Remote View

1y ago

🤦‍♀️ It's over, boys, the Twitanic has sunk

132 comments

Just gonna leave this little gem here, enjoy.
https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057
- Haha jesus christ, the incompetence is unreal!
- Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!
- This is...beautiful?
- I literally fell out my chair laughing at the network tab scrolling like that 🤣
- did they not even test it before they shipped it. Embarassing

By post he means tweet, right? Google says average tweet length is only around 30 characters and average word length around 5 characters. So let's say it's 8 words with abbreviation which would take 2 seconds to read. If it's 4 seconds per tweet with scrolling then you can now only spend under an hour on Twitter without paying (not counting time spent replying). Good on him for fighting against social media addiction I guess.
- I got rate limited in 25 minutes by refreshing my Following feed and reading about people getting rate limited. I don't think it counts 600 unique tweets since I definitely reloaded the same tweets multiple times.
- Dude is using 100% of his brain to find the best way to cut ad revenue.
- It's basically everything. Tweets, quoted tweets, replies, and even ads all count against the limit. I've seen people saying they hit the limit in under 10 minutes of scrolling. One person said they only managed to post two tweets before being limited.
  And from what I understand spam bots are mostly unaffected since they're already rate limited for reads (but not posts).
- Lmao what a fucking spoon
  
  I can’t believe people used to think this guy was Tony Stark, when he was obviously a dumber Justin Hammer this whole time.

wow, this is actually amazing.
You’d think a rapidly developing service like Lemmy might face restrictions like that due to resources but Twitter? Mismanagement beyond belief.

spez right now:

How the fuck is Reddit closing their API behind a ridiculous paywall only the SECOND stupidest social media move of the day
- Boy I sure picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue
  
  Well I picked the wrong day to quit amphetamines!
- The day is not over yet
- Well, Huffman made his Reddit API moves in conscious emulation of (and after talking with) Musk. So behold, a single bad idea from a single person is bringing down two major social networks in one day.
- deleted

Fucking lol.
Keep punching yourself in the dick, elmo.

I wonder what's actually going on; I doubt it's about "scraping" and "manipulation"
- This is second-hand, so take it with a grain of salt, but I've seen mention of a bug that sometimes causes the same graphql query to be executed in an infinite loop (presumably they're async requests, so the browser wouldn't lock and the user wouldn't even notice).
  So they may essentially be getting DDOS'd by their own users due to a bug on their end.
  Edit: better info: https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057
  
  Ha, that's hilarious. Absolutely not a surprise, though
- For my money I would bet the issue stems from abandoning Google server hosting, either from arrogance or being unable to afford it.
  
  That's my bet too. They weren't hosting the site itself on GCP but they were using them for trust and safety services, and I bet that one of those services was anti scraping prevention with things like ip blocking and captchas, which would explain why scraping suddenly became a problem for them the day their contract ended. It can't be a coincidence.
  
  Oh yeah I completely forgot about that particular idiocy, Elmo gets up to so much stupid shit that it's hard to keep track.
  But I'd also be willing to bet money on this being somehow at least partially tied to ditching GC, likely due to not being able to pay (at that's what is implied by them refusing to pay the bill.) I guess Elmo thought "how hard can running some servers be? I'm a rokit skientist" and decided to just skip paying the bill as a power move instead of trying to make a deal with Google, and now the remaining developers, ops people etc. – those poor bastards – are paying the price.
- I'm suspect some of the backend is starting to fail. So the servers can't keep up with the demand.
- Or it could be. It's no coincidence that scraping went way up when he started charging for the API.
  Everyone with a brain knows that data will be retrieved somehow, it's do you want a lower cost API option or do you want them to scrape the whole webpage?
- I bet it's just more short sighted penny pinching, he's been skipping out on bills left and right.
- If it is, he's even dumber than I thought. You stop scrapping by setting a rate limit to something comfortable for humans but painfully slow for scrappers. Something like 60 tweets per minute would all but ensure that humans aren't affected and that scrappers won't get anywhere.
- Its all about getting people to pay for it.

You know the fediverse isn't perfect but it seems more sustainable than these big social media companies that are not profitable. Reddit and Twitter make no real money but want to host everything on their website and I'm not entirely sure why. Image boards like 4chan purge all their data and the fediverse is spread out to a bunch of different servers. What's the point of keeping everything forever on one server? Do they really think that all that junk data is valuable?
Also why did reddit go from just hosting text to hosting images and videos? It used to be a link aggregation site now it's a never leave our borders site I don't understand how that's going to be profitable with how much hosting that data is going to cost.
Years ago I used to hit like 15 websites a day just for video game news and discussion then it became all reddit.
- As Cory Doctorow termed it, it's the enshittification of the Internet - all for the sake of "shareholder value" It's a proper "can't see the wood for the trees" business
- Miss the good ole days of porn on gfycat
- Miss the good ole days of imgur, YouTube, and porn on gfycat
- Also why did reddit go from just hosting text to hosting images and videos? It used to be a link aggregation site now it’s a never leave our borders site
  The idea is to keep the users on Reddit instead of directing them to third-party sites, so they can show them ads instead of the third-party sites getting all the ad revenue. They just haven't figured out how to monetize it.
  
  It's costing them a lot of money to do that. Old reddit must have been a lot cheaper. I don't get the walled garden approach for a link aggregation site. It's obvious spez is going to sell it for a shit ton of money then bounce because it's a money pit. So was Twitter they lucked out with Elon being dumb enough to buy it for that insane price tag.

I’m shocked, SHOCKED that killing the API would lead to web scraping! That was a completely unpredictable outcome.
- I'm also shocked that this happened the day after their contract with Google for trust and safety services ended. Totally a coincidence right? One of those services surely couldn't be anti scraper protection could it?

I for one am cheering its demise.

Limit rating your core audience in their primary task is completely batshit crazy. Thank fuck for mastodon.

Let's hope for another twitter migration wave to mastodon / other fediverse platforms!

So unless you pay Elon Musk $8/month, you can only load 600 tweets per day. That's some fucked up shit right there man.
- And apparently their new algorithm seems to favour posts that anger people. So it’s 600 rage inducing posts… stick a fork in it, Twitter is done.
- ....surely there's gotta be a better analogy

Traditional internet is killing itself
- Just these monolithic social media companies really. And I don't really consider anything "web 2.0" to be traditional internet. Newgrounds was traditional internet.
  
  And it was dope for little Kalothar
- The fediverse came just in time. I wouldn't have even heard about lemmy/kbin or mastodon if reddit hadn't shut down 3rd party apps.
  They seem like they're trying to bleed a stone.
  
  They showed they don't have the lobes for business.
- Nah, Web 2.0 is killing itself. Turns out dipshit greedy pig boys aren't great at running social platforms
  
  It's bizarre they ever thought they could, the internet is pretty fundamentally socialist in spirit with large chunks of infrastructure being maintained by OSS, the culture being based in flirting with copyright violation and transformative works, and people generally expecting to receive services for free. Information on the internet is intuitively considered the commons by everyone except the people trying to monetize it.
- I would say the traditional internet was before the time of corporate ruled media, so in that case I'd say corporate internet is killing itself and and media is going back to traditional, at least with respect to the Fediverse.

This is the result of a deranged fascist being born with an apartheid silver spoon in his mouth.
- Probably an emerald spoon in his case.
  
  Indeed!

Simply put this is the most amazing thing the twit did to Twitter since forcing himself as King Twit. Even better than when he tried to back out of it but couldn't because he'd already signed for it.

Please please please let this be the breaking point at which big online personalities switch to mastodon, or at least start using those crossposting tools. That's the only thing I miss from twitter and something RSS cant replace

Wow that’s my Twitter and Reddit account deleted within 24 hours

Elon will be happy to know that my Twitter consumption has fallen to zero a day.
- A true hero. Always thinking how to best help Musko

Not only that, it seems they are also DDoSing themselves because of the recent changes to view comments publically.

Limit READIND is something new. What a creative move!

Talk about killing the goose that laid golden eggs...
- The eggs were foil-wrapped chocolate, a lovely boon for the average person but worthless to the people who wanted to sell them for cash.

So, let's see. My 1920x1080 monitor and my full window browser can render 3 or 4 posts without scrolling, just logging in on Twitter. Because it's a new account, that means I have 296 posts left to read.
I click on one of those 4 initial posts, and without scrolling, I read 3 or 4 replies. I have 292 posts left to read. And even those replies don't bring me anything meaningful, they're just trolls doing troll things. 4 posts wasted.
And so on and so on. Wonderful, Mr. Free Speech Absolutist.
- I love that avatar.
  
  Thanks. It's a dwarf from Dwarf Fortress. Be careful, they hate drinking water and they love plump helmets.

"Temporary Limits"

300 posts is what, maybe 10 minutes of scrolling if you don't actually engage with much of the content..? Brilliant idea.

He is so unbelievably dumb?? 😅

Brilliant, make the service literally unusable, lets see how it plays out

You really can’t make this stuff up, it’s beyond my head how someone can make those choices. But I mean advertisers already ditched Twitter long ago, so why not squeeze the last money out of it that you can get.

Why would you punish your users for using your fucking site? It’s kinda sad how Elon is ruining Twitter.
- The ad companies will no doubt be thrilled... /s

Terrible idea (from my limited perspective to be fair.)
Consider the amount of replies a tweet will receive. Each of those are posts (potentially) leading to a number of allotted viewed posts being taken from one thread.
You also have to consider retweets. Do these count as a separate post if already viewed due to another account sharing it? I'd assume so - albeit pessimistically - leading to more allotted views being taken.
In general the average user will have and already has (evidenced by Elons' tweeting of increasing the limit from 300 to 500 for non-accounts and 600 to 1000 for those with an account) pressed against this limit easily within a days casual browsing. Limiting the amount of content your user can view may net small profit gains initially but will without a doubt frustrate a majority of the user base and stifle the platforms' ability to provide information to the public, something twitter has been especially known for via press outlets (or at least before changes caused them to leave as well).
- Bad take. The average real use is absolutely nowhere near these API limits. I beg you to count your post count tomorrow.
  
  It's reading, not posting. It wouldn't take long scrolling through your feed, tapping on a few tweets with lots of replies and looking through trending to hit several hundred

Great! Come to fediverse, no limits here ✌️

This is utterly insane. Twitter has basically become pay-to-use. I give it less than a day for him to walk this back.
- The site is holding on by a thread. I suspect their hands are tied.

The funny thing is I'm pretty sure replies, tweets, and retweets all count toward that (if they're using the same rules as the API), so basically that just kills the majority of your user base.

zomg. musk has finally found the cure for doomscrolling addiction!!!

https://soundcloud.com/ajjofficial/schadenfreude

LOL this is ridiculous. Great work Elon!

I quickly scrolled through my feed to see how fast I'd hit the limit. It took like a minute. Most of the posts hadn't even loaded before I scrolled past them. What a joke.

Maybe the rich will eat themselves…

He's rate limiting his own ad revenue. That's a new degree of self own.

I swear he's trying to kill it
- Rabbits

Well, Twitter is a mobile game now... Is there something to consider it a gacha?
- Maybe those blue checkmarks I keep hearing about

And people pay for this?

Another Elon has hit the Twitter

I haven't been using Twitter at all (except to promote my own content) but now I just frankly will not use it. It's become a hostile app that sounds unusable.
I've also stopped using Reddit and have considered a single user Lemmy instance to host a community (or communities depending) for my content.

I don't even use Twitter anymore, but after this, I went there just to delete my two accounts.

I won't be mad if he wants to kill his own social network.
- Honestly given how petty and childish he is, I wouldn't be shocked if that was the case this entire time.

Is this a joke? This can't be real, right?

I can't see Twitter making it out of this one!

The good thing is that it will reduce my twitter time to less than 30 minutes.

Is there a link to the tweet or did I miss it? I think you should link the tweet because screenshots are so easy to fake and (in other situations) to give credit
- Well, the tweets also need login to see nowadays, so here's an article for you: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-users-being-forced-sign-in-see-tweets-2023-7

Hoping this will be the thing that pushes my Twitter friends over to Mastodon. It's the only reason I still have my account (that and nostalgia anyway)

132 comments