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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

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s notable that it’s Elon, not Yaccarino, making this announcement (and likely decision).

Yaccarino doesn't seem to be making the wide-sweeping announcements that Elon does. Given that this outage and rate limiting may legit make Twitter's business infeasible, I change my prediction that Yaccarino will leave Twitter from within 3 months to within 3 weeks.

I’d bet good money on you being wrong. Want to do $1k? We can use a trusted middleman and perform deposits or whatnot.

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

#462

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?

[deleted]

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

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 think he was trying to say that the Frontend of the Twitter timeline is not aware of the new request limit, and when that limit is reached it just retries the request, as it would in a normal network error, and keeps in retrying resulting on DDOS. But I don't believe on that because Twitter is a billion dollar company and that kind of mistake is dumb. So idk.

You severely overestimate musk’s software engineering prowess

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

#464
post #158
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…

An account on an ESPN Mastodon instance that comes with and logs in with that Disney+/Hulu/ESPN bundle would probably be popular. Doesn't even have to federate.

bah gawd that's RSS's music

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

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 think he was trying to say that the Frontend of the Twitter timeline is not aware of the new request limit, and when that limit is reached it just retries the request, as it would in a normal network error, and keeps in retrying resulting on DDOS. But I don't believe on that because Twitter is a billion dollar company and that kind of mistake is dumb. So idk.

> But I don't believe on that because Twitter is a billion dollar company and that kind of mistake is dumb.

This sort of mistake is very common especially when a product is going through a period of change, so it seems very believable to me that recent rate limiting features (or older features that have not been used in a long time or maybe ever) on the backend hadn't been adequately tested to make sure there are no unforeseen side-effects on the front-end when they are activated under pressure.

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

#466

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…

Update from Elon: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754 > Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified Well, at least he's engaged over a holiday weekend. If it was my company, this would be a fifteen meetings, a six-month series of sprints, and we still would only decide on a new color for the icon.

I guess a couple of well-run meetings would have prevented this disaster in the first place.

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

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 think he was trying to say that the Frontend of the Twitter timeline is not aware of the new request limit, and when that limit is reached it just retries the request, as it would in a normal network error, and keeps in retrying resulting on DDOS. But I don't believe on that because Twitter is a billion dollar company and that kind of mistake is dumb. So idk.

Then you didn't look at how any of the Atlassian products are built. Most of them are multiple implementations of the same Frontend-Franework on the same page because independent teams work on stuff. Then you have hundreds of request "just to load some issue list".

Probably twitter can even do worse.

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

#468
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Bluesky is having some degraded performance due to "record-high traffic" (according to them). As a casual user, it's noticeable how many people are posting now.

Yeah, noticed a lot of dormant follows pop up on my home feed again.

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

#469

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…

This is some pretty dumb mental gymnastics to retcon a motivation. The simple explanation: he made an offer for Twitter, then the market (and Twitter’s value) crashed, and he tried to avoid paying the now-vastly overpriced fee he was on the hook for.

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

#470

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?

Sounds like a really interesting challenge, would be fun to see how far you can get.
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