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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

#651

Post by JauntTrooper »

samtp wrote: post #636
JauntTrooper wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His offer was $54.20 in April 2022. That was a 38% premium to the market price immediately prior to his investment, which is attractive but not necessarily "always well above fair value" Twitter had traded above that price as recently as five months earlier, and had traded in the $60s and even $70s for most of 2021. Twitter's stock had cratered in early 2022 along with many other tech stocks (Facebook went from $330…

In what world is a 38% premium not well above market value? If you pay $1.38m for a $1m house, you are definitely paying well above market value.

Market value and fair value aren't necessarily the same thing.

The 38% is just the one day premium. The offer was at a discount to the stock price less than six months earlier. It was possible that the stock price had overreacted to a tech sell off, and if the market had rebounded by the summer the bid could have looked genius.

Market pricing in M&A is somewhat opaque and different than trading prices because it's based partly on synergy value to a bidder. To use your house example, if the house next door was willing to pay $1.5 million for your house, then the $1.38M is not above market even if Zillow and the list price say it's $1 million.

There were other potential suitors for Twitter, like Microsoft, Disney, Salesforce and private equity. They might have valued it more than Musk based on the benefits it brought their firms. Twitter would be a lot more valuable inside Amazon, Google or Meta but there were probably antitrust issues there.

Plus Twitter's board and management team had access to a lot of material non public information that investors did not. Even if you thought the market price in early April accurately reflected all the public info on Twitter, the Board was looking at 5 year projections and much more detailed pricing/demand/customer info.

The Delaware Courts give a lot of deference to board judgment in these situations, and Twitter's board would have been well within their rights to say "no, that 38% is not good enough" if that was their conclusion after a good faith and reasonable process.

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

#652

Post by GuB-42 »

moose_man wrote: post #360
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…

You mean to tell me that you can't actually run a tech company with three engineers and a Mac Mini?

I think Twitter was definitely overstaffed. You don't need that much manpower to run a tech company, at least on the technical side.

The problem is that Twitter organized itself as an overstaffed company, with complex structures, complex code, lots of R&D, etc... Than Elon Musk came in and did a Thanos snap and immediately fired half of the workforce, and I guess quite a few others left, especially among the best who would have an easy way finding a good job elsewhere. But while the workforce was drastically reduced, the complexity of the system wasn't reduced and probably never will. So, you get what happens now.

It is possible to run a Twitter-like website with much less resources than Twitter had before Elon Musk bought it, but you can't run Twitter as it is now.

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

#653

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

Xen9 wrote: post #480
ryandrake wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Her job is to handle the humans. Most people cannot take radical ideas and don't understand that Elon Musk does not need to care and foes not care if he fails with Twitter after first trying to construct something with a social impact. Elon Musk can fuck up every company he has and (as long as he doesn't get sued by angry investors) he will still be able to live a great, amazing life. Edit: I get down votes but no re…

> Most people cannot take radical ideas...If you disagree, it would be beneficial to write why.

It might help the credibility of the free speech absolutionist if said absolutionist didn't assist a certain Turkish dictator shut down free speech, didn't mute journalists covering his actions against elonmuskjet, didn't censor the blocktheblue campaign, didn't try to erase the existence of substack from twitter, didn't help the Indian gov censor tweets that Gov didn't like ... off the top of my head.

An individual using their position of power to silence unliked speech - and help authoritarians do the same ... it just isn't very radical.

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

#654

Post by grecy »

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…

And the incredible part is that it just won’t matter. Tesla and spacex are licensed to print money for the next decade or more.

Him losing 40 billion is like us losing 400. It just won’t matter in the grand scheme

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

#655

Post by ProjectArcturis »

soneca wrote: post #84
x86x87 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am 100% sure that I didn’t load 300 tweets in the official app today. I was only accessing an account where I follow 17 people. I just counted and there were 14 new tweets (RTs counted as 2 tweets) in my feed from today (the average for a typical day in this account). And I was rate-limited today. In the best scenario, the change is really intended, but they messed something with the implementation and Musk will ne…

Guessing the app preloaded responses to the tweets you read?

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

#656

Post by kergonath »

kvetching wrote: post #639
cldellow wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. It's really hard for me to believe that a uniform 600 tweets read per _day_ limit for almost _all_ accounts is the best tool they have to mitigate a scraping attack. They likely have great insight into the risk profiles of each account based on age, size, past engagement. This is an incredibly coarse banhammer -- very close to just turning off the servers, IMO. Reasonable if it lasted for an hour, debatable if…

absolutely insane. indictment on the engineers for lack of creativity. Twitter has been completely inaccessible on my android app all day. I unknowingly used up my rate limit in my bed this morning. There has to be some other motive- possibly related to France protests. Macron announced that social media was to blame

Musk rate-limiting reading (and not posting) on Twitter worldwide because of localised protests in a single country? You must be joking; this makes no sense at all.

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

#657

Post by peytoncasper »

faefox wrote: post #278
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 says a lot of things, like last fall when he was crowing about how Twitter had the bot problem licked. Fast forward to today and bot spam is worse than ever before. You can believe what you want. I choose to believe what I see with my eyes.

I’m not taking a side of whether Elon is right or wrong.

However, you mentioned that today is an admission that the bot problem is worse. However that not true, the restrictions are specifically on viewing data (scrapers) rather than creating data (bots).

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

#658

Post by ssnistfajen »

diegocg wrote: post #171
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 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.

Instagram has a Twitter-like product in the pipeline now.

Google had their foray into social media more than a decade ago and it failed miserably. Starting from that point they've produced a continuous stream of failed products that never received enough support to last long enough to see viability.

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

#659

Post by vb6sp6 »

epistasis wrote: post #208
somenameforme wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like they are facing a novel denial of service attack that was near to the point of being able to imperil their service. This is an obviously temporary remediation to keep the systems up, not a new policy for the site. And all of that falls right under the purview of the CTO.

A more plausible explanation would be that they no longer have the engineering capability to maintain the site, or its prior attack resistance. If there is any sort of novel scraping going on, and their only response is to shut down the site for all the accounts, their engineering capabilities have been pretty much zeroed out, and it's a massive indictment of the leadership decisions. Plus, at this point believing an…

The GCP contract expired yesterday

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

#660

Post by choward »

choward wrote: post #513

This has to be the dumbest idea I've ever seen any social media company make and that says a lot. First, I can't find any documentation explaining the rate limits. Just his tweet. Is this a rolling limit? Where do I see how many posts I've allegedly read? Do replies count as posts? Also, you can't go back and re-read the tweets that counted toward your limit. His tweets are getting over 20,000 replies. That means tha…

I can confirm that scrolling through replies does count. So reading the replies to Elon's tweets to figure out what's happening makes you hit the rate limit.
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