Elon Musk:
"To address extreme level 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"
Source: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz94eReWYAEhkHS?format=png&name=900x900
Source (backup): https://i.imgur.com/WvwtHez.png
Edit: actually, since that source doesn't appear to have a paywall workaround at the moment, I'm going to merge the thread back hither.
You're welcome.
Would be even better if HN would automatically rewrite Twitter links to use the current workaround. Especially if the point is to foster discussion here around a single comment, no need to load the whole application.
Given that this outage and rate limiting may legit make Twitter's business infeasible, I change my prediction that Yaccarino will leave Twitter from within 3 months to within 3 weeks.
The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.
In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.
The second video shows why it's jiggling. 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.
This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.
Unbelievable. It's amateur hour.
#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS
A mostly still movie of a Twitter feed showing a rate limited error message and a jiggling scrollbar indicating repeated attempts to load a resource.
Firefox network console showing 10 requests to twitter.com zooming by per second. https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057
The problem is that Twitter organized itself as an overstaffed company, with complex structures, complex code, lots of R&D, etc... Than Elon Musk came in and did a Thanos snap and immediately fired half of the workforce, and I guess quite a few others left, especially among the best who would have an easy way finding a good job elsewhere. But while the workforce was drastically reduced, the complexity of the system wasn't reduced and probably never will. So, you get what happens now.
It is possible to run a Twitter-like website with much less resources than Twitter had before Elon Musk bought it, but you can't run Twitter as it is now.
https://joinmastodon.org/de/about
Four.
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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?
If you block stuff somewhere in the microservie hell in the backend, but forget to update the frontend code properly, and everything was built with the assumption that authentication and authorization is not a thing, and suddenly it is, there's bound to be craploads of stuff that can start spamming network requests.
You need to understand that there is a huge gulf between "this doesn't make any sense" and "I don't understand this".
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
Browser:can I get the tweet now?
Server: No
You know what I mean?
20 Wait $timeout for new content; if a load failed, it was probably a mobile network glitch or something else we should ignore
30 GOTO 10
But I don't believe on that because Twitter is a billion dollar company and that kind of mistake is dumb. So idk.
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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 Twitter
Elon thought he'd be able to wiggle out of it because he assumed the SEC would be the regulatory body he'd be up against - and to his credit he has made a career out of making the SEC look like spineless chumps - but much to Elon's horror he actually found himself before the almighty Delaware Court of Chancery
So in an effort to slyly make a couple Billion $'s, Elon torched ~$40 Billion of his personal wealth, in what is arguably the biggest bag fumbling in modern history
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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa
Him losing 40 billion is like us losing 400. It just won’t matter in the grand scheme
Your basic assumption already makes no sense. Please list the businesses Elon has started after his PayPal days with the goal of enriching himself.
Also, money is a means to an end, is it not? So what do you think he’d do with more money? Again, you can look at what he did with his Zip2 money. And then his PayPal money. That might give you a clue.
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Explain just about all platforms doing revenue adjusting user hostile actions then? Examples include Reddit with the API fees, YT with the Ad Blocking blocking. etc
This is all a reaction to the end of cheap money, aka the cost of capital is going up, so companies need to actually make revenue instead of chasing free capital
>>I don't think this high interest rate environment will last that long
There is no indication this true, most likely the "new normal" is going to be on the order of rates before the 2008 housing crash, not going back to the insanity of 0-1% fed rates...
Really should provide a source when stating things like this, as many will want to check out for themselves exactly what was said.
I went and found the tweet that I assume is being referenced. It's here :
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675205751902486529
Elon says "He is right". So he is referencing the Imam in the video of the tweet he is replying to (not the tweeter, who appears to be female). The video of the Imam's speech has subtitles, so you can see what Elon is saying 'is right'.
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Normally I'm inclined to think that Musk is a great product person but this one move seems like a jerk reaction to some numbers not meeting expectations and designing a product to improve numbers without thinking about how the product actually works.
Interestingly, we have had (for the first time in years) decent advertising traction on Twitter in the first half of 2023 and I was planning on expanding that.
Advertising a product like ours has been very difficult because the venn diagram of "people who understand rsync.net" and "people who don't use an adblocker* has a very tiny overlap.
So between suspending our reddit promotions due to the dysfunction there and seeing some (very marginal) success with Twitter ads called into question I suspect we're headed back to square one ...
Odd statement given that Fidelity just cut its valuation of reddit, but increased it valuation of Twitter.
From today, according to https://apnews.com/article/twitter-fidelity-musk-value-08c64.... It doesn't sound like it increased its valuation of twitter in any way tbh.
Every cool startup that people loved started by burning cash. This made Uber cheap, DoorDash cheap, Youtube helpful and creative, Facebook about connecting with classmates, Twitter a free public forum, Reddit a playground for forums of all possible varieties, Imgur an ad-free alternative to ad-laden image hosting sites, 0% loan available for purchasing anything, etc, etc.
But all of this was possible because all of these companies spent more than they made. In fact, most of these listed still do spend more than they make but they're going through contortions trying to change that and many might not survive it. For those that do their products will unquestionably be inferior to what we had in the 2010s.
There's this belief that technology can only go forward, only get better, but what I think we'll see as we move into the 2020s is a growing realization that things were substantially better in the 2010s... but only because we were putting everything on a credit card and not worrying about the bill that eventually had to be paid.
We (consumers) didn't put anything on a CC. VCs did.
And I count that for the blessing it was. I ordered tons of subsidized food on DoorDash, cheap rides on Uber, etc.
Now that golden era is over, and I will not be ordering any more of that stuff at the now exorbitant prices.
Thank you based VCs, for comping a bunch of stuff for me the last 10 years.
New reddit launched 5 years ago, and many people still prefer using old reddit. Twitter also did not add any feature in the past 5 years the majority of its users cared about losing. If most of your users are fine with giving up everything you’ve built in the past 5 years, and you have a large staff of engineers, then you’ve not been running the business effectively.
They fail because they need to become billion dollar behemoths to support the VC funding they've gotten. But plenty (not all though) of them could be profitable if they were ran as a "lifestyle" business.
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 with drunk tourists screaming around the apartment buildings at 3 am. I stopped using AirBnb because it was making it enjoyable to visit other cities, but destroying my own. It's also a lot more expensive for fewer amenities.
Spotify hasn't made any money yet. I wonder if they're going to start charging $30/month. Time for the return of CDs, vinyl, MP3s?
Twitters current issues are entirely the creation of Elon Musk.
You can believe what you want. I choose to believe what I see with my eyes.
I’m not inclined to take Elon’s words at face value, he has an incentive to pump any statistic that makes it seem Twitter is growing.
A famously trustworthy source.
Frankly I feel Google would be more motivated to challenge Reddit. Since so many of Google’s search results go to Reddit, they might as well try to take over that part of the web rather than leaving it in the hands of mercurial leadership of Reddit.
The only problem is possible retaliation from Reddit and potential antitrust problems if other similar sites feel threatened.
Hahahahahhhaha
Google had their foray into social media more than a decade ago and it failed miserably. Starting from that point they've produced a continuous stream of failed products that never received enough support to last long enough to see viability.
Only a few power users cared about it and no one cared about them.
On social network websites, the vast majority of people are only lurkers, a relatively few people commenting, even fewer people posting, and fewer people still who want to put in the effort to build up a community.
Reddit's soul sits in those handcrafted small communities, the big ones sure will stay around and be popular, but there's lots of other places where one can get 5 second cat videos, and memes.
This event eroded a lot of the remaining trust between moderators and the admins, and while that can feel like it's not relevant to normal users, over time this will cause fewer people to be interested in starting a community on Reddit.
Power mods suck, but power users are the backbone of the site. I predict information quality and density will continue to decrease rapidly on Reddit until it becomes no different from Instagram.
(I’m not personally a power user, I’ve just been on Reddit for a while)
So far it's been the attention of the users that has been monetized, primarily via advertising.
But now the content generated by the users has value as input into AI training sets. And AI companies are scrambling to gather as much as they can as rapidly as they can.
The data itself, not the attention of the users, is what is now being harvested.
The companies hosting the data are right to intervene, there's no reason to allow incredibly well-funded AI organizations hoover it all up for free.
Where it's going wrong is how the social companies are intervening. Their goal is correct, their methods are not.
You could only join by invitation, so as to make F2F social networks in self-hosted instances, or in a Discord-esque "server". I think the value here would be in exchanging opinions, information and new interests with an expanded social network (you woukd probably like and find interesting your friends' friends). Although I admit this model would be a closed community, if it's only one instance then it's not a problem because there are not a lot of people, and if it proves to be successful, it could span a renaissance of blogs or independent content-generation, i.e. these communities would be closed but reinforcing an open Web, instead of mega-silos with captive audience.
I think that a limit in size for each community would be essential, the first member/admin can invite, let's say, 80, people, each of those can invite 40 people, and the third "generation" just another 20 people. This way you get at most 64k people to interact with. There was a post here on HN a couple months [0] ago with a back of the envelope calulation of subreddits being hostile when reaching a 300k userbase.
[0] https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/scaling-problems-in-soc...
Someones going to say Lemmy and Mastedon - they're wrong.
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Fwiw there's a post trending on mastodon that they DDOS'd themselves as a result of forcing logins to view tweets.
Right. I just don't grasp how people don't understand he is surely flat out lying.
Any estimates for how much?
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Yep. Elon clearly lost his motivation for Mars at some point, either because he was confronted with unshakeable evidence that his goals were impossible to achieve, or because he just got bored and distracted.
My guess is that the latter explanation is closer to the mark. But on the other hand, learning that his dream was out of reach could easily have led to the kind of dissipative, self-destructive loss of focus that we've seen from him over the past couple of years.
For those of us who were on board with his original vision, he's just another Lucy, holding just another football.
> 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 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.
This isn't accurate at all.
Standard operating procedure for large-scale scraping is to use a botnet, it's a sybil attack where you can have tens or even hundreds of thousands of IPs ticking away at 10 requests per minute or some such. Done correctly, it's nearly impossible to detect which nodes are complicit from their access patterns or user agents.
That said, rate limits work relatively poorly against this. A proof of work approach like HashCash might work though.
Could it be that they just stop paying bills for Akrose and they shut down their service?
That said, someone mentioned that the login page alone involves 11 MB of data transfer, so maybe that is the problem they are confronted with.
Needless to say, if true, this would be extremely funny.
My guess is he got rate limited himself after a few hours as a verified user so he’s already upping it
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.
But that's OK. Twitter has a big engineering team that should be able to sort this out soon. Oh, wait...
Advertising must really be in the hole to force users off the site like this.
I’m a big fan of Elon and what he’s built so I wasn’t planning on leaving, but can’t even use it now. Mastodon still seems too complicated to get the masses on. Where will non-tech folks go?
As a casual user, it's noticeable how many people are posting now.
It's lively, and I use it everyday.
TBH, I don't really miss the people that don't want to come over.
making sure that nobody can see ads by ratelimiting them too hard really helps with this, or so I'm told