381–390 of 761 posts
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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.
You would think that forced logins would have stopped a majority of the scraping. Even if it didn't the rate limit they have well below what would be needed to stop scrapers.
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It's possible to make money on them. But not if you have tens of thousands of employees. 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.
If you actually looked at the balance sheet of twitter before Elon took it over it was quite possible to make it profitable. It would have needed to cut cost and probably try and to boost its ad platform a bit more but well within the realm of possibilities. With the debt that Elon has saddled them with I doubt they will ever be profitable again without declaring bankruptcy.
Without the $760M settlement, they'd have made about $270M in 2021[1].
[1] "2021 operating loss of $493 million, or an operating margin of -10%, includes a one-time litigation-related net charge of $766 million" - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...
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?
Someones going to say Lemmy and Mastedon - they're wrong.
Update from Elon: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754 > Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified lolwut. Quoting a post from Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@maxkennerly/110640373859329500 > LOL this is not how you deal with "data scraping," this is how you deal with a catastrophic loss of system capacity. > You limit data scraping by blocking th…
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…
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.
This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself. The 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 its…
You mean to tell me that you can't actually run a tech company with three engineers and a Mac Mini?
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The fact that even paid subscribers are limited to 6000 posts a day (seems like a lot, very much isn't if you're a remotely active user) is utterly bonkers. What other platform works like this?
And that's probably 6,000 tweets loaded via API, not 6,000 that you might care about. Don't they promote and show you posts from blue checkmark people even if you're not following them?
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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…
> we were putting everything on a credit card and not worrying about the bill that eventually had to be paid We (consumers) didn't put anything on a CC. VCs did. And I count that for the blessing it was. I ordered tons of subsidized food on DoorDash, cheap rides on Uber, etc. Now that golden era is over, and I will not be ordering any more of that stuff at the now exorbitant prices. Thank you based VCs, for comping a…