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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

#411

Post by marginalia_nu »

minimaxir wrote: post #322

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…

> You limit data scraping by blocking things a human user couldn't do, like access a thousand posts a minute. This is aimed directly at reducing normal activity across the whole system.

This isn't accurate at all.

Standard operating procedure for large-scale scraping is to use a botnet, it's a sybil attack where you can have tens or even hundreds of thousands of IPs ticking away at 10 requests per minute or some such. Done correctly, it's nearly impossible to detect which nodes are complicit from their access patterns or user agents.

That said, rate limits work relatively poorly against this. A proof of work approach like HashCash might work though.

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

#412

Post by anigbrowl »

dylan604 wrote: post #193
diegocg wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Googs has showed us in the past it is unable to make a product that people want to use, and that they have no stomach for a slow grind to get a product to beat the establishment.

au contraire, they can definitely make products people like but then insist on either ruining them or shutting them down.

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

#413

Post by jklinger410 »

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?

There will be no observable long term impact from Reddit banning third party apps.

Only a few power users cared about it and no one cared about them.

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

#415

Post by lolinder »

jklinger410 wrote: post #406
user_named wrote: post #230

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?

I don't know what all is involved on the backend, but when I go to twitter.com it runs 123 requests and transfers 11MB of data in order to serve me a login page.

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

#416

Post by Majromax »

arthur2e5 wrote: post #282
sumeno wrote: 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.

> Blue sales ultimately can't hope to come close to what big brand ads used to give.

I don't know, I think the hope is there. With these rate limits and some Fermi estimates, we can guess what Twitter's hoped-for revenue per user might be.

Suppose that this move is designed to move regular users over to Twitter Blue, and a regular user might ordinarily see 2000 tweets per day. Suppose further that Twitter would show 1 ad per 10 tweets, and ad sells for 3$CPM on average, and a Blue user sees 33% fewer ads.

An ordinary user would then expect to give Twitter 200 ad impressions per day, at $0.60/day of ad revenue or $18. By seeing 1/3 fewer ads, that ad revenue drops to $12, but Twitter picks up $8/month in Blue subscription fees, increasing the gross revenue to $20.

That feels about right, and the math gets better in the short term for Twitter if it's having a hard time filling its ad spots — a proportionally greater share of its revenue would then come from the pushed-for Blue.

Likewise, if Twitter is having a hard time filling its advertising spots, kicking non-Blue viewers off the platform is not a short-term revenue loss: the marginal eyeball is unmonetized. In the medium to long term, of course, Twitter is strangling the very content that attracts those eyeballs, and this is still a bone-headed business decision.

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

#417

Post by Maxion »

jklinger410 wrote: post #406
user_named wrote: post #230

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?

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

If you block stuff somewhere in the microservie hell in the backend, but forget to update the frontend code properly, and everything was built with the assumption that authentication and authorization is not a thing, and suddenly it is, there's bound to be craploads of stuff that can start spamming network requests.

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

#419

Post by misnome »

TillE wrote: post #384
minimaxir wrote: post #322

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'm 50/50 on whether they're actually dealing with catastrophic technical issues, or if this is just Musk being mad about something and insisting on an incredibly silly solution. Both are entirely plausible!

I’ve seen speculation correlating “Going down at 9am on the first day of Q3” with the fact that they have apparently been trying to migrate off Google cloud by June 30th because of Melon’s blanket policy of “Not paying bills”.

Needless to say, if true, this would be extremely funny.

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

#420

Post by puttycat »

dopa42365 wrote: post #395

Semi related: it looks like twitter is currently winning the battle vs adblockers, which made me notice how every third or fourth post is a "promoted" advertisement. I guess it's the same (or even worse) in their mobile apps. There's no way that twitter isn't making money (A LOT) with 1/3 the site being ads? Especially with twitter being much less media heavy than other sites (very far from youtube or even twitch tha…

No ads for me, using uBlock origin.
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