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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

#501

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…

Haven’t read anything so off the mark in quite a while.

Your basic assumption already makes no sense. Please list the businesses Elon has started after his PayPal days with the goal of enriching himself.

Also, money is a means to an end, is it not? So what do you think he’d do with more money? Again, you can look at what he did with his Zip2 money. And then his PayPal money. That might give you a clue.

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

#502

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…

My impression was that he bought Twitter for the reasons you say, but failed to predict the dip in the market that followed it.

If Twitter stock hadn't sunken immediately like a stone, he probably would have pulled it off, too, even after the signing the agreement.

If indeed the Twitter deal was manipulation to leave poorer investors holding the Tesla bag, it's hard to feel sorry for him.

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

#503

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?

I mean, hat tip to the pie-acquisition engineers, Twitter has done better than I thought it would without maintenance.

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

#504
> New unverified accounts to 300/day

This rate limit may stop the most extreme scrapers, but it won't come close to stopping moderately large operations. AFAIK nothing is stopping you from creating as many accounts as you want, each of them associated to either an email address or a phone number. Even if they made it more strict and required both a phone number and an email address, it would still be a trivial process. They will give up in the near future and implement some annoying Amazon style captcha, which scrapers will again circumvent with rotating proxies and captcha solvers :-)

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

#505
post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is because of the "end of cheap money" (I don't think this high interest rate environment will last that long) but just sheer incompetence by Musk and his staff. Elon has become increasingly erratic on the platform, he just tweeted recently a reply to a Tweet saying Islam would take over France. I don't know if he's always been like this or if the stories of his heavy ketamine usage are true and ta…

[flagged]

I didn’t read the parent comment as making any particular judgement apart from the one that Islam in France is an unusual and unnecessary topic for Elon to be getting himself publicly involved in.

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

#506
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

from wikipedia:

> According to some Arabic writers, Musa's gift-giving caused a depreciation in the value of gold in Egypt. Al-Umari said that before Musa's arrival, a mithqal of gold was worth 25 silver dirhams, but that it dropped to less than 22 dirhams afterward and did not go above that number for at least twelve years.[95] Though this has been described as having "wrecked" Egypt's economy,[83] the historian Warren Schultz has argued that this was well within normal fluctuations in the value of gold in Mamluk Egypt.[96]

Seems like this might a misleading folk tale.

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

#507

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 the GP is saying Twitter's client-side scripting doesn't understand permanent failures. It thinks all failures are transient, so it keeps retrying, hoping to get through. That creates more traffic than if Twitter just let the user read the site.

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

#508
post #489

This is just insane. He really wanna take this app to zero users. Can't believe there exists people who think Elon is smart.

Some people will stick to their priors through thick and thin. I've learned to just enjoy watching the blue check mark crowd contort to whatever is the new thing they agree with Elon about and then vehemently back it up with other reasons too. Pretty sure a lot of the Twitter accounts that are famous because he interacts with them started out as liberals who liked EVs and are now tweeting about how they're worried ab…

But with the rate limits, we can’t even hate-read their tweets anymore. This is probably a good thing.

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

#510
post #421
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Except a lot of the formers ways of doing things / getting things have been pushed out of the market with all the capital influx. So there aren’t any small stores anymore, small restaurants don’t do delivery anymore, etc etc.

Small restaurants doing delivery doesn’t make sense as an example.

The only structures that were torn down were things that required capital and upkeep. So for example, once you starve the beast of the taxi industry, then the fleet decays and they can’t compete without new capital investment.

For a small restaurant delivery, they can at any point hire another person to run orders just as they always could, with no loss. The reason this is not viable is because the whole economy got disrupted by covid and now it’s not actually feasible for someone to earn a living just moving parcels of food around locally. Like literally the unit economics don’t resolve positively because CA minimum wage is $15 an hour and you need even more than that to have a decent life.

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