This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.
The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.
These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.
I find it especially bizarre that spez took inspiration and guidance from Musk. I can entertain the possibility of Musk intentionally driving Twitter to the ground (though he sure is taking the scenic route), but Reddit? It just seems like the rich tech bros have collectively lost their minds
You can’t lose something you never had
deleted by creator
I really don’t believe at all that he would intentionally drive it to the ground. I can see him claiming that if he manages to actually kill it tho
Oh my god, this is just too funny.“The DDOS is coming from INSIDE the HOUSE!”
My lord. And they can’t/won’t piece 1+1 together? Hanlon’s razor dictates they are indeed idiots.
In order to quickly fix it they would probably have to roll back the change to require login to view tweets, which would be admitting that it wasn’t caused by “attacks” on Twitter, which Elon won’t do. Rock and a hard place.
you commented 3 times btw
Yo for real, what’s up with all these social media sites literally shooting themselves in the foot as we speak?.
Youtube planning to antagonize adblock users and limiting video watching, Reddit killing itself with
bureocracystyle and now Twitter doing this shit. Hopefully shit sites like TikTok or Facebook jump on the wagon too.There are several negatives to the limitation too. Advertisers (which are already leaving in droves) are even further discouraged from placing ads that have a much smaller chance of being seen.
Edit: spelling
Yeah, that’s the extra stupid part. Not only limiting the amount of content people can see, but also the ads he needs money from.
Elon Musk, the latest billionaire owner of the online screaming match known as Twitter, sat slumped at his desk, staring at a wall of monitors blinking with a technicolor smorgasbord of error messages. The reason? He’d just let Twitter’s hosting contract with Google lapse because he thought it’d be fun to see if he could migrate it somewhere else. The results? Not so fun.
A comment on Reddit had caught his eye, and he couldn’t shake it. “Every now and then Elon must have a moment of clarity. Where it occurs to him ‘Maybe I am just stupid?’ But then he violently buries the thought.”
“Stupid?” he scoffed aloud to his empty office, sending a mini landslide of Mars Rover prototypes tumbling off his desk. “I’m a genius.”
He remembered how smart he’d felt when he decided to axe the account verification system, only to reinstate it after a week of high-profile mix-ups that included the Dalai Lama being mistaken for a llama enthusiast.
And the content moderation! Who needs it? Well, as it turned out, everyone. Without it, Twitter had turned into a feral wilderness of conspiracy theories, insult slinging, and more unsolicited pictures of eggplants than a greengrocer’s catalog.
And then there was Kanye. “Free Kanye!” he’d declared one afternoon after one too many rocket fuel coffees. But after the notorious rapper had declared war on flannel shirts and clogged up the site with CAPS LOCK tweets, the ban was back on faster than you can say “Kim Kardashian for president.”
“Stupid?” he muttered again, watching as Twitter spontaneously DDOS’d itself like a robotic bull in a digital china shop.
There was a pause. Then a grin spread slowly across Elon’s face, as if he’d just understood the punchline to a particularly tricky joke. “Naaaah,” he laughed, slapping the desk.
He looked at the chaos on the screens, the digital calamity his decisions had wrought, and couldn’t help but chuckle. There was something amusing about being this absurdly, cosmically, hilariously brilliant.
“Back to the drawing board,” he chuckled, picking up a Mars Rover and making it do little jumps across his desk.
Honestly this is probably more close to reality than anyone wants to admit.
That rate limit is insanely low, even for verified. I’m not verified, but I hit the limit in like 10 minutes of very distracted usage.
The hilarity is that these moves are the exact opposite of the so called Public Square he claims Twitter is or should be.
Yeah, 600/800 sounds like a lot until you realize that includes all the stuff you’re just scrolling past in your feed or comments, not even clicking on. I wouldn’t be surprised if they even overlooked the fact that ads might count against that cap too. I’m no heavy user but hit that cap in less than 20 minutes of reading people reacting to the news.
Twitter and Reddit both dying at the same time was not what I expected in 2023
As a former individual who understands the underlying systems, it seems like they botched deployment of a new feature causing issues and cannot figure out how to solve them.
Most of Twitter is and has been in maintenance mode since acquisition (think of 10 man engineering team and 1 left to handle maintenance).
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I’ve heard.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a former individual. What happened? Was it like a Frankenstein thing?
I’ve noticed that my batch image downloader works on maybe 40% of all twitter posts, and only 40% of the time (It used to work 100% of the time before Musk arrived). It’s fucking annoying. I think they’re having major API and CDN issues.
This is why it cracks me up every time when someone is praising Elon for “cutting slack” when firing all those twitter employees. Yes, twitter did not implode immediately. Turns out, people can build software that is stable enough to run in maintenance mode. But good luck dealing with new issues cropping up.
Transcription for the blind: Screenshot of a Twitter post from Elon Musk, Twitter handle @elonmusk, that says:
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
1:01 PM Jul 1, 2023 3.6M Views
-Transcription from a human volunteer. Let me know how I can do better.
Thank you for the transcription, human volunteer :)
The sequence of events from Elon Musk acquiring Twitter to now is an incredible journey.
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Elon Musk bought a social media company for tens of billions, attempted to back out of the deal but couldn’t because of his ineptitude by signing away the ability to reneg on the deal.[1](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/technology/twitter-musk-lawsuit-reasons.html)
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Then there was the freedom of speech advocacy from Musk where he ultimately unbanned racists and then he began sharing bigoted Tweets. But it’s only freedom of speech for his bigoted supporters, when authoritarian governments ask Musk to censor people/tweets he abides by their requests.[2](https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/twitter-has-complied-with-almost-every-government-request-for-censorship-since-musk-took-over-report-finds/)
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The site becomes inundated with the alt right rife with bigotry.[3](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-2024-twitter/674149/)
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The whole verified blue check mark debacle where verification became something you could pay for, with people making fake “official” accounts. For example a fake account impersonating a pharmaceutical company caused their stock to drop abruptly following a joke tweet.[4](https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/11/12/fake-eli-lilly-twitter-account-claims-insulin-is-free-stock-falls-43/)
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Twitter engages in mass layoffs and multiple things break on the site. There are also reports that they can’t pay rent in certain locations. Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisors, as they record a 59% reduction in advertising revenue.[5](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sales-musk.html)
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Elon Musk posts tweets seemingly apologizing for some of the changes and says he will follow the will of the people by posting polls for users to vote on policy changes. Musk asks if he should step down, to which the majority vote in favour of his removal. He then goes on a tirade about bots after losing in the poll. He goes on to say that only paid subscribers will be permited to vote in future polls. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.[6](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/20/elon-musk-breaks-silence-after-10-million-twitter-users-vote-for-him-to-step-down)
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The crème de la crème is Elon Musk implementing a new restriction where you have to be logged in to see tweets. Inadvertently DDOSing his own site.
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New York Times - Why Elon Musk Can’t Back Out of Buying Twitter, According to Twitter
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Forbes - Fake Eli Lilly Twitter Account Claims Insulin Is Free, Stock Falls 4.37%
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New York Times - Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue
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The Guardian - Elon Musk breaks silence after 10 million Twitter users vote for him to step down
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I don’t know if I could do a worse job running Twitter if I tried
Wonder what mental gymnastics the fanboys/chuds are doing to spin this into “yes, Mr. Musk you are so smart, please piss on me next”?
I thought this guy was supposed to be stepping down - didn’t he even announce the new CEO?
Somehow I doubt it’s even that. The guy’s just a braindead, incompetent moron. I don’t think the fucker’s even smart enough to realize this is literally the worst possible decision he could’ve made.
Yeah Occam’s Razor and all that, he’s probably just a fucking idiot.
Funny enough, it’s actually Hanlon’s razor.
Seems naive to prioritize stupidity over malice when trying to make sense out of the actions of businessmen and politicians, but Elon has shown a penchant for stupidity lately.
For the last eight years or so, my response to any invocation of Hanlon’s razor has always been, ¿por qué no los dos?
True. Malice and idiocy aren’t mutually exclusive, but you tell me what REPEATEDLY lighting $44B on fire is more likely to be.
im pretty certain he is being paid by the saudis to destroy twitter. it’s way too powerful a vehicle to be in the hands of the proletariat.
this might sound crazy but … this is why kbin/lemmy etc is so important. in about 2 years+ time, there will be a gigantic global civil war as the masses rise up and seek to annihilate the billionaires. the billionaires will hide behind the use of nukes by russia, then china invades taiwan, then WW3, then Biden is cloned, Covid26 arrives, global tsunamis and geostorms, and then the aliens invade. It’s all pretty much clear. we need to organise now, to just give 0.5% of our kids a miniscule chance to survive the coming extinction of humanity.
Seriously who needs to post 300 things in a day?
Reading not posting, however I still agree. No need to scroll that much.
I keep hitting the limit by scrolling down. This is stupid.
So with Spez having a hard on for Elon and how he runs Twitter, how long until we see this on Reddit? Premium members can view 1000 posts/day and regular members can only view 100 posts/day. Similar rule will apply to comments too.
I think spez is not that dumb lmao
Undeniable?
I deny this.
He’s trying to make something new
I think he got this.
