David Bunce
Mike Masnick ✅This is hilariously stupid. I mean, just painfully stupid. And, yes, it's real.
SHODAN 
@mmasnick Twitter isn't going to last the year at this rate I bet.
nhan@nhan @mmasnick Ugh, I feel sorry for some people about to lose contacts but its a place that has long needed to be put out of its misery tbh. Twitter and a bigoted image board have long (Even before Musk) had uncomfortable similarities in culture and I saw a lot of hate proliferate there during my tenure.
D.Charlebois@Dcharlebois @nhan @mmasnick Welcome! I hope things pan out better for you than they did on Twitter.
GoodGodfrey
Aditya Induraj
JojoTheWolfBoy@Dcharlebois @SHODAN @nhan @mmasnick same here. Sad to see it implode so quickly, but it was bound to happen.
Ryan@RealRyanMcLeod @mmasnick I feel given the kind of person who he is, he'll force the loser to go on an Oceangate sub. Zero shits given.
BiohazardWhat do you think are the chances this is related to them having trouble paying their cloud services bills? That's the first thing that came to mind when I saw that was happening, the reports of how the cloud services contracts were among the ones Elon decided to stop paying once revenue shrunk.
@Biohazardous the story earlier this week was that Yaccarino got them paying their cloud bills, so I dunno.
If that was just this week, it might not be a coincidence. Maybe they had to negotiate something out for less bandwidth then they were getting before.
meehawl@mmasnick @Biohazardous Musk is notoriously cheap, and Twitter is broke, so likely it paid for some lowest tier for the new quarter. And then they broke the clients with their self-inflicted DDoS and blew through their entire low-budget third-quarter data cap within a day or so.
Sheldon Chang 🇺🇸 (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image Lest anyone doubt that Twitter was idiotic enough to release code that would cause a race condition and result in its own users executing a DDOS attack on it, here's the network console readout from Firefox showing all the network requests blasting away. Of course I immediately closed out my connection because I'm a good person. Oh, but it's the weekend and Evil Sheldon is in control so I kept the party going for a while since Twitter insisted on it. #TwitterDown #Twitter #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS
wanderingincode@Biohazardous @mmasnick My take is that people are gaming view counts for things like crypto scams. Was seeing a ton of those before the "shutdown"
Random Damage 🌻@Biohazardous @mmasnick a few days ago there was talk of Twitter denying anonymous access, which was promptly skated around by people using web scrapers on throwaway accounts
This has the smell of a poorly thought out reaction to that
pcbeardIrrelevant platform becomes more irrelevant. Nobody likes Twitter anymore. Remember when it was useful and stuff?
annie gray
Iron Curtain (Chiptunes)@mmasnick Mr. Masnick, I predict-in this order-that:
A. you will write a techdirt post on this, and
B. you will be whined at by Elon stanboys over how biased you are against him when you're just doing your job.
A. you will write a techdirt post on this, and
B. you will be whined at by Elon stanboys over how biased you are against him when you're just doing your job.
CarlG
Rod Hilton@mmasnick this would be insanely dumb even with astronomical limits set just to kill scrapers.
But 600/day for regular users? On a platform you're trying to sell ad impressions on?
I hit the limit in 11 minutes casually scrolling. You can't even read your own tweets and their replies without gas-pedaling into your rate limit with it so low.
A single viral or controversial tweet and you're done.
MostlyBlindGamer@rodhilton @mmasnick this may be the thing that gets me to open the Twitter app, just to see what happens.
Aaron Toponce ⚛️
@mmasnick APIs were created as a more efficient way of getting to data versus web scraping. So when he killed API access, of course devs turned back to web scraping to get the data.
No doubt that created additional load on the servers, so he thinks limiting access to the data via requiring an account to view tweets and rate limiting web resources is a good solution.
But now he's just limited ad exposure. Aren't ads a large driver to revenue? So, yeah, this is tremendously stupid.
emmatonkin@atoponce @mmasnick
I know right. All that whining about the expense of running the API, both from Twitter and Reddit, and I'm sitting there thinking: I'm old enough to remember when engineers built these things for exactly the reasons you describe.
It's like all the actual engineers have left these companies and the techbros running them now are people who've never benchmarked a service in their lives.
@caneroncu @mmasnick It's all about web scraping. Tweets are no longer public. They're behind a login, which means all embedded tweets in blog posts and such broke. This effectively cuts off scraping tools. Which means only logged in accounts can web scrape.
Soooo, he's rate limiting logged in accounts to also limit web scraping. The 6,000 vs 600 & 300 limits is just a perk to subscribe to Twitter Blue.
Further, requiring logged in accounts also means you can track who is scraping.
Bodie 🇺🇲🤝🇺🇦@atoponce @caneroncu @mmasnick
I don't buy any of this. I mean maybe that's the cover story but the site is clearly broken. It's just as unusable now as when I logged in this morning. Comments do not appear. You can no longer read threads beyond the first tweet. My timeline is 'frozen' so maybe that's where these numbers apply and my set amount was like preloaded for the day.
I don't buy any of this. I mean maybe that's the cover story but the site is clearly broken. It's just as unusable now as when I logged in this morning. Comments do not appear. You can no longer read threads beyond the first tweet. My timeline is 'frozen' so maybe that's where these numbers apply and my set amount was like preloaded for the day.
@atoponce @caneroncu @mmasnick Different users report different levels of brokenness, for example regardless of w/e limit (using a burner I set up very recently, unverified) I can search posts or others timelines and scroll away all day. Others cannot even if they have blue check.
@Bodie @caneroncu @mmasnick Oh, yeah. It's definitely broken. That's what Musk gets for firing his engineering and development teams. I suspect it'll be some time before the dust settles and it's stable.
BornachDon't worry. He's thought of that.
Viewing an ad doesn't count towards your limited quota
https://tenor.com/en-GB/view/smart-gif-20689814
Tenor
Coach Pāṇini ®
Stephen Drennan
magney
OutermostGhost@mmasnick Huh! Because I can't open Twitter to fact check this, one must assume it is true unless otherwise proven wrong ;D
🌙
Timothy Clark@mmasnick I'm sure the advertisers are THRILLED to have their audience rate-limited.
Chris Berez@mmasnick Elon just killed his baby and he’s too dumb to know it. By the time he realizes what a bad idea this is, the exodus will be irreversible and the few legitimate advertisers remaining will have cancelled their accounts.
J Neal@mmasnick It's like he's racing Spez to see who can kill their respective platform the fastest.
@infosec_jcp 🐈🃏 done differentlyThey have talked about... ~12 times so.. ♟️💥💨
Greg Pak@mmasnick I honestly thought it was probably parody. Had to check. Whew.
@mmasnick what’s even more hilarious is that there’s a large cohort of people who think Musk is a genius.
Carl KarcherWell, when you don’t pay Google cloud services…
Lurid Sorcerer@mmasnick Hit my limit while deleting old tweets, guess I'm done for the day.
smy20011@mmasnick Doesn't twitter make money for each view?
Kat@mmasnick 600 posts a day! So, less than 10 minutes' worth.
Robbie Coleman@mmasnick I'm reading more and more about this. Sounding like he failed to address a hosting contract that ended yesterday:
https://twitter.com/vogon/status/1675202475228565504
https://twitter.com/vogon/status/1675202475228565504
@erraggy i ain't clicking that and using up half my daily ration. Want to share the details?
@erraggy yeah, that's wrong. they had stopped playing gcloud, but yaccarino changed that this week and started paying up again.
@mmasnick hmmm, interesting. Thanks for correcting this.
There's got to be something more about the significance of today. Whatever the real reason, it's obvious he's unable to manage.
JP 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇬🇪
Shannon
Jaguar937@mmasnick sooner or later twitter will sink all the way to the ocean floor
MecCoffee@mmasnick I replied to your tweet and requested the invite you mentioned. Thanks, if you can accommodate.