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  • 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.

  • I find this more mildlyhumorous than infuriating. I'm looking forward to a new era where every news article no longer includes a string of embedded tweets. :) As a non-twitter user, this certainly doesn't encourage me to bother making an account.

  • Anyone still on Twitter at this point is getting what they asked for. It's like you drove past every "last restroom for X miles" sign, and now you're in the middle of nowhere and have to piss.

  • I bet the throtteling is not caused by data scraping but by Twitter not paying their Google Cloud bills and therefore now with the new month they got services suspended.

  • Maybe it was just me but Musk has never seemed like someone who actually understood tech. Just a rich guy who buys up other's work and talks a big game. I knew the second I heard he bought Twitter it was going to crash and burn. He's doing it way faster than I thought possible.

    Of course he will eventually say this was all on purposes and not that he is crap at business and tech.

  • I see that a lot of people complain about reddit, twitter, and whatever mainstream website completely fuck the consumer, but fail to realize one crucial thing. The only time change happens in mob settings is when the pain of no change is greater than the pain of change. I applaud Elon, spez, and who ever else wishes to put there services behind their paywall whether it’s an API or just simply viewing tweets. Anyone in the know knows that it’s a crock of shit and anyone who isn’t is annoyed to the point where change is preferable. The sooner people figure out posting information, entertainment, and other forms of media/knowledge to the benefit of a company is horrendous the better. Now we have the opportunity to get rid of the corporate greed and basically open-source peoples knowledge from around the globe. Although like with reddit, mob mentality poses a real threat to communities like this one, I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother (as corny as that sounds). I much prefer it over giving more information to companies who use it to profit off of my content, while I receive nothing.

    *Edit: Thank you kind stranger for the reddit gold! Glad you spent real hard cash so I can have reddit premium and reddit coins! The lovely people at reddit will be spending your money sitting on a yacht eating grapes in one hand and lobster in the other. I’m sure they are real thankful too! :) *

  • "Extreme levels of data scraping" my ass. This is probably meant to reduce server costs because Elon put a huge hole in this boat and now he does a very loud "look-what-you-made-me-do" scream. And what on earth would "system manipulation" exactly mean? Sounds like some pseudo-profound bullshit.

  • "To address extreme levels of failing to pay our bills & firing every competent person at Twitter, we've applied the following temporary limits:"

  • This truly is a genius level move. If users are using your site, they are contributing to your hosting costs. You don’t want that.

  • It must have taken all of Elon's willpower to not make the limits:

    • Verified accounts are limited to reading 6969 posts/day
    • Unverified accounts to 420 posts/day
    • New unverified accounts to 69/day

  • I gave up on Twitter when this turd took over but holy shit...

  • That has been his goal since he got forced to actually buy it rather than just boosting the stock so he could make a profit, which like most of his antics was really the only goal (publicity and money)

  • Almost certainly this isn't anything to do with scraping. Like with Reddit, those with a stake in Twitter stand to benefit from AI and, as far as I know, there's no mass reposting (retweeting?) effort to something like Mastodon.

    That would be trivial to block anyway, since it would be easy to identity the service accounts and source IP's of the requests. No need to impact average users.

    What's more likely is he hasn't paid the bill for his cloud infrastructure and no longer has the capacity to serve so many users.

    IMO, that's what you get when you fire half of your staff.

  • Twitter was great during the big earthquake we had in Japan, because phones weren't working. People sent out tweets for help and got help thanks to twitter.

    After this, a lot of municipalites made accounts and now they post emergency info on twitter, but this just fucks everything up.

  • It must be nice to be able to waste 44 billion dollars and not miss it.

    I could live comfortably for the rest of my life on 1/10,000th of what Elon spent.

  • Hopefully this leads to Twitter not being the public square of the internet anymore at least mainstream wise. The man is doing everything to make the site worse.

  • And twitter blue dumbasses eat it up. Legit one of them said “he created a problem, and now he’s created a solution”. No, he didn’t say that as a criticism. He was telling people to buy twitter blue.

797 comments