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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

#371

Post by cldellow »

csiegert wrote: post #190
throw2022110401 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are literally throwing away revenue with every denied impression. An act of desperation obviously. My take: they broke something and need to shed load to keep the site running. The "extreme scraping" thing is the usual Musk BS.

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 would believe that scraping is why they now require users to be authenticated.

But given that they now require users to be logged in, it should be computationally cheap to drop unauthenticated requests at the front door before they incur real expense.

It'd also be cheap to just blackhole datacentre IP space.

The sort of attack that would require this level of limits is malware on tens of thousands of residential machines that can use a user's existing Twitter session cookies. I'm really skeptical that's the case.

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

#372

Post by duped »

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.

They can give it a catchy name too with their branding, because it adds so much value to their services. Maybe call it Google+?

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

#373

Post by mattgreenrocks »

x86x87 wrote: post #128
soneca wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Twitter crumbling is the best case scenario imho. This will show that you cannot run it with a skeleton crew and that the decisions made were either extremely naive or extremely dumb and filled with hubris

And we get the nice side effect of Twitter being dead.

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

#374

Post by rideontime »

yodsanklai wrote: post #351

Lot of Musk bashing in the comments but I'd love to have more technical insight behind this decision. For instance, what rate limiting policy is reasonable for such a service. What was the policy before this decision?

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 things a human user couldn't do, like access a thousand posts a minute. This is aimed directly at reducing normal activity across the whole system.

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

#375

Post by esskay »

Oh awesome, yeah I hit the limit by about 5pm. How damn stupid do you have to be to not only restrict viewing to logged in users, but to then limit how long those eyeballs can look at your adverts.

Between Reddit's implosion and Twitter being run by a moron it's making it incredibly easy to get work done.

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

#376

Post by esskay »

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…

I managed to hit the limit during the F1 sprint race as theres a ton of threaded comments for that. Genius level move on how to screw up your own business.

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

#377

Post by bardak »

randomfool wrote: post #196
pphysch wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah my limit hit after 20-25 minutes of total screen time. What a mess.

Same- rate limited after 20 mins. Way to force me to move elsewhere. Advertising must really be in the hole to force users off the site like this.

This kills any advertising revenue they have and I'm sure twitter blue subscribers won't be happy about this if it keeps going on. I wonder if they will give twitter blue subscribers an even higher limit so that they can actually use it.

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

#378

Post by upon_drumhead »

housemusicfan wrote: post #295
rsynnott wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use Twitter? Even at the best of times, you learn to flip though fairly quickly skimming over the nonsense, and since the ascension of naughty ol’ mr car bluetick replies get promoted to the front of the queue, so you have to scroll past a sea of bullshit to get to the real replies. Twitter with 600 tweets a day is clearly unusable. That’s one large thread, and you’ll scroll past most of it anyway.

By your logic, everyone with a paid subscription constitutes "a sea of bullshit" and the "real replies" are at the back of the line? That's the most hipster-esque description of Twitter I've ever heard. Underground Twitter, it's where the cool kids hang out and vape behind the gymnasium. This sounds more like unresolved personal grudges rather than an issue with the platform itself and the masses that use it. If you…

The sea of bullshit is the fact the page is laid out like this

Interesting Tweet Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweet x 20 Related Replies x 20 Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweet x 20 And so on.

The sea of bullshit to me is the huge chunks of Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweets that are thrown into the reply chains.

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

#379

Post by publius_0xf3 »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #223
pphysch wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah my limit hit after 20-25 minutes of total screen time. What a mess.

/s or not /s? 25 minutes seems like plenty to me. But I also have HN noprocrast enabled.

25 minutes is nothing when a major event is happening. Like just last week, I was intensely following the Wagner Group rebellion minute-by-minute without sleeping. A limit would make it impossible to watch history unfold in real-time.

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

#380

Post by russdill »

minimaxir wrote: post #322

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…

I suspect this is less about scraping and more about artificial manipulation of view counts to both push certain scams/tweets to the top. I don't think they are providing advertising kickbacks yet, but that would only amplify this.
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