https://mastodon.social/@sysop408@sfba.social/11063983312372... Like I don't know if this even counts as analysis let alone if it's right, but damn it would be funny if this was self inflicted.
Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
221–230 of 761 posts
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#222Earlier 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?
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#223So 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...
Yeah my limit hit after 20-25 minutes of total screen time. What a mess.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#224Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#225I 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…
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Youtube social media? I mean it has a comment section, but to me it's always been a content delivery service for videos, first and foremost.
There are also far fewer creators/posters and far more value per post, especially when you consider that YouTube carries a lot of commercial content (music & music videos) Would I pay for ad-free access to a giant catalogue of music (even though I can use an ad blocker) or to support talented people putting hours into composing and editing content I like? Sure, why not. Would I pay to see people's random short-form t…
There's nothing like that on Twitter, FB, Reddit, etc.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#227It 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?
I'm always a bit surprised how few people realized how many "nice things" from the last decade plus have been heavily subsidized by VC money (which itself was created from low interest rates). Every cool startup that people loved started by burning cash. This made Uber cheap, DoorDash cheap, Youtube helpful and creative, Facebook about connecting with classmates, Twitter a free public forum, Reddit a playground for f…
They fail because they need to become billion dollar behemoths to support the VC funding they've gotten. But plenty (not all though) of them could be profitable if they were ran as a "lifestyle" business.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#229It 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.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
#230The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.
In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.
The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.
This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.
Unbelievable. It's amateur hour.
#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS
A mostly still movie of a Twitter feed showing a rate limited error message and a jiggling scrollbar indicating repeated attempts to load a resource.
Firefox network console showing 10 requests to twitter.com zooming by per second. https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057