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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

#241

Post by rsynnott »

crote wrote: post #209
throw2022110401 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That seems… implausible? They used to be profitable; clearly at that point advertising revenue must have greatly exceeded infra cost. Now, I’d buy that it’s down, but surely not by _that_ much.

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

#242

Post by eterm »

rsynnott wrote: post #141
housemusicfan wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verified accounts are limited to 6k tweets/day. Assume the average human is awake for 16 hours a day. That's 6.25 tweets/minute if you did literally nothing but scroll through twitter all day long for 16 hours straight. Please explain how that makes the site "unusable" unless of course you are a non-human bot scraping site content.

Do you use Twitter? Even at the best of times, you learn to flip though fairly quickly skimming over the nonsense, and since the ascension of naughty ol’ mr car bluetick replies get promoted to the front of the queue, so you have to scroll past a sea of bullshit to get to the real replies. Twitter with 600 tweets a day is clearly unusable. That’s one large thread, and you’ll scroll past most of it anyway.

I don't use Twitter. (Or haven't since ~2006).

That sounds like a miserable user experience in general, what compels you to seek out that experience?

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

#244

Post by partiallypro »

loso wrote: post #130

I 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…

I don't think this is because of the "end of cheap money" (I don't think this high interest rate environment will last that long) but just sheer incompetence by Musk and his staff. Elon has become increasingly erratic on the platform, he just tweeted recently a reply to a Tweet saying Islam would take over France. I don't know if he's always been like this or if the stories of his heavy ketamine usage are true and taking a toll on him.

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

#245

Post by randomfool »

csiegert wrote: post #190
throw2022110401 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These limits are far below standard scraping rates and deeply affecting the casual users, have to presume intentionally.

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

#247

Post by olalonde »

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?

It doesn't feel like that to me. Elon reported that Twitter hit a new all time high of "user seconds" last week. Reddit usage doesn't seem to have gone down much. In my opinion, what you are really experiencing is wishful thinking.

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

#248

Post by dbish »

rjtavares wrote: post #236
dbish wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s still invite only though right?

Yeah. I think each user gets onr invite per week. Here's an invite code: bsky-social-ejzzv-3pehr

Thank you much. Greatly appreciated. Trying it out now

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

#249

Post by evan_ »

housemusicfan wrote: post #74
3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #7

Needless to say, with those limits, Twitter is basically unusable. I really doubt these ridiculous limitations can be explained just by a sudden urge to scrape. Why limit verified accounts, for example?

Verified accounts are limited to 6k tweets/day. Assume the average human is awake for 16 hours a day. That's 6.25 tweets/minute if you did literally nothing but scroll through twitter all day long for 16 hours straight. Please explain how that makes the site "unusable" unless of course you are a non-human bot scraping site content.

It isn’t actually “tweets read”, it’s tweets loaded.

If you for instance open the @elonmusk tweet announcing this, it will load dozens if not hundreds of replies, and those will all be counted against your quota. Do that a few times and you’re done in a few minutes.

I got rate limited after a few minutes of normal use. (Like most users I don’t have Twitter blue.)

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

#250

Post by sumeno »

bassman9000 wrote: post #238
LordAtlas wrote: post #42

So 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...

Not an engineering issue. Compute, and in the end, energy, has a cost. You weren't aware of it because, as someone mentioned, it was subsidized before. Now you are aware. You're free to contribute by paying, if content is worth to you, or walk away. There are alternatives, but you can't escape the fact that moving all those bits is not free.

Why is it suddenly so costly only after Elon took over considering Twitter was borderline profitable before he took over?
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