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Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

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

#401

Earlier 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.

They are, but it's self-inflicted: https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639474671754723 > Lest anyone doubt that Twitter was idiotic enough to release code that would cause a race condition and result in its own users executing a DDOS attack on it, here's the network console readout from Firefox showing all the network requests blasting away.

That's great, so just leaving a tab open in the background to Twitter will help bring down Twitter. Let me for the first time ever, voluntarily go to Twitter's website

Edit: looks like they fixed that issue with a login screen and no 10 requests per second issue. rats

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

#402
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Twitter is extremely addictive and bring the worse in people. There's a constant flow of information, lots of arguments, lots of famous people (also addicted). For some reason, HN likes to pick on Facebook, but Twitter is by far the most toxic social network.

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

#403

Reminder that Elon didn't even intend to buy Twitter He wanted to sell ~$2.5 Billion Tesla stock at all-time highs without causing the stock price to significantly deflate, so he used the Twitter purchase suggestion as a cover. He did similar pump and dump schemes with crypto - like Dogecoin - but because Elon is fundamentally a dumb guy, he did the extraordinarily stupid thing of signing a purchase agreement with Tw…

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

#404
post #185
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All moderation is better when accompanied by descriptions of going hither and thither.

Needs some yon.

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

#405
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't use twitter either but I guess it's the same reason many of us come here. We find it interesting and/or entertaining. I know I've had days where I killed hours on HN. I try to avoid it, but still probably spend more time here than I get in compensating benefit. Very little of what is discussed here is really important in a significant way if you take a step back and evaluate it honestly.

HN is very different in the sense that HN moderation and culture encourages users to be civic. Twitter incentizes for the opposite.

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

#406

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…

> 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.

Hey, just as an FYI, this comment doesn't make any sense.

Why would blocking people from viewing the TL on the home page cause Twitter more stress?

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

#407
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general yes, but Twitter was borderline profitable before Musk took over and saddled them with insurmountable debt payments and decisions alienating advertisers and users. Twitters current issues are entirely the creation of Elon Musk.

Blue sales ultimately can't hope to come close to what big brand ads used to give. And ironically enough, blue currently works as a crappy version of advertising thanks to the reply ranking. The promises of prioritizing "high-quality content" never came true; all we see are mid takes and, if you speak Mandarin, AI-powered sex scambots. Well, worse for us plebs. Not sure if it's worse for the buyers.

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

#408
post #177

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...

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?

Been on Mastodon since November. Signup was done in seconds. Finding people to follow was done gradually.

It's lively, and I use it everyday.

TBH, I don't really miss the people that don't want to come over.

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

#409
post #156

Earlier 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.

To some extent she is also probably there to play the same "say yes to Elon about some dumb idea and then get the team to implement a somewhat less dumb version and convince him it was his idea all along" game with him that Tesla and SpaceX leadership reportedly does.

You have to wonder how much that is true for Tesla and SpaceX too, and how much is damage control PR.

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

#410
post #172
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…

It’s wild. Used to checking it frequently which any social media company would love, but can’t even scroll the feed this morning as I hit the rate limit just drinking coffee and catching up. The good thing is this will make me spend far less time on social media since it was the last one I had on my phone.

Wow, so maybe Musk was society's savior we didn't want to need. Although, maybe if Twitter was no more, people would begrudgingly go back to FB for their doom scrolling needs.
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