Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 761 posts

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

#251

Post by seydor »

partiallypro wrote: post #191
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?

If Meta were smart, they'd immediately shift away from their Metaverse nonsense and use this as a massive opportunity to do things they are pretty good at (hate them or love them.) I know they are working on a Twitter competitor, but they need to find a way to help get the followers they once had back, if they were to switch. They could even ultimately challenge Reddit. I know that would not be an ideal outcome, but…

I d say the opposite. Their headsets are great and affordable, but their obsession with making everything social is ... annoying at this point? They keep adding social stuff to the oculus, but why the hell would i want to be stalked while i m deep into another world wearing glasses. They need to quit their old habits and focus on the future not the past

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

#252

Post by MuteXR »

dylan604 wrote: post #210

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?

It isn't. This is a nonsense excuse.

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

#253

Post by minimaxir »

drumhead wrote: post #233

Elon seems to have adopted the same business model as Reddit. Lock down the data and sell it to the LLMs. Quite short sighted, but if you're desperate for cash then its probaly an inviting option. Im hoping the alternative to twitter start becoming more generally available soon.

Steve Huffman got the lock-down-the-API idea from Elon.

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

#254

Post by kredd »

dylan604 wrote: post #210

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?

Twitter is a crack pipe for dopamine hits, which OpenAI has no business in. Highly doubt bots is the actual reason, since they have had that problem since forever. Now, infrastructure bills could be a real reason.

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

#255

Post by cldellow »

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.

Maybe.

It's really hard for me to believe that a uniform 600 tweets read per _day_ limit for almost _all_ accounts is the best tool they have to mitigate a scraping attack. They likely have great insight into the risk profiles of each account based on age, size, past engagement. This is an incredibly coarse banhammer -- very close to just turning off the servers, IMO. Reasonable if it lasted for an hour, debatable if it lasts for a day, idiotic if it lasts longer.

Would love to see the inside story, hopefully it gets leaked/reported at some point.

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

#257

Post by aquova »

olalonde wrote: post #247
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.

It's going to be hard to continue hitting record highs if you're limiting how much of your content people are able to see.

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

#258

Post by SoftTalker »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #192
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?

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…

Yep somewhere along the way we forgot that you can't become profitable on volume when marginal revenue is negative. This is first-year business undergrad stuff.

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

#260

Post by lljk_kennedy »

olalonde wrote: post #247
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.

How is user seconds defined?
Post reply on HN