This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.
The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.
These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.
Oh my god, this is just too funny.“The DDOS is coming from INSIDE the HOUSE!”
My lord. And they can’t/won’t piece 1+1 together? Hanlon’s razor dictates they are indeed idiots.
My guess is that they are severely understaffed. Happens when the new boss is a noob in the industry and fires the people he needs…
In order to quickly fix it they would probably have to roll back the change to require login to view tweets, which would be admitting that it wasn’t caused by “attacks” on Twitter, which Elon won’t do. Rock and a hard place.
Elon was right, firing off many engineers didn’t cause any DDoS attack from outside- as DDoS attacks are now happening from within
The self-DDoS truly the height of idiocy. It’s been a good couple of weeks watching billionaires who have never faced consequences fuck around and find out.
I find it especially bizarre that spez took inspiration and guidance from Musk. I can entertain the possibility of Musk intentionally driving Twitter to the ground (though he sure is taking the scenic route), but Reddit? It just seems like the rich tech bros have collectively lost their minds
Is spez rich?
Yes. While he loves to talk about how little reddit makes, he doesn’t mention how much reddit pays him for that.
He’s rich not because of his salary (what Reddit pays him). He’s rich because of his equity/ownership in Reddit. But he can only monetize that if there are buyers.
For years this wasn’t a problem because private buyers and banks were happy to buy his shares or lend against them as collateral. However that market has been drying up over the past 18 months.
So he desperately needs to get to an IPO so he, and his Board of Directors and other stockholders, can dump their shares on an unsuspecting retail public market that doesn’t realize that the “profitability” was only achieved by destroying the user base, and that what they’ve actually bought is a ticking time bomb.
I really hope the IPO bombs just to spite all the people, including Spez, that drove Reddit into the ground.
The problem is that if the IPO bombs, it’s the public investors that will lose money, as fuck u/spez and other shareholders will have dumped their steaming pile of shit shares onto the market from the start to reduce their shareholding and cash in.
When people say that, they don’t mean they hope it bombs after the IPO…
They mean they hope It bombs before the sale so Huffman and the others with a stake don’t make much money
Anyone that buys the stock after the IPO would get a lower price.
It would be the Institucional investors that have the opportunity to buy before the share is open in the market. After that is fair game to anyone stupid enough to buy it.
It’s not just spez , there are going to be a LOT of folks in reddit willing to burn it to the ground to create valuation for an IPO. The next Mod blackout need to happen the night before and the day of the IPO.
Short Reddit on IPO. Give him a good farewell.
Nah I’m pretty sure he got some preferential liquidation a few times and is cash rich.
Thank you for making my point. That’s not salary. That’s equity sold in a secondary.
Already has more money than he should have.
Yes, and he would like to graduate into being obscenely rich through a successful IPO.
Compared to musk? No. Not even close tongue same tier. But he’s still a 1%er
They never had their minds. They just now have enough money to make that all of our problems… This is why no one deserves billions of dollars. It makes you go megalomaniacle.
They just don’t want LLMs scrapping their websites
Yo for real, what’s up with all these social media sites literally shooting themselves in the foot as we speak?.
Youtube planning to antagonize adblock users and limiting video watching, Reddit killing itself with
bureocracystyle and now Twitter doing this shit. Hopefully shit sites like TikTok or Facebook jump on the wagon too.For reddit at least, The money from VCs dried up. They have to monetise fast or go broke.
Elon way way way overplayed for Twitter and the company is hemorrhaging money paying the loans he took out to pay for the purchase.
Google in general is in decline. Ad sales are down as the net becomes SEO’d to death. Marketing teams just aren’t willing to pay for Google ads like they used to since the roi isn’t there anymore.
But there are so many ways Reddit could have played this better. It wasn’t just about monetizing. The API changes were in bad faith and meant to kill 3rd party apps without flat out doing it. Users would have been understanding if they charged a reasonable amount of started injecting ads into the API feeds, but instead they went full aggro and disrespected not just the devs working to make their platform better, but the users as well. If they wanted 3rd party apps to show their ads or charge a fee to remove ads I would have been understanding, but because of the disrespect I’ve dropped them.
I forgot the actual numbers, but it’s downright bizarre that Reddit can’t figure out how to make money. They have a massive platform that is user-moderated for free, filled with free user-created content, with third party developers creating solid apps and features, again for free. Reddit should be able to do fuck all and make money
That plus their own app being abysmal. The official Reddit app is a terrible experience without the necessary features of the old ones
In general, i agree with your post, but GOOG is up ~ 30% in the last 6 months. Specific parts of Google may be dwindling but their overall business is thriving right now.
The stock is not the company, that’s important to remember. The PE ratios for tech companies are totally out of whack compared to basically any other company.
Google stock is doing ok in part because they have Bard which means they’re participating in the AI boom. I think that’s going to turn out to be mostly hot air, but in the meantime it’s helping a small number of companies stay afloat
I really hope this the end of an era of milking the users for data and then selling that for ad money. Twitter and Facebook are switching to a subscription model, but I’m not so sure it’s actually going to reduce the amount of data they try to get from everyone.
Twitter successfully sold itself to a private investment firm for over market value. That’s the dream for tech startups and never-made-a-profit digital services.
Anyone still using Twitter is an addict or a boomer, but that’s exactly the audience that Musk wanted to purchase.
The only reason twitter was popular is because you could check it for information. Towns and organizations would post updates there, it drove traffic, eyeballs, ads and revenue. This is the dumbest thing ever, even if he wanted to promote nazi ideology, it’s idiotic because your only preaching to the choir. You cannot convert people when you drive them all away, so even if it wasn’t about money, it’s dumb.
The world is starting to wise up to the fact that online advertising is nearly 100% fraudulent so they aren’t buying online ads as much.
The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’
The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’
It goes deeper than that.
This all started with the API changes. Before they were charging a fair price for the API and companies happily paid it for the convenience. Then Elon got greedy he started charging a ridiculous amount for the API so those companies decided it would be worth it to just deal with the annoyance and switch to scraping the website instead. But when you hit the website it’s way less efficient than hitting the API because it’s doing a bunch of mixing and ranking which is a lot more complicated and costly than serving static content, which costs a small fraction of real time algorithmic ranking. So now instead of making money off companies that want their data they’re losing money on the cloud costs to serve the scrapers.
More recently, they haven’t been paying their hosting bills to Google and their service was set to expire at the end of last month. What just happened at the start of this month? They added the limitations. That can’t be a coincidence. Now the Google services weren’t hosting the site itself, otherwise they’d probably be fully down right now, but it was hosting their trust and safety services for things like fighting spam. That could have also been hosting anti scraper services as well. Since they’re so under staffed they probably couldn’t swap the services in time, so instead of having anti scraping services like every other big company on the internet, they decided to cut service instead. It’s just built up incompetence coming to a head.
Much like the case of Reddit, Musk might want to reflect on who actually produces all the content he’s guarding so jealously, and ask himself what’s likely to happen to the value of his site if he makes it difficult for millions of us to write all his content for free
I don’t think this is that complicated. The hypothesis Musk and Spez are pursuing is that right wingers are easier to monetize because they are stupid. They are basically purging the old, liberal web2.0 userbase, under the premise that they are going to build back something which is more friendly to the conservative social media space.
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.
Remember elon musk isn’t smart
We shouldn’t credit him for Tesla, spacex, etc because it’s the employees that actually put in the effort and contribute
Elon is just a Mr moneybags that thinks he smart because the things he funded have been good ideas when he actually never contributed anything to those ideas
I can’t wait until the companies he’s finding push him out completely
Honestly this is probably more close to reality than anyone wants to admit.
As a former individual who understands the underlying systems, it seems like they botched deployment of a new feature causing issues and cannot figure out how to solve them.
Most of Twitter is and has been in maintenance mode since acquisition (think of 10 man engineering team and 1 left to handle maintenance).
This is why it cracks me up every time when someone is praising Elon for “cutting slack” when firing all those twitter employees. Yes, twitter did not implode immediately. Turns out, people can build software that is stable enough to run in maintenance mode. But good luck dealing with new issues cropping up.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a former individual. What happened? Was it like a Frankenstein thing?
Former individual is just the politically correct way to say dead guy.
Actually, he pissed of Captain Janeway and was erased from the timeline.
Used to be a nice guy before he became a former individual.
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I’ve heard.
I’ve noticed that my batch image downloader works on maybe 40% of all twitter posts, and only 40% of the time (It used to work 100% of the time before Musk arrived). It’s fucking annoying. I think they’re having major API and CDN issues.
Maybe I’m dumb, but this is starting to seem like these Tech CEOs are dumber than we thought.
Why not just make 4000 accounts and have distributed scraping? What are they going to do next? “Unverified Twitter accounts can only be accessed 10 times?”
They’ve always been dumb. You don’t put smart people in CEO chairs, you put smart people to do the actual work and leave all the decision making to idiots. Hence the results.
That rate limit is insanely low, even for verified. I’m not verified, but I hit the limit in like 10 minutes of very distracted usage.
The hilarity is that these moves are the exact opposite of the so called Public Square he claims Twitter is or should be.
It’s just like how they forcibly remove you from public squares after you’ve passively listened to people for 15 minutes
The quintessential public square experience
Yeah, 600/800 sounds like a lot until you realize that includes all the stuff you’re just scrolling past in your feed or comments, not even clicking on. I wouldn’t be surprised if they even overlooked the fact that ads might count against that cap too. I’m no heavy user but hit that cap in less than 20 minutes of reading people reacting to the news.
Transcription for the blind: Screenshot of a Twitter post from Elon Musk, Twitter handle @elonmusk, that says:
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
1:01 PM Jul 1, 2023 3.6M Views
-Transcription from a human volunteer. Let me know how I can do better.
Thank you for the transcription, human volunteer :)
The sequence of events from Elon Musk acquiring Twitter to now is an incredible journey.
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Elon Musk bought a social media company for tens of billions, attempted to back out of the deal but couldn’t because of his ineptitude by signing away the ability to reneg on the deal.[1](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/technology/twitter-musk-lawsuit-reasons.html)
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Then there was the freedom of speech advocacy from Musk where he ultimately unbanned racists and then he began sharing bigoted Tweets. But it’s only freedom of speech for his bigoted supporters, when authoritarian governments ask Musk to censor people/tweets he abides by their requests.[2](https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/twitter-has-complied-with-almost-every-government-request-for-censorship-since-musk-took-over-report-finds/)
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The site becomes inundated with the alt right rife with bigotry.[3](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-2024-twitter/674149/)
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The whole verified blue check mark debacle where verification became something you could pay for, with people making fake “official” accounts. For example a fake account impersonating a pharmaceutical company caused their stock to drop abruptly following a joke tweet.[4](https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/11/12/fake-eli-lilly-twitter-account-claims-insulin-is-free-stock-falls-43/)
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Twitter engages in mass layoffs and multiple things break on the site. There are also reports that they can’t pay rent in certain locations. Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisors, as they record a 59% reduction in advertising revenue.[5](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sales-musk.html)
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Elon Musk posts tweets seemingly apologizing for some of the changes and says he will follow the will of the people by posting polls for users to vote on policy changes. Musk asks if he should step down, to which the majority vote in favour of his removal. He then goes on a tirade about bots after losing in the poll. He goes on to say that only paid subscribers will be permited to vote in future polls. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.[6](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/20/elon-musk-breaks-silence-after-10-million-twitter-users-vote-for-him-to-step-down)
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The crème de la crème is Elon Musk implementing a new restriction where you have to be logged in to see tweets. Inadvertently DDOSing his own site.
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New York Times - Why Elon Musk Can’t Back Out of Buying Twitter, According to Twitter
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Forbes - Fake Eli Lilly Twitter Account Claims Insulin Is Free, Stock Falls 4.37%
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New York Times - Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue
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The Guardian - Elon Musk breaks silence after 10 million Twitter users vote for him to step down
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limiting engagement an app that RELIES ON ENGAGEMENT??? IT CAN’T POSSIBLY GET DUMBER THAN THIS???
“Starting immediately, all McDonald’s will restrict the number of fries we sell to 1.5 packages per customer.”
More like the ketchup packets.
That man has got to legitimately be one of the stupidest motherfuckers to ever luck his ass into a pile of money.
The Future
Twitter and Reddit both dying at the same time was not what I expected in 2023
who had two social media companies dying on their bingo board?
They have never properly turned a profit - and relied solely on VC money. It was kind of “obvious” from the beginning - this house of cards of completely free services is increasingly unstable.
My pet theory… Though I don’t believe it.
Musk and u/spez are playing 4-dimensional chess. The end goal is to increase freedom and user choice. By slowly destroying their respective platforms, people are driven to the fediverse, the idea of centralised platforms is tainted, power is shifted back to the user and long term everyone is better off.
It is a nice thought experiment…
This but I don’t think they are on the side of the people. For both of them it could be personal or part of some secret deal, though if it’s the latter at all, it’s probably both. Both got a lot of disrespect through those platforms, and the freedom of movement of information on both platforms were making things more difficult for entities that were previously dominating the information game.
I just wonder what their next play is if I’m right. I suspect Reddit will walk back their changes to try to kill off these decentralized mass social media sites to bring the discussion back to the centralized ones where they can at least influence the discussions with admin access to the platform.
Why are so many people suddenly against Twatter burning? I thought we all wanted that?
Oh I’m all for it. Let it crash and burn. Any time a billionaire gets embarrassed is okay with me, because it’s the only thing that will hurt them.
Embarrassment and submarine implosions
Things like Reddit and Twitter are bad for billionaires. It makes it harder for them to exploit you when there is a public place to talk about their bullshit.
Elon is so damn transparent. I NEVER remembering anything like this happening before Elon. Dude is running this like a moronic mob boss.
“Hey…it’d be a shame if you could only view 600 tweets. I have this Twitter Blue that might be able to help…”
The mob boss who wants $8/mo for a lame service but won’t harm you if you don’t want it?
