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Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

news.ycombinator.com

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

#521

Post by blowski »

TigeriusKirk wrote: post #237
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?

The shift is that the content itself now has tangible value. So far it's been the attention of the users that has been monetized, primarily via advertising. But now the content generated by the users has value as input into AI training sets. And AI companies are scrambling to gather as much as they can as rapidly as they can. The data itself, not the attention of the users, is what is now being harvested. The compani…

And yet, by shrinking the reach of posts, there must be far less content being generated. Isn't that the tightrope social networks have always been walking?

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

#522

Post by timmytokyo »

x86x87 wrote: post #29
3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #7

Needless to say, with those limits, Twitter is basically unusable. I really doubt these ridiculous limitations can be explained just by a sudden urge to scrape. Why limit verified accounts, for example?

I am guessing twitter fucked around and now are in the finding out phase. I bet some of their infra is crumbling under the stress of all bs Musk pulled.

This was all foreseen:

“Things will be broken. Things will be broken more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in more severe ways,” he says. “Everything will compound until, eventually, it’s not usable.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...

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

#523

Post by cududa »

suzzer99 wrote: post #399
cududa wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cool so I get about 3 more minutes of looking at tweets My guess is he got rate limited himself after a few hours as a verified user so he’s already upping it

They probably have if (isElon) somewhere in the code to turn off rate limiting.

Bold assumption that anyone left there would know how to implement something like that

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

#524

Post by cavisne »

dylan604 wrote: post #429
anigbrowl wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

fine, I'll rephrase: social products. Remember Google+? You and 10 other people do. Most people's memory of Google+ was how to avoid it after it became a mandatory thing for all gmail users, and then it was just gone. So yeah, people really liked that product

Imo Google (basically by accident) owns the best place social network for the next decade - YouTube.

Human generated content will become rare and more valuable, which is why the remaining non walled gardens (Reddit and Twitter) are quickly raising the drawbridge.

Video will be the last medium to fall to AI generated content pretending to be human generated, and by cloning tiktok across to YouTube shorts they remove the barriers to entry for humans.

Social media nowdays is not about friends, it’s about algorithms & creator monetization. YouTube is #1 on monetization by a huge margin.

Any text based social media network will be absolutely overrun with LLMs.

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

#525

Post by mrtksn »

loso wrote: 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…

What I wonder is, how people who paid for verified account feel about it? First you pay for the reach(more features and priority to display) and then your followers or those who are supposed to reached need to pay to read your content. Some people are actually paying non trivial amounts for business accounts.

Normally I'm inclined to think that Musk is a great product person but this one move seems like a jerk reaction to some numbers not meeting expectations and designing a product to improve numbers without thinking about how the product actually works.

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

#526

Post by mazurnification »

After hitting rate limit I cannot even read my own tweets (Profile->Tweets). I find it hilarious.

One more thing - it look like rate limit is per client. When hit on mobile app I could normally use TT on web interface till fresh allowance was exhausted. Which did not lasted that long, too.

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

#527

Post by [deleted] »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #502
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#528

Post by ultrasaurus »

It's amazing how much a rate-limited Twitter isn't Twitter any more:

- It makes the "for you" tab even worse, now their discovery mechanism takes away quota from the Tweets you wanted to see

- I have no idea how many tweets I view in a day: but now that I'm thinking about it I'm actively closing after a quick check

- I feel pressured to read to the end of what's loaded before refreshing (I paid for those!) but it's new content that makes Twitter special

- 6000 is awfully low for your highest paid tier

- I bet most new users don't hit 300 -- but most new power-users will. I don't know if there are any future-power-users who haven't already tried Twitter but they might never get hooked, especially since your first day is going to have the highest junk:goodstuff ratio

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

#529

Post by squeaky-clean »

housemusicfan wrote: post #154
greatwave1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

16 hours? If you're scrolling 100 tweets/min, you'd hit the unverified user limit within 6 minutes, and the verified user limit within an hour

I don't understand, are you actually reading 100 tweets/minute, or just endlessly scrolling through random data for thumb exercise? When you make the good faith assumption that people are actually reading through the content, the numbers start to seem a bit more rational.

Just for reference, let's say HN added a similar rate limit. Opening this thread would cost you over 500 comments towards that rate limit. It doesn't mean you read all 500 comments on this post.

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

#530

Post by hbn »

x1ph0z wrote: post #288
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.

| Elon reported that Twitter hit a new all time high of "user seconds" last week I’m not inclined to take Elon’s words at face value, he has an incentive to pump any statistic that makes it seem Twitter is growing.

That's pretty much majority of data science at tech companies. Stakeholders want numbers that make things look good, not accurate or useful numbers.
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