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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

#641

Post by threeseed »

olah_1 wrote: post #159
TillE wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instagram doing a fediverse thing is a big deal, and makes me really optimistic about the future of ActivityPub. We don't have it all figured out just yet, but I do think we're going to see a decentralized future of social media, which is pretty exciting.

Their use of ActivityPub is just a way to quickly bootstrap social media functionality using time tested libraries. Just like they did with XMPP.

It's likely more a way for Instagram to avoid monopoly and associated regulatory discussions.

By basing it on an open protocol they can be one of many trusted clients rather than a closed, proprietary service.

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

#642

Post by alvarezbjm-hn »

mjg59 wrote: post #479
dylan604 wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned back in the 90s you don't google horse videos without safe search on, so no, I won't be taking your suggestion ;-)

https://elon.horse has the details (I swear this is legitimate)

Not working. God bless archive

https://archive.ph/KwVqi

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

#643

Post by emmp »

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.

Your "good faith assumption" is just not the consumption profile of a twitter user. Scrolling through 100 tweets in a minute is completely plausible.

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

#644

Post by peruvian »

PokestarFan wrote: post #572
stubybubs wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is going to be known as "the Millennial subsidized lifestyle era." Not that it was exclusively used by Millennials, but it's largely what they grew up with. AirBnb was maybe the worst of the bunch, because it has such a dramatic negative externality on housing markets. Entire areas of Barcelona have essentially no real residents because even those who didn't sell to AirBnb investors found it unlivable wi…

How does Spotify lose money? Audio isn't nearly as big as video files. Likely they are just going to make the free tier absolutely suck.

They pay the record companies a lot of money to have their music on their platform.

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

#645

Post by basisword »

Majromax wrote: post #416
arthur2e5 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blue sales ultimately can't hope to come close to what big brand ads used to give. And ironically enough, blue currently works as a crappy version of advertising thanks to the reply ranking. The promises of prioritizing "high-quality content" never came true; all we see are mid takes and, if you speak Mandarin, AI-powered sex scambots. Well, worse for us plebs. Not sure if it's worse for the buyers.

> Blue sales ultimately can't hope to come close to what big brand ads used to give. I don't know, I think the hope is there. With these rate limits and some Fermi estimates, we can guess what Twitter's hoped-for revenue per user might be. Suppose that this move is designed to move regular users over to Twitter Blue, and a regular user might ordinarily see 2000 tweets per day. Suppose further that Twitter would show…

>> Suppose that this move is designed to move regular users over to Twitter Blue

I hope you don't work in marketing. Why would a non-paying user watch Twitter arbitrarily limit the number of Tweets a _paying user_ can view per day, and think "yeah, I'll pay for that".

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

#646

Post by 18pfsmt »

simplicio wrote: post #67

Hard to imagine limiting the ad views of your non-paying users is going to help fix your revenue short-fall.

That's why none of the explanations given can possibly be thorough, and I'm finding very few plausible explanations on HN either.

Most seem to be happy to blame whoever they view as their opposing team, which rarely leads to wisdom.

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

#647

Post by shagmin »

jdminhbg wrote: post #474
zimpenfish wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was quite possible to make it profitable Without the $760M settlement, they'd have made about $270M in 2021[1]. [1] "2021 operating loss of $493 million, or an operating margin of -10%, includes a one-time litigation-related net charge of $766 million" - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...

At the absolute pinnacle of ZIRP era, there were just barely able to get into the black (ex their legal settlement). That’s not an extremely healthy business. They were going to crash in 22/23 regardless of ownership.

Crash as in what? Get delisted from the Nasdaq and go bankrupt or just have a bad bearish couple years or something? Their cashflow had pretty consistently improved since their IPO, they would've maybe had a couple bearish years, would've laid off employees like most other tech companies and most likely would have roughly followed the overall Nasdaq trajectory in the market. But that's a normal business cycle, the stock market is full of companies in much worse shape (look at Amazon for its first decade) that can survive any storm as long as their DSCR ratio isn't crazy...like Twitter's is now.

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

#648

Post by ssnistfajen »

the42thdoctor wrote: post #450
jklinger410 wrote: post #406

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.

The people who had the knowledge to realize this was a dumb mistake were probably fired by Musk.

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

#649

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

cldellow wrote: post #255
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.

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…

pg already pointed out to him that there has to be a better way to handle it. I agree.
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