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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

#661

Post by ssnistfajen »

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.

Actual human users are hitting rate limits under 10 minutes because every Tweet loaded counts towards the rate limit. This is like setting your house on fire at the sight of a few mosquitos.

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

#662

Post by lost_tourist »

wilg wrote: post #629
cubefox wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you checked how many engineers Mastodon has? https://joinmastodon.org/de/about Four.

Just for my own interest, based on the latest data I could find and making ChatGPT's code interpreter doing the remedial math ( https://chat.openai.com/share/3745dbcd-5be5-4af9-ae34-36845b... ) The Monthly Active Users (MAUs) per engineer for Twitter is approximately 600,000, while for Mastodon it's around 280,000.

But if you count salaries in the amount of efficiency and uptime per employee per user per dollar spent is astronomically higher in favor of Mastodon

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

#663

Post by ssnistfajen »

jsheard wrote: post #356
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…

Turning a big dial that says "rate limit" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on The Price Is Right

A garage startup doing this with a thousand users would be cool and fun. An established large platform with hundreds of millions of users doingg this is just undermining its own reputation.

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

#664

Post by ssnistfajen »

reaperducer wrote: post #433
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…

Update from Elon: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754 > Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified Well, at least he's engaged over a holiday weekend. If it was my company, this would be a fifteen meetings, a six-month series of sprints, and we still would only decide on a new color for the icon.

Sometimes things move slowly for good reason. Wasted meeting minutes is a reasonable tradeoff over rendering the main product unusable like this.

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

#665

Post by kgwxd »

jdminhbg wrote: post #469
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…

This is some pretty dumb mental gymnastics to retcon a motivation. The simple explanation: he made an offer for Twitter, then the market (and Twitter’s value) crashed, and he tried to avoid paying the now-vastly overpriced fee he was on the hook for.

Hanlon's razor is reserved for people without a long history of malice.

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

#666

Post by ssnistfajen »

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

The deadly combo is running a skeleton crew while rapidly implementing new changes. This just presents an exponentially higher workload for the remaining staff who may not have the institutional knowledge required to successfully tackle those problems.

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

#667

Post by kgwxd »

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?

Lemmy has been great. I went SDF as a host. Never going back to Reddit. I left Twitter almost a decade ago so I can’t compare to mastodon but that’s been really nice too.

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

#668

Post by Kye »

cududa wrote: post #523
suzzer99 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Boolean was banned for sounding too much like boo elon.

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

#669

Post by fundad »

JauntTrooper wrote: post #651
samtp wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

Twitter’s board exited. Post-ZIRP they knew fair value wasn’t higher than the offer so they took the money.

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

#670

Post by fundad »

kevingadd wrote: post #542
thomassmith65 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems like loading Twitter up with debt servicing was always a bad idea, stock dip or not, considering what its revenues were like. It wasn't in great shape before but the amount of money it now has to spend servicing debt is a nightmare for anyone trying to make that company profitable. His strategy for buying it simply doesn't make sense.

I think the influence is more important than revenue
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