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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

#451

Post by lolinder »

I don't know whether or not Twitter is actually seeing unprecedented levels of traffic due to ChatGPT plugins or whatever else—I personally doubt it, but I'm willing to believe it's possible.

However, that Twitter can't keep up with the load is completely unsurprising after the way Musk treated Twitter's engineers. You can't indiscriminately shed 80% of the company[0] and expect to have magically retained the key people who understand your distributed system well enough to adapt it to new strains and pressures. There were people in that 80% who knew how to solve this problem and are no longer available to help. There are probably people in the remaining 20% who know how to solve it but are afraid to speak up because Musk has created a hostile work environment.

[0] https://www.engadget.com/80-percent-of-twitters-full-time-st...

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

#452

Post by parthdesai »

dspillett wrote: post #430
SamReidHughes wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Care to be more specific about the inaccurate parts and/or provide counterpoints (preferably with appropriate counter-evidence)?

“Elon is fundamentally a dumb guy”

This is the guy who’s had more than a few successful businesses now. A lot of smart people did want to work with him. Andrej Karpathy himself has said that Elon was very quick to pick up AI technically. That doesn’t sound like a “fundamentally dumb” guy to me

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

#453

Post by joezydeco »

misnome wrote: post #419
TillE wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If Google decides to graveyard GCloud, you can say you were here when it started.

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

#454

Post by spike021 »

This may have already been discussed. But, if Musk is being honest and this has to do with blocking efforts to scrape content for ML/AI models, then why not block IP ranges from the most common compute services (i.e. aws, gce, digital ocean, etc.)?

That's what streaming services do to block VPNs as far as I understand it.

I would think most efforts are by orgs using those platforms.

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

#455

Post by ben_w »

FrankWilhoit wrote: post #333
user_named wrote: post #293

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…

What are your counterexamples from ancient history?

There's the guy who gave away so much gold he broke half of Africa's economy for a bit; the motivation might be different, but I think it counts if the category is "got money badly wrong".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa

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

#456

Post by paulmd »

optionalsquid wrote: post #329
olalonde wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't the current situation imply that a lot of those users were bots/scrapers?

I don’t have an account so all my interactions with twitter are via discord bots. I don’t know where that falls into scraping vs bots but I ain’t an organic user from their perspective.

In theory the goal would be to push people like me to register and get an account to at least view, and force me into their platform/ecosystem so I can be measure and monetized.

Unfortunately, much like ape pics, printscreen key exists and people will simply pivot to posting png’s of twitter instead of direct linking

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

#457

Post by petesergeant »

zimpenfish wrote: post #422
csiegert wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I find the scraping explanation plausible. How do you explain it suddenly being a problem today and not, say, during the recent World Cup when not only the AI scraping would have been happening but el Morko himself was crowing about how much extra traffic they were handling?

Someone with deep pockets flipped the ON switch?

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

#458

Post by ryandrake »

anonymousab wrote: post #391
faefox wrote: 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.

I’ve always wondered what it’s like to work for a CEO where you simultaneously 1. can’t say no to him, and 2. can’t implement their hairbrained ideas without killing your product and then being blamed for it.

I heard a rumor (who knows if it’s true) that in the early-ish days of Amazon, they had an entirely separate backend and frontend just for Bezos that would only display if his account was logged in. So when he asked for something crazy they could just implement it in the Bezos-Amazon and not fuck up the main product.

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

#459

Post by user_named »

stubybubs wrote: post #305
PheonixPharts wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is going to be known as "the Millennial subsidized lifestyle era." Not that it was exclusively used by Millennials, but it's largely what they grew up with. AirBnb was maybe the worst of the bunch, because it has such a dramatic negative externality on housing markets. Entire areas of Barcelona have essentially no real residents because even those who didn't sell to AirBnb investors found it unlivable wi…

Try bandcamp

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

#460

Post by reaperducer »

epistasis wrote: post #56

If Musk had shut down the site completely, he could have had the same effect without looking like he was completely incompetent. Pretty odd to see somebody burn up all their public goodwill, at the cost of billions of dollars. The man must be hurting internally, there's no other explanation for such self destructive behavior.

The man must be hurting internally, there's no other explanation for such self destructive behavior.

Or he's high AF.

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