but can you really not detect a bot vs a user?
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