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.
That's what I've been saying. Seems like they just can't afford as much bandwidth anymore. They weren't paying their hosting contracts, and their revenue stream shrunk a lot, so they probably just had to negotiate on those overdue contracts and negotiated out less bandwidth.
@Biohazardous @maxkennerly it’s not a question of bandwidth, it’s a question of “a tweet costs this much compute”
Much of Twitter was on their own hardware, and they shut down one of their data centers a while back. so there’s just less system capacity overall to handle the cascading failures
and tuning those systems such that they don’t fall over is no longer possible with their poor understanding of the systems they inherited from the people that management drove out (including many trans/queer SREs!)
(note: not one of said *ex-twitter* SREs; this is based on my understanding of conversations with ex-tw SREs, plus personal experience with how complex distributed systems fail)
If only one of the world's wealthiest billionaires would buy them.
Oh, wait.
@wxChris13 @maxkennerly he intends to crash it. Nothing else makes sense. Though there is this too And…we may know why…enough to be dangerous. They are under a massive denial of service attack…launched from twitter. It’s rather funny 👇🤡🤣😆😂👀
Look at this Ben https://sfba.social/users/sysop408/statuses/110639755659702772
Attached: 1 image @[email protected] ok, here's an even funnier version of the Twitter self-DDOS. This is a video of my video of Twitter self-DDOSing itself played from a Tweet while the bug is still active and the page itself continues to flood Twitter with requests. Now notice the trending topics in the sidebar: #TwitterDown, WTF Twitter, Rate Limit Exceeded, Damn Twitter This might be the most perfect screen video ever recorded. 😆 #selfDDOS
@wxChris13
@adrienne @Nadinabbott @maxkennerly
It doesn't have to "be" anything, really.
Musk is a "Ready, FIRE!, aim?" kind of boss, so he just reacts.
He is pissed that people are using Twitter to train chat bots. He wants that to stop.
That might be all it took.
A temper tantrum.
@wxChris13 @Nadinabbott @maxkennerly somehow i missed this mention. my assumption has been, and continues to be, that someone just broke something real bad by deploying to prod on a Friday afternoon, and the "600 tweets per day" numbers were made up retroactively to make it seem deliberate.
(It's definitely not a consistent 600, and it's been fluctuating a lot over the last few days.)
@Nadinabbott @wxChris13 @maxkennerly
I'd agree, but there is one other, sensible explanation.
Musk is so detached from reality, so isolated from anytime but sycophants, and so egotistical that he actually believes he's saving Twitter, preserving free speech, and about to start making money.
In short, he's not that bright, so things don't have to actually make sense.
He's not playing 4D chess.
He just thinks he is.
@maxkennerly Also while there was reporting that twitter came to a deal with google and Linda ordered the back payment to be made, there was no indication the payment actually happened. And the date of shut off was 6t/30...
so
I think its much more likely GCP cut them off and its playing havoc with the backend.
No this is just a ploy to get people to pay for the blue check.
@maxkennerly I genuinely do not understand what’s going on behind the scenes. They fire 80% of the staff, remove the “unnecessary microservices”, charge $8 to all the checkmark losers, he’s constantly saying how engagement is “higher than ever”, and yet they’re still somehow losing so much money that they have to do this?
So either he’s telling the truth about scraping & is just an idiot, or you’re right & the company is somehow crumbling despite everything…
Greatest businessman of our time.
It's not either or.
Mastodon was slow today.
People are trying to train AIs with content scraped from social media.
That doesn't mean he didn't just use that as an excuse.
@TheActualBrian
You’re right, it could be both. But I don’t think you can really compare mastodon and one of the biggest tech companies in the world - Twitter should have both the server capacity & engineering (eg sane ratelimits) that scraping makes virtually zero impact.
I suspect it did at one point, but he fired the people responsible for maintaining it, so now we’re stuck with this
It's likely many things.
Mastodon might not have the capacity, but it also doesn't have the users or content, so scraping would be faster and impact less.
Musk has not only been crippling Twitter, he's also been throwing monkey wrenches into the code using primarily the people who are forced to stay or be deported who are blue working in a building where they don't clean the bathrooms.
What could possibly go wrong, right?
😁
"... loss of system capacity." As in Google Cloud cutting you off for non-payment of your cloud bill.
Elon, Elon, you gas lighter, you.
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