Incredibly bizarre way to intentionally kill your app, even after all the other nonsense he's been doing. Even if I were willing to pay for something as cringe as verification, 6000 posts a day is laughable for an app like Twitter. I hit the rate limit on my "unverified" account in about 5 minutes. I've been waiting for $newApp to get enough users to be fun, and this only motivates me more to be the change I want to see.
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.
You would think that forced logins would have stopped a majority of the scraping. Even if it didn't the rate limit they have well below what would be needed to stop scrapers.
Alternatively, the costs outweigh impression revenue, they are actively running out of money, and trying to stall while desperately trying to find additional cash.
That seems… implausible? They used to be profitable; clearly at that point advertising revenue must have greatly exceeded infra cost. Now, I’d buy that it’s down, but surely not by _that_ much.
Oh, sure, I’d be amazed if it’s profitable today. But I understood the person I was replying to to mean that they were throttling to control infra cost, which makes no sense, as revenue from people using twitter (ads) must surely more than pay for the infra; effectively shutting down twitter won’t make the debt costs go away and would clearly be a net financial negative.
A lot of advertisers left Twitter one after another after each change by musk. Especially his change to allow hate speech (because free speech!) led to an exodus.
Now there are only very low-quality ads by drop-shipping companies left. I bet they don‘t pay as much as the big brand names before.
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.
I would believe that scraping is why they now require users to be authenticated.
But given that they now require users to be logged in, it should be computationally cheap to drop unauthenticated requests at the front door before they incur real expense.
It'd also be cheap to just blackhole datacentre IP space.
The sort of attack that would require this level of limits is malware on tens of thousands of residential machines that can use a user's existing Twitter session cookies. I'm really skeptical that's the case.
How do you explain it suddenly being a problem today and not, say, during the recent World Cup when not only the AI scraping would have been happening but el Morko himself was crowing about how much extra traffic they were handling?
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.
Now imagine being on Elon's Mars colony and having your breathing rate limited out of the blue one day. Today switched my vision of that from wonder and hope to seeing it as volunteering to become one of the belters in The Expanse. I'm kinda sad to have moved from the 'let me in' to 'hard pass' on that dream. It was one of that last big future dreams 1990s me had for the 20X0's.
I'm kinda sad to have moved from the 'let me in' to 'hard pass' on that dream. It was one of that last big future dreams 1990s me had for the 20X0's.
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.
That hit me years ago when working conditions at Tesla came to light, I realized Elon can never have his Mars colony be self-sufficient or he'd be thrown out of an airlock.
That's the main problem with Twitter Blue (other than its very bad reputation): it's just not worth the money. Instead of adding value to the subscription or making it cheaper, Elon just makes the rest of the product worse. It's a very weird way to do business.
