81–90 of 102 posts
Funny how the effect of the rate limit has barely affected bots and scrapers at all but severely damaged the userbase of the site.
Very anecdotally, bot activity on my accounts was increasing in the last month and then it completely stopped after that recent rate limiting stuff.
Funny how the effect of the rate limit has barely affected bots and scrapers at all but severely damaged the userbase of the site.
tinfoil hat time: what if that was the point all along? twitter was a vital space for organizing protests - think arab spring, occupy wall street. one of the richest guys in the world (who's also very anti-union, btw!) buys it up in a time where inequality is getting worse and worse and social fabrics are starting to tear and makes it unusable. no more space for organizing. one fewer threat to capital.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
tinfoil hat time: what if that was the point all along? twitter was a vital space for organizing protests - think arab spring, occupy wall street. one of the richest guys in the world (who's also very anti-union, btw!) buys it up in a time where inequality is getting worse and worse and social fabrics are starting to tear and makes it unusable. no more space for organizing. one fewer threat to capital.
He would be really stupid if that is his thinking, because as we just saw these users would just move to a competitor as long as there is one. Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on short conversation-based social media.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/7/23787334/instagram-threads...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmmm... I was thinking you could limit based on the unique identifierForVendor[1], but without a way to verify that a given id is legit this would be easily circumvented. An API whereby Apple cryptographically signs a vendor/device-specific ID so you can effectively rate limit without needing any personal info whatsoever would be nice. 1: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidevice/162...
A device specific ID would be a fingerprinting mechanism that would conflict with the privacy goals though? It would then have to be resettable, like the ad identifier already is.
The problem is you can't use it for rate limiting because a bad actor could just generate a random ID and use that. That's why an endpoint for validating a given ID was issued for a particular vendor is required for a privacy-preserving anonymous rate limiting implementation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He would be really stupid if that is his thinking, because as we just saw these users would just move to a competitor as long as there is one. Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on short conversation-based social media.
A competitor that "isn't for news, politics or negativity" [0]. In other words, a place that won't let the same thing happen. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/7/23787334/instagram-threads...
They said they won't boost these, not that these are forbidden.
Funny how the effect of the rate limit has barely affected bots and scrapers at all but severely damaged the userbase of the site.
Whatever Elmo is doing, it's not working
Earlier quoted context omitted.
tinfoil hat time: what if that was the point all along? twitter was a vital space for organizing protests - think arab spring, occupy wall street. one of the richest guys in the world (who's also very anti-union, btw!) buys it up in a time where inequality is getting worse and worse and social fabrics are starting to tear and makes it unusable. no more space for organizing. one fewer threat to capital.
He owns the site. If this is truly his intention then all he has to do is turn off the main switch. There's really no reason to give him the benefit of doubt and twist the narrative into "Musk is a genius and everything is going according to plan". The simpler theory is likely to be the correct one – he has never run a social network before and has no idea how to stop bleeding users and cash so is desperately throwin…
Putting on a secondary tinfoil hat to prevent stray signals from leaking in: the Simple Sabotage Field Manual suggests that you gum-up the works so to slow things down by a lot. You may not want to make the sabotage obvious, because it'd get fixed immediately (e.g. blow up a factory). Back to the topic: turning off the switch would result in an exodus to other platforms.
Warning: long somewhat related story that is basically humblebragging, but the summary is that bypassing Twitter ratelimits is not very hard. I didn't feel like playing around with Twitter's annoying certificate pinning so I just uploaded the Twitter APK to Corellium, turned on what they call the "network monitor", opened the Twitter app since it lets you use Twitter without signing in. I clicked around, searched and…
Funny how the effect of the rate limit has barely affected bots and scrapers at all but severely damaged the userbase of the site.
Very anecdotally, bot activity on my accounts was increasing in the last month and then it completely stopped after that recent rate limiting stuff.