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Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
561 points by 3cats-in-a-coat on July 1, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 716 comments
Elon Musk:

"To address extreme level 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"

Source: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz94eReWYAEhkHS?format=png&name=900x900

Source (backup): https://i.imgur.com/WvwtHez.png




See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552231


Comments moved thither. Thanks!

Edit: actually, since that source doesn't appear to have a paywall workaround at the moment, I'm going to merge the thread back hither.


https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=16751879694...

You're welcome.

Would be even better if HN would automatically rewrite Twitter links to use the current workaround. Especially if the point is to foster discussion here around a single comment, no need to load the whole application.


Yes, I for one will not be signing in to Twitter to view a tweet posted on HN, I will just move on.


As long as it doesn’t subsequently have to move yon.


All moderation is better when accompanied by descriptions of going hither and thither.


All? Even important service announcements or serious notifications?

edit: why the downvotes? I'm simply trying to engage in curious discussion. Apologies, I'm neurodivergent and I can't often discern between humor or not.


> edit: why the downvotes? I'm simply trying to engage in curious discussion. Apologies, I'm neurodivergent and I can't often discern between humor or not.

I appreciate your willingness to ask questions, and your candor about neurodivergence. I wish it were easier to tell the difference on the internet between someone who's trolling and someone who just doesn't get the day's in-joke, and, unfortunately, since trolls are really good at seizing on the benefit of the doubt, it's often expedient to err on the side of harshness.

I was making a whimsical remark—not especially a joke, since there was no intended punchline. The words 'hither' and 'thither' used to be more common, but nowadays have more of an archaic flavor, so I found it funny to see them here. (I had not been aware of the context provided by SushiHippie (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36555921), so it was only an in-joke by lucky happenstance.)


Thank you, I appreciate it.


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33768503

It is just that dang likes these words and uses them always when he moves comments from one post to another.

See: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...


Needs some yon.


It’s notable that it’s Elon, not Yaccarino, making this announcement (and likely decision).


I always assumed Yaccarino was merely a figurehead installed in an effort to make Twitter more palatable to advertisers. Elon never stopped making policy pronouncements from his personal account despite nominally giving up the CEO title.


I'm not really sure what she thought was going to happen. There is no way that Musk was going to stop making decisions, especially about content moderation, which is really the main concern of advertisers. If he wants it to be his kind of speech over the concerns of advertisers, that's what it's going to be, and she has no path to success.

I've heard Elon really seems like he's listening and that he's actually going to take advice. Yoel Roth actually believed that Elon was going to implement his trust and safety recommendations. Then he would go and tweet what he was actually going to do as soon as he was out of the meeting. At this point it's pretty well documented.


> not really sure what she thought was going to happen

Fat severance package, a post-termination book deal and international name recognition?


Probably. She's 60, I'm sure she could keep working if she wanted to, but maybe getting involved in the wildest ride in tech is a good story from which to launch your retirement career of being a media personality yourself. I'm sure she'd be perfect on Bill Maher or something. I could see it being a good compensation package too. Several millions more in the bank to salute the captain on a sinking ship, then sneak off to a lifeboat.

And name recognition too. This is the first I had ever heard of her. So, good move there.


He’s got a conspicuous habit of not paying people severance even when legally obligated to.


Yeah but her lawyers know that and he'll have to pay the severance eventually. She probably has money to wait out whatever legal delay tactics Twitter counsel would employ.


Maybe she gets a horse.


No, every girl wants a pony, not a horse.


This is presumably a reference to Musk offering to buy a SpaceX employee a horse in exchange for sexual favors.


This is libel, a vile calumny, and I won't hear it! How dare you!

It was a flight attendant he offered a horse to.


A flight attendant who was supposed to give him a massage as part of her duties. Because who doesn't expect their flight crew to be masseuses?

You must be crazy to work for Musk.


everyone gets 40 Billion and a Fool.


everyone gets 40 Billion and a *Foal.


-deleted


You need to Google Elon musk and horse


I learned back in the 90s you don't google horse videos without safe search on, so no, I won't be taking your suggestion ;-)


https://elon.horse has the details (I swear this is legitimate)


I took a wild gamble on this and it indeed has the details. Fairly NSFW too.


Not working. God bless archive

https://archive.ph/KwVqi


That's a surprisingly nice use for this crazy TLD.


I really liked walmart.horse too. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/19/jeph-jacq...


I'd do it for those reasons too. How much fun to watch the implosion from inside!


To some extent she is also probably there to play the same "say yes to Elon about some dumb idea and then get the team to implement a somewhat less dumb version and convince him it was his idea all along" game with him that Tesla and SpaceX leadership reportedly does.


I’ve always wondered what it’s like to work for a CEO where you simultaneously 1. can’t say no to him, and 2. can’t implement their hairbrained ideas without killing your product and then being blamed for it.

I heard a rumor (who knows if it’s true) that in the early-ish days of Amazon, they had an entirely separate backend and frontend just for Bezos that would only display if his account was logged in. So when he asked for something crazy they could just implement it in the Bezos-Amazon and not fuck up the main product.


Not sure how early we are talking with Amazon but I was there in '99 and that was not the case then, nor did I ever hear of such a thing. Not that I have lots of positive things to say about Bezos but he knew what the site was doing and would never have been so easily fooled.


Honestly this is how many of the cultures higher up on the authoritarian scale operate. You say yes to your higher-up no matter what they ask, then depending on whether or not it's actually a good idea you may or may not do it.


Regarding 1st sentence, leave. Or, if you really want to keep working there, you collect what you can for a while, then leave before the product tanks and your name could be associated with it. Musk has his own reality distortion field (tm) protecting him from any PR backlash, his employees don't.


> I’ve always wondered what it’s like to work for a CEO where you simultaneously 1. can’t say no to him, and 2. can’t implement their hairbrained ideas without killing your product and then being blamed for it.

When I try to imagine this, what I do is think about US or British politics after 2015 or so. And then I feel enraged. And I conclude that this is what it would be like, only closer, more immediate, and more sickness-inducing.

Musk, Trump, Boris Johnson: ever-present, narcissistic sociopaths who inject themselves into everything and ruin lives, up close and further afield.

I have no idea whether the Bezos story is true, but the sound engineers working for the Beach Boys apparently really did eventually set up a mixing desk for Murry Wilson (the Wilsons' overbearing, abusive father and interfering manager) so he could make his idiotic changes whenever he wanted, but that only affected what he heard:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/featu...


Her job is to handle the humans.

Most people cannot take radical ideas and don't understand that Elon Musk does not need to care and foes not care if he fails with Twitter after first trying to construct something with a social impact.

Elon Musk can fuck up every company he has and (as long as he doesn't get sued by angry investors) he will still be able to live a great, amazing life.

Edit: I get down votes but no replies. If you disagree, it would be beneficial to write why.


> Most people cannot take radical ideas...If you disagree, it would be beneficial to write why.

It might help the credibility of the free speech absolutionist if said absolutionist didn't assist a certain Turkish dictator shut down free speech, didn't mute journalists covering his actions against elonmuskjet, didn't censor the blocktheblue campaign, didn't try to erase the existence of substack from twitter, didn't help the Indian gov censor tweets that Gov didn't like ... off the top of my head.

An individual using their position of power to silence unliked speech - and help authoritarians do the same ... it just isn't very radical.


Elon Musk does not have "radical ideas"

He has moronic ones. The only reason any of his companies have done well is because they have people that can manage HIM well enough to do well in spite of his idiotic moronic stupid ideas.


You have to wonder how much that is true for Tesla and SpaceX too, and how much is damage control PR.


Yaccarino was placed there simply so that when twitter does eventually go belly up Musk can go "it's her fault, I wasn't the CEO". I'm unsure why anyone thought/thinks she has any other purpose?


There is a term for it - a "glass cliff". You hire a woman to take the fall for you.


Yes, but if he wakes up at three in the morning to go the bathroom who will make major decisions?


Elon was making tweeting-while-crapping toilet jokes the same late night that he (quite foolishly) tried to drag Halli Thorleifsson. I wonder how many important twitter decisions have been impacted by Elon being affected by Ozempic side effects


The poor wretch who’s on call


Yaccarino doesn't seem to be making the wide-sweeping announcements that Elon does.

Given that this outage and rate limiting may legit make Twitter's business infeasible, I change my prediction that Yaccarino will leave Twitter from within 3 months to within 3 weeks.


I’d bet good money on you being wrong. Want to do $1k? We can use a trusted middleman and perform deposits or whatnot.


Hi, I am a trusted middleman and can facilitate your transaction


I am a small family of racoons in a trenchcoat and can facilitate your transaction.


Pompoko is leaking


These people tend to hold on until right before their reputation is totally unsalvageable so they can relaunch their personal brand with a hero narrative.


That's what happened Esther Crawford, now she tweets about her hopes to productize 'moments of calm and psychological intimacy', whatever that means. Can't load the tweet rn because rate limited (lol) but the replies were divided between people shilling their product and other people suggesting that fireplaces and loveseats already meet this need.


She’s gonna sell molly?


It sounds like they are facing a novel denial of service attack that was near to the point of being able to imperil their service. This is an obviously temporary remediation to keep the systems up, not a new policy for the site. And all of that falls right under the purview of the CTO.


A more plausible explanation would be that they no longer have the engineering capability to maintain the site, or its prior attack resistance.

If there is any sort of novel scraping going on, and their only response is to shut down the site for all the accounts, their engineering capabilities have been pretty much zeroed out, and it's a massive indictment of the leadership decisions.

Plus, at this point believing anything that Musk says is extremely foolish. If this was something that was meant to believed, it would have been posted by somebody with more credibility in the organization who actually has something to lose by lying. That person is literally anyone except for Musk.


There is a mastodon link in this thread that shows whatsythe likely cause


The GCP contract expired yesterday


Maybe.

It's really hard for me to believe that a uniform 600 tweets read per _day_ limit for almost _all_ accounts is the best tool they have to mitigate a scraping attack. They likely have great insight into the risk profiles of each account based on age, size, past engagement. This is an incredibly coarse banhammer -- very close to just turning off the servers, IMO. Reasonable if it lasted for an hour, debatable if it lasts for a day, idiotic if it lasts longer.

Would love to see the inside story, hopefully it gets leaked/reported at some point.


pg already pointed out to him that there has to be a better way to handle it. I agree.


absolutely insane. indictment on the engineers for lack of creativity. Twitter has been completely inaccessible on my android app all day. I unknowingly used up my rate limit in my bed this morning. There has to be some other motive- possibly related to France protests. Macron announced that social media was to blame


Musk rate-limiting reading (and not posting) on Twitter worldwide because of localised protests in a single country? You must be joking; this makes no sense at all.


They are, but it's self-inflicted: https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639474671754723

> 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.


That's great, so just leaving a tab open in the background to Twitter will help bring down Twitter. Let me for the first time ever, voluntarily go to Twitter's website

Edit: looks like they fixed that issue with a login screen and no 10 requests per second issue. rats


No it was "management by stochastic gradient descent" as per Elon's usual modus operandi.


Entities cutting service because they are not getting paid is technically denial of service I guess...


This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.

The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.

In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.

The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.

Unbelievable. It's amateur hour.

#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS

A mostly still movie of a Twitter feed showing a rate limited error message and a jiggling scrollbar indicating repeated attempts to load a resource.

Firefox network console showing 10 requests to twitter.com zooming by per second. https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057


You'd think they would at least throw in an exponential backoff. Here, I'll help.

    to = 2;
    while (!request(timeout=to)) {
        to *= 2;
    }
I'm available for a 6-week contract. $1M plus a ride in a Dragon capsule, cash up front.


We'll give you $2M and a free OceanGate tour of the Titanic; $2M paid after the tour.


That's better than my current life insurance policy.


As far as you'll ever know, it is.


If the request immediately returns an error then this would just call it in a loop with no delay


My guess is that the frontend person responsible got fired


You mean to tell me that you can't actually run a tech company with three engineers and a Mac Mini?


I mean, hat tip to the pie-acquisition engineers, Twitter has done better than I thought it would without maintenance.


I'm not terribly surprised. General rule of thumb is you devote 20% of your resources to KTLO. If you fire 50% of your staff, you can still keep the lights on, just the portion of new development fell from 80% of your capacity to 60%.

Now obviously firing entire teams changes that metric some. Probably why there's been some high profile outages like MFA. But most companies can sacrifice large portions of their workforce if they only want to maintain the status quo.


I think Twitter was definitely overstaffed. You don't need that much manpower to run a tech company, at least on the technical side.

The problem is that Twitter organized itself as an overstaffed company, with complex structures, complex code, lots of R&D, etc... Than Elon Musk came in and did a Thanos snap and immediately fired half of the workforce, and I guess quite a few others left, especially among the best who would have an easy way finding a good job elsewhere. But while the workforce was drastically reduced, the complexity of the system wasn't reduced and probably never will. So, you get what happens now.

It is possible to run a Twitter-like website with much less resources than Twitter had before Elon Musk bought it, but you can't run Twitter as it is now.


Only Twitter was an advertising company. And for that to run smooth, you apparently need a lot of staff.

From people that ensure your Kelloggs ads don't appear below literal neonazi movies, to people that close deals on large advertising campaigns, to people that ensure the place where those ads appear (Twitter, the product) actually keeps running.


Have you checked how many engineers Mastodon has?

https://joinmastodon.org/de/about

Four.


Doesn’t take too many people to build a website like twitter. It’s not really hard and there are tons of mvc frameworks in pretty much any major language.

Only one good programmer could probably create a clone.

Of course the scale matters, but it’s not like you’d be writing an OS.


Just for my own interest, based on the latest data I could find and making ChatGPT's code interpreter doing the remedial math (https://chat.openai.com/share/3745dbcd-5be5-4af9-ae34-36845b...)

The Monthly Active Users (MAUs) per engineer for Twitter is approximately 600,000, while for Mastodon it's around 280,000.


But if you count salaries in the amount of efficiency and uptime per employee per user per dollar spent is astronomically higher in favor of Mastodon


Managing servers/infrastructure also? AFAIK Twitter has a couple of data centers.


They are not involved in running your instance


Sounds like a really interesting challenge, would be fun to see how far you can get.


Without specifying scale, this seems pretty easy. Pieter Levels has been able to manage a tech company with just a single engineer and with some optimization he could probably fit it all onto a mac mini without too much trouble.


one would be ideal... until they leave...


> Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

Hey, just as an FYI, this comment doesn't make any sense.

Why would blocking people from viewing the TL on the home page cause Twitter more stress?


I think the GP is saying Twitter's client-side scripting doesn't understand permanent failures. It thinks all failures are transient, so it keeps retrying, hoping to get through. That creates more traffic than if Twitter just let the user read the site.


> Why would blocking people from viewing the TL on the home page cause Twitter more stress?

If you block stuff somewhere in the microservie hell in the backend, but forget to update the frontend code properly, and everything was built with the assumption that authentication and authorization is not a thing, and suddenly it is, there's bound to be craploads of stuff that can start spamming network requests.


I don’t think ‘built with the assumption that authentication and authorisation is not a thing’ is the best description. Requests from logged in users would already need to be authenticated to see private accounts they follow. It’s more just the client having aggressive retry logic in the case of whatever rate limit responses they’re getting.


> Hey, just as an FYI, this comment doesn't make any sense.

You need to understand that there is a huge gulf between "this doesn't make any sense" and "I don't understand this".


I don't know what all is involved on the backend, but when I go to twitter.com it runs 123 requests and transfers 11MB of data in order to serve me a login page.


Browser:can I get the tweet?

Server: No

Browser:can I get the tweet now?

Server: No

Browser:can I get the tweet now?

Server: No

Browser:can I get the tweet now?

Server: No

Browser:can I get the tweet now?

Server: No

Browser:can I get the tweet now?

Server: No

Browser:can I get the tweet now?

Server: No

Browser:can I get the tweet now?

Server: No

Browser:can I get the tweet now?

Server: No

You know what I mean?


10 If User has reached end of scroll region, load more content

20 Wait $timeout for new content; if a load failed, it was probably a mobile network glitch or something else we should ignore

30 GOTO 10


I think he was trying to say that the Frontend of the Twitter timeline is not aware of the new request limit, and when that limit is reached it just retries the request, as it would in a normal network error, and keeps in retrying resulting on DDOS.

But I don't believe on that because Twitter is a billion dollar company and that kind of mistake is dumb. So idk.


> But I don't believe on that because Twitter is a billion dollar company and that kind of mistake is dumb.

This sort of mistake is very common especially when a product is going through a period of change, so it seems very believable to me that recent rate limiting features (or older features that have not been used in a long time or maybe ever) on the backend hadn't been adequately tested to make sure there are no unforeseen side-effects on the front-end when they are activated under pressure.


Very common for start ups with inexperienced devs, not for long standing tech companies with the best and most experienced employees...

Isn't Elon supposed to know this shit himself?

I guess we learned alot about the state of the company as well as elons own coding skills with this event, didn't we?


Even in “long standing tech companies with the best and most experienced employees” this sort of issue has been known to fall through the cracks. Twitter has experienced significant staffing changes, procedure changes, and code changes, recently and any one of those three things can exacerbate the chances of side-effects of changes not being realised until too late.


When you buy a company and your staff has had near complete turnover and your product significantly changes (at least in consumers eyes), are you actually the same company?

I'd say that shortly after Elon bought it twitter effectively became a start-up rather than an established company.

Arguing otherwise is like saying Xerox Park would have been the exact same institution even if all the staff were swapped with interns and management fundamentally change mission statements etc.....

Kind of absurd when framed that way, huh?


You severely overestimate musk’s software engineering prowess


The people who had the knowledge to realize this was a dumb mistake were probably fired by Musk.


Then you didn't look at how any of the Atlassian products are built. Most of them are multiple implementations of the same Frontend-Franework on the same page because independent teams work on stuff. Then you have hundreds of request "just to load some issue list".

Probably twitter can even do worse.


I wouldn't have believed it but we're seeing it happen in real time haha. How twitter has fallen from the glory days


If it doesn't make any sense, what's your analysis? At least they tried to come up with some technical explanation and incite my curiosity, rather than dismiss it outright.


It could be retry logic that gets stuck in certain conditions that have been met by how TL blocking is handled.


Broken retry logic due to an unexpected situation.


Reminder that Elon didn't even intend to buy Twitter

He wanted to sell ~$2.5 Billion Tesla stock at all-time highs without causing the stock price to significantly deflate, so he used the Twitter purchase suggestion as a cover. He did similar pump and dump schemes with crypto - like Dogecoin - but because Elon is fundamentally a dumb guy, he did the extraordinarily stupid thing of signing a purchase agreement with Twitter

Elon thought he'd be able to wiggle out of it because he assumed the SEC would be the regulatory body he'd be up against - and to his credit he has made a career out of making the SEC look like spineless chumps - but much to Elon's horror he actually found himself before the almighty Delaware Court of Chancery

So in an effort to slyly make a couple Billion $'s, Elon torched ~$40 Billion of his personal wealth, in what is arguably the biggest bag fumbling in modern history


This is some pretty dumb mental gymnastics to retcon a motivation. The simple explanation: he made an offer for Twitter, then the market (and Twitter’s value) crashed, and he tried to avoid paying the now-vastly overpriced fee he was on the hook for.


His offer was always well above fair value, which is why Twitter's board took him to court to enforce it.


His offer was $54.20 in April 2022. That was a 38% premium to the market price immediately prior to his investment, which is attractive but not necessarily "always well above fair value"

Twitter had traded above that price as recently as five months earlier, and had traded in the $60s and even $70s for most of 2021. Twitter's stock had cratered in early 2022 along with many other tech stocks (Facebook went from $330 to $220 in that period).

At the time, the Board could have argued that the current stock price was artificially low due to market forces, and that it wasn't an accurate reflection of the company's prospects. That's especially true because Boards have access to non-public information and longer term forecasts.

When the board agreed to the merger, it signaled to investors that sophisticated insiders on the Board and their financial advisors did not believe the stock would be reasonably likely to reach the offer price in the near/medium term, on a risk adjusted basis, and thus the acquisition is superior. That's important intel for investors, and one of the reasons why failed mergers are so risky.


In what world is a 38% premium not well above market value? If you pay $1.38m for a $1m house, you are definitely paying well above market value.


Market value and fair value aren't necessarily the same thing.

The 38% is just the one day premium. The offer was at a discount to the stock price less than six months earlier. It was possible that the stock price had overreacted to a tech sell off, and if the market had rebounded by the summer the bid could have looked genius.

Market pricing in M&A is somewhat opaque and different than trading prices because it's based partly on synergy value to a bidder. To use your house example, if the house next door was willing to pay $1.5 million for your house, then the $1.38M is not above market even if Zillow and the list price say it's $1 million.

There were other potential suitors for Twitter, like Microsoft, Disney, Salesforce and private equity. They might have valued it more than Musk based on the benefits it brought their firms. Twitter would be a lot more valuable inside Amazon, Google or Meta but there were probably antitrust issues there.

Plus Twitter's board and management team had access to a lot of material non public information that investors did not. Even if you thought the market price in early April accurately reflected all the public info on Twitter, the Board was looking at 5 year projections and much more detailed pricing/demand/customer info.

The Delaware Courts give a lot of deference to board judgment in these situations, and Twitter's board would have been well within their rights to say "no, that 38% is not good enough" if that was their conclusion after a good faith and reasonable process.


Does doing mental gymnastics like this strengthen your brain?


20% - 50% is the typical premium paid to take a public company private.


No, but it's my day job.


Where did you hear Disney wanted to buy twitter?


Twitter’s board exited. Post-ZIRP they knew fair value wasn’t higher than the offer so they took the money.


Twitter trades at $53.79 now.


Twitter does not trade right now.


Oh crap, you're right, I'm off the loop.

So he just made it private?


It's private now, yes. Owned by Musk, Saudi Arabian investors, Jack Dorsey is in with 1 billion (which is now more like 1/3 of a billion) Elon loaned 13 billion of high interest loan from banks, in a leveraged buyout, which means now Twitter owns that debt of 13 billion and paying interest on it of 1 billion a year.

It's a rather dramatic situation.


Hanlon's razor is reserved for people without a long history of malice.


This timeline is ahistorical.


Wrong


My impression was that he bought Twitter for the reasons you say, but failed to predict the dip in the market that followed it.

If Twitter stock hadn't sunken immediately like a stone, he probably would have pulled it off, too, even after the signing the agreement.

If indeed the Twitter deal was manipulation to leave poorer investors holding the Tesla bag, it's hard to feel sorry for him.


It seems like loading Twitter up with debt servicing was always a bad idea, stock dip or not, considering what its revenues were like. It wasn't in great shape before but the amount of money it now has to spend servicing debt is a nightmare for anyone trying to make that company profitable. His strategy for buying it simply doesn't make sense.


Not if the endgoal is to arrive at a profitable version of Twitter, no.

So maybe that's not the goal. Or maybe it is but the CEO is vastly more incompetent than those underwriting his bid anticipated.


I think the influence is more important than revenue


Was reading another thread about LLMs on HN yesterday (yeah, can't find which one, there's always soooo many) about how Elon was 'tricked' into funding the charity OpenAI before it pivoted into for-profit and he got no equity. And now this timely reminder that Elon was 'tricked' into buying Twitter too! Quite a record, and yet he is somehow still the world's richest person? I do enjoy him talking about rockets, though.


What are your counterexamples from ancient history?


How about the time that Scotland got envious of all the other European powers doing colonialism in the New World, so they dumped all their wealth into setting up a colony in the Darien gap, which failed so horribly that it bankrupted the country and forced them to unite with England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme


There's the guy who gave away so much gold he broke half of Africa's economy for a bit; the motivation might be different, but I think it counts if the category is "got money badly wrong".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa


from wikipedia:

> According to some Arabic writers, Musa's gift-giving caused a depreciation in the value of gold in Egypt. Al-Umari said that before Musa's arrival, a mithqal of gold was worth 25 silver dirhams, but that it dropped to less than 22 dirhams afterward and did not go above that number for at least twelve years.[95] Though this has been described as having "wrecked" Egypt's economy,[83] the historian Warren Schultz has argued that this was well within normal fluctuations in the value of gold in Mamluk Egypt.[96]

Seems like this might a misleading folk tale.


And the incredible part is that it just won’t matter. Tesla and spacex are licensed to print money for the next decade or more.

Him losing 40 billion is like us losing 400. It just won’t matter in the grand scheme


Most of the money was loaned, and the debt is now Twitters and not his.


Elon rolled Twitter into X Corp, which would mean the debt is entangled with his other assets and may make things messy in the inevitable lender lawsuits.


That means he can spin off all of X’s debt together with Twitter whenever he wants.


Haven’t read anything so off the mark in quite a while.

Your basic assumption already makes no sense. Please list the businesses Elon has started after his PayPal days with the goal of enriching himself.

Also, money is a means to an end, is it not? So what do you think he’d do with more money? Again, you can look at what he did with his Zip2 money. And then his PayPal money. That might give you a clue.


Right it’s not about revenue, only power


One might think that, sure. But I’ve seen this story that led to the Twitter takeover unfold since 2015. And I don’t think you’re right in this case.


[flagged]


https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/16/taxes-arent-the-only-reason-...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/elon-musk-sued-2...

https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-258-billion-dogecoin-law...

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/timeline-elon-musks-tumultuo...

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/13/1111239959/twitter-elon-musk-...

---

https://chat.openai.com/share/aaef7d7c-1537-48b7-bc49-81cecf...


Care to be more specific about the inaccurate parts and/or provide counterpoints (preferably with appropriate counter-evidence)?


Why? He’s not the one making claims. Do you have any idea how this works?


On Hacker News it's generally discouraged to post generic dismissals without counterarguments.


Correct. Only baseless conjecture is encouraged.


The evidence may be circumstantial, but the conjecture is far from baseless.


He claimed his parent comment is making stuff up? What do you mean he's not the one making claims, there's one right there?

Or do you mean claims about Elon? It would suit your comment better to be more specific, please try to do so in the future :)


user_named's post is absolute nonsense.

"Elon thought he'd be able to wiggle out of it because he assumed the SEC would be the regulatory body he'd be up against"

Bullshit like this has no relation to reality whatsoever.


Bullshit.


> He’s not the one making claims.

Yes. Do you?

> Do you have any idea how this works?

Counter-claims are claims that should be evidenced too.


The parent's source is mind-reading.


“Elon is fundamentally a dumb guy”

This is the guy who’s had more than a few successful businesses now. A lot of smart people did want to work with him. Andrej Karpathy himself has said that Elon was very quick to pick up AI technically. That doesn’t sound like a “fundamentally dumb” guy to me


a lot of smart people fell for Elizabeth Holmes charm and put their money on Theranos

for the purpose of this thread saying “Elon is fundamentally a dumb guy” is a statement of opinion, one that a growing number of people agree with


I tend to fall in the camp that a “fundamentally dumb guy” won’t be able to successfully start, grow and run Tesla and Space X.

Was buying twitter a mistake? Sure. Did he make dumb decisions when it comes to twitter? Yes. But IMO, that’s very different than labelling someone “fundamentally dumb”


Musk did not found Tesla.


this.

seems a lot of people confound funding and founding, he was one of Tesla's early funders, but he was not part of the team that founded it.

> he sank an initial investment of more than $6 million into Tesla, which was then not much more than a pair of founders and a vision of electric sports cars.

– https://time.com/6127754/elon-musk-net-worth-person-of-the-y...

> So AC Propulsion CEO Gage suggested Musk speak with electric car start-up Tesla Motors, which was also looking to commercialize the tzero. Musk reasoned that by teaming up with another company, he could “have my cake and eat it too,” he said on the podcast – he could still run SpaceX but also pursue his passion for electric cars in his spare time.

> “I didn’t think it would be easy, but I thought maybe I could allocate 20 to 30 hours a week and just work on product engineering, and then other people could do the other stuff. I didn’t like doing the other stuff anyway,” Musk said.

– https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/30/elon-musk-i-really-didnt-wan...


It's not a statement of opinion, it's a bitter resentful raving.


okay


[flagged]


Ah yes. Inheriting and owning stuff makes you smart. Maybe even the smartest. One could argue it even makes you a “stable genius”!


Both of Musk's parents are still alive. Neither of them were involved in the electric car or rocket companies. It's fine to be a Musk critic - but you should restrict yourself to saying things that are actually true rather than making stuff up.


Maybe inheritance isn't the right word. I understood them as saying "he was born into money" - is there another way to say he "inherited" purely in the sense of money being passed onto him?


That's also not true. Musk's parents may have been millionaires (hard to tell, this is disputed and their wealth likely changed over time) - but it's not like that's the source of Musk's money. Musk founded a company in college with his brother, his father invested 25k in the company (about 10% of total investment - so, no reason to think this investment was necessary/dispositive). Musk later sold the company for about 300 million - he reinvested that money in his future companies.

Musk's wealth doesn't come from "being born into money" - it comes from being an entrepreneur. Recently there is hate at Musk for political/ideological reasons. Now people just lie and make stuff up without regard for the truth - I find it sickening.

Musk was advantaged by having parents who raised him, provided for his education, and invested in his early company. He had more advantages from birth than most people in the world, but if you compare him to the average Stanford grad student (where he dropped out) I'm not certain he's in the top decile in terms of advantage. On the other hand, in terms of outcome, Musk is clearly an extreme outlier - pretending like Musk-outcomes are determined by his parents or family money is pure cope.


I just absolutely love how he makes his haters' brains break.


I’m really happy you’re enjoying it that much. And I’m sure Elon will sleep a little better next night, knowing you’re there standing guard for him!


Is your comment the reverse of the great philosophical statement "If you're so clever why aren't you rich?".


If you gave someone with a severe learning disability $100billion the first thing they would do is start commissioning rockets and race cars.


I think it's fair to say he's done some stupid stuff, but obviously he's done more than enough smart stuff to make up for it. He's deserving of some criticism but a lot of HN seems to have turned it into more of an insane jealousy. I think that's the price of success and doubt he cares that some internet critic thinks they're smarter than him.


I downvoted both you and the parent. While I agree with your argument, HN is not a place for disrespectful language as used by you and the parent.


elon musk simps are everywhere lol.


"but because Elon is fundamentally a dumb guy" - Oh genius, let us know who you are


I knew the end of the cheap money era would cause some businesses to be exposed but wow. We are basically in the middle of watching someone flush 44 billion down the drain. I could understand if it was a 600 posting limit. But a 600 viewing limit? wow. For example, NBA free agency just started. There are types of trades & signings being talked about. Just looking at that information I'm going past the 600 limit in about 30 minutes just by scrolling to see if anything is new. Twitter was nice to get this information from & they showed me a few ads. Decent transaction. But now I'm just going to refresh ESPN to see the latest signings.


It’s wild. Used to checking it frequently which any social media company would love, but can’t even scroll the feed this morning as I hit the rate limit just drinking coffee and catching up. The good thing is this will make me spend far less time on social media since it was the last one I had on my phone.


Wow, so maybe Musk was society's savior we didn't want to need. Although, maybe if Twitter was no more, people would begrudgingly go back to FB for their doom scrolling needs.


Between Musk and u/spez, I recovered at least 2 hours a day of normally wasted time.

I've read books, like actual paper ones. Spent some time making a simply 2-d space shooter, just for fun. Spent more time engaged with people I care about. Turns out social media is the least social thing ever and basically sucks.


If you asked me a year ago I wouldnt have guessed that raising interest rates would be the cure to doomscrolling. But here we are.


What’s next? A war in Ukraine that solves the fossil fuel crisis?


Instagram Threads is going to thrash Twitter. It will be insane, like Snapchat stories but much worse


I don't think this is because of the "end of cheap money" (I don't think this high interest rate environment will last that long) but just sheer incompetence by Musk and his staff. Elon has become increasingly erratic on the platform, he just tweeted recently a reply to a Tweet saying Islam would take over France. I don't know if he's always been like this or if the stories of his heavy ketamine usage are true and taking a toll on him.


>>I don't think this is because of the "end of cheap money"

Explain just about all platforms doing revenue adjusting user hostile actions then? Examples include Reddit with the API fees, YT with the Ad Blocking blocking. etc

This is all a reaction to the end of cheap money, aka the cost of capital is going up, so companies need to actually make revenue instead of chasing free capital

>>I don't think this high interest rate environment will last that long

There is no indication this true, most likely the "new normal" is going to be on the order of rates before the 2008 housing crash, not going back to the insanity of 0-1% fed rates...


Reddit over hired and is doing other stupid pricing models because they want to IPO, they filed confidential paperwork for an IPO last year. Twitter has been unprofitable since before Musk, and Musk's actions drove their revenue into the ground. Those aren't related to higher interest rates. What other examples do you have? Reddit and Twitter are bad examples.

> There is no indication this true, most likely the "new normal" is going to be on the order of rates before the 2008 housing crash, not going back to the insanity of 0-1% fed rates...

There's no indication that your statement is true either, I think in a 5-10 year span we'll have lower rates simply because virtually every economy is in population decline. In any case, the Twitter and Reddit flubs weren't due to higher interest rates. SVB was, this isn't.


They're not perfect examples. But what they're saying is:

* High returns from interest means the cost of capital is higher. Comparable safe investments return more, so investors demand more of a return from a riskier one.

* As a result, a lot fewer venture investments make sense with the higher discount rate.

* Companies cannot count on going back to the venture till, so high volatility strategies of chase-IPO-now or monetize-now are increasingly employed.

* Similarly, public companies desperately seek better fundamentals now, because future revenues are discounted so much in investors' opinions.

* As a result, a lot of companies enshittify, going after short term wins that risk the entire company's reputation..

As to the interest rate environment: the Fed has suggested a couple more interest rate hikes are likely later this year. It is likely to take quite awhile to walk rates down after inflationary pressures reduce. Current market prices imply rates will stay relatively high for the next few years.

No one really knows what an aging, contracting population will do to the interest rate environment. It's likely governments will have to borrow a bunch more, which can push up rates... And older workers seem to be more productive than models expected, which adds further upward rate pressure.


> Explain just about all platforms doing revenue adjusting user hostile actions then? Examples include Reddit with the API fees

Bad example. Reddit actions (and Twitter actions) are definitely not due any user hostile actions.

> YT with the Ad Blocking blocking.

This one may be has some merit to it, but we only have Google's word for it, and Google itself doesn't seem to be hurting because of all the bad-no-good ad blocking. Is Youtube hurting? No idea.


>Bad example. Reddit actions (and Twitter actions) are definitely not due any user hostile actions.

The actions are hostile to the users.. Twitter, Reddit, and YT (and others) have changed policies in a way to maximum revenue at the expensive of the users of the platforms.


It’s price perception shaping. Hey investors look how much we are charging for APIs, that’s how valuable our data is. Can I haz some money


If it truly is "the end of cheap money" (which I believe is the root cause) we can clearly see which management is competent, and which just flailing aimlessly.

"When the tide goes out, you see who's been swimming naked."


> he just tweeted recently a reply to a Tweet saying Islam would take over France

Really should provide a source when stating things like this, as many will want to check out for themselves exactly what was said.

I went and found the tweet that I assume is being referenced. It's here :

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675205751902486529

Elon says "He is right". So he is referencing the Imam in the video of the tweet he is replying to (not the tweeter, who appears to be female). The video of the Imam's speech has subtitles, so you can see what Elon is saying 'is right'.


[flagged]


I didn’t read the parent comment as making any particular judgement apart from the one that Islam in France is an unusual and unnecessary topic for Elon to be getting himself publicly involved in.


Unnecessary and unusual defined by whom? It’s okay to talk about anything on social media. It’s an important topic that he is shedding light on.


I don’t know how to tell you this…but you’re delusional.


It's even funnier when Elon confirmed that scrolling through a tweet counts as a read.


Isn't that obvious though? What else would count as a read?


Yes it's obvious, but it's so bizarre that I assumed the title had to be clickbait or poorly written. But no, it's absolutely correct.


having worked on products where analytics matter, it's important to be specific about behavior of those who use your products, and a better metric would be related to lingering, did you stop scrolling and if there are many tweets in this feed where you stopped, did you move your mouse towards one of those tweets? was your lingering intentional or related to inattention? It's important to develop an understanding of which in the list is the one you are lingering on (or what even is that list). It's important for behavior monitoring but also to make sure you are serving ads in a way that aligns with attention (assuming you run an ad supported platform, like Twitter) and that you can have accurate measurements for ad impressions (scrolling past an add without even stopping shouldn't cost an advertiser more than the base cost of the ad, and should cost more if someone lingers for even a half second.)

Other random ideas for what you would consider counted? you replied, you liked, you clicked a link through the tweet, you expanded a shortened version of a long tweet. There are so many ways to determine "read" and assuming it's always the naive "it was served" is like building a business based off of page views and not actual engagement.


It's impossible to know for real if someone has read a tweet -especially on Twitter where several tweets appear on the screen at once - however "dwell time" is a common measurement that is usually enough to appease marketers.

In this case it doesn't matter though because the aim is to mitigate cost, so equating an impression with engagement is fine.


Stop complaining or it's going to be 600 characters or less! Including the headers for your requests! /s


O noes, not the headers!


Taps head...ers! This is how you make money!


What I wonder is, how people who paid for verified account feel about it? First you pay for the reach(more features and priority to display) and then your followers or those who are supposed to reached need to pay to read your content. Some people are actually paying non trivial amounts for business accounts.

Normally I'm inclined to think that Musk is a great product person but this one move seems like a jerk reaction to some numbers not meeting expectations and designing a product to improve numbers without thinking about how the product actually works.


rsync.net has a verified (gold star ?) account which we neither asked for nor paid for. I think it comes with having an advertising balance ?

Interestingly, we have had (for the first time in years) decent advertising traction on Twitter in the first half of 2023 and I was planning on expanding that.

Advertising a product like ours has been very difficult because the venn diagram of "people who understand rsync.net" and "people who don't use an adblocker* has a very tiny overlap.

So between suspending our reddit promotions due to the dysfunction there and seeing some (very marginal) success with Twitter ads called into question I suspect we're headed back to square one ...


Hi! I’m one of the people who fall in the middle of the Venn diagram, and just wanted to let you know I was reading your website and the menu hamburger button doesn’t seem to work on my iPhone 14 on Safari or Firefox, so I couldn’t get to the pricing page etc. I’ll take a note to read it when I’m on my desktop but just wanted to pass it along.


> iPhone 14 on Safari or Firefox

Rendering engine is all Safari on iPhone, so trying another brand of browser won't help with rendering issues.


I've just been googling "Damian Lillard" every 5 minutes I don't know what to do with myself


https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/37852244/nba-free-agency... has very rapid updates.


I managed to hit the limit during the F1 sprint race as theres a ton of threaded comments for that. Genius level move on how to screw up your own business.


An account on an ESPN Mastodon instance that comes with and logs in with that Disney+/Hulu/ESPN bundle would probably be popular. Doesn't even have to federate.


bah gawd that's RSS's music


Based on the post I replied to, it sounds like realtime updates are an important feature. All the accounts would have RSS feeds if someone wanted it in that format.


There will be cost and consequence of moderation, with very limited benefit given its content subscription model.


I was thinking read/boost-only for all but select users, like sports celebrities.


FWIW I turned on notifications for Woj and Shams and I’m still getting them even though I’m rated limited too.


'Likes' tab on a profile also appears to be unaffected by rate-limit as well.


Tesla keeps going up


And what is Musk’s attention primarily directed at these days?


>>We are basically in the middle of watching someone flush 44 billion down the drain.

Odd statement given that Fidelity just cut its valuation of reddit, but increased it valuation of Twitter.


> The Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund has reduced the market value of its equity stake in Twitter for a third time, now putting it at $6.55 million. That’s down from the nearly $20 million the Fidelity fund valued its stake at in October.

From today, according to https://apnews.com/article/twitter-fidelity-musk-value-08c64.... It doesn't sound like it increased its valuation of twitter in any way tbh.


TIL that June 1st is "today" July 1st...

In reality that was a month ago, and on June 30th they increased the value

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/30/fidelity-deepens-valuation...


> The financial giant also readjusted the value of its holding in Twitter to $6.86 million, up from $6.55 million from a month prior, but still down 65% since the original investment.

Still significantly down.


It really feels like we're witnessing the end of an era. Elon is doggedly piloting Twitter into the ground and Reddit seems strangely compelled to follow his lead. Reddit may recover - I'm not so sure about Twitter. What technologies will take their place? In a time where it's never been easier to stand up your own website/forum/what have you, could we possibly see a gradual return to a pre-corporate Internet?


I'm always a bit surprised how few people realized how many "nice things" from the last decade plus have been heavily subsidized by VC money (which itself was created from low interest rates).

Every cool startup that people loved started by burning cash. This made Uber cheap, DoorDash cheap, Youtube helpful and creative, Facebook about connecting with classmates, Twitter a free public forum, Reddit a playground for forums of all possible varieties, Imgur an ad-free alternative to ad-laden image hosting sites, 0% loan available for purchasing anything, etc, etc.

But all of this was possible because all of these companies spent more than they made. In fact, most of these listed still do spend more than they make but they're going through contortions trying to change that and many might not survive it. For those that do their products will unquestionably be inferior to what we had in the 2010s.

There's this belief that technology can only go forward, only get better, but what I think we'll see as we move into the 2020s is a growing realization that things were substantially better in the 2010s... but only because we were putting everything on a credit card and not worrying about the bill that eventually had to be paid.


Were these apps made possible with VC money, or just made monopolizable? In a different world, I could see most of these areas spawning smaller companies—on a slower timeline, sure—if VC-backed companies couldn't use massive up-front capital to suck the air out of the room. We could certainly have app-based taxis and restaurant delivery without Uber or DoorDash; hardware and bandwidth have gotten cheap enough that we could have more Vimeos and Floatplanes instead of one big YouTube; Slashdots and Diggs and HNs without Reddit... etc.


I'm hoping for a return of smaller communities and forums that were (more) common before facebook and reddit.


Absolutely, it really was pouring gasoline on fire rather than the sole cause of the ideas. All the functions they provide would have turned up but on a smaller more sustainable scale, more like the older traditional companies of the past.


They wouldn't have been able to support consumer scale without the up front capital. Otherwise they would need private betas and stuff but this would have not created the value of the same network effects and robust marketplaces.


A larger number of smaller firms each supporting the consumer scale they can sustainably and profitably support instead of selling below cost to capture the entire market then turning into hell when the bill comes due.


> we were putting everything on a credit card and not worrying about the bill that eventually had to be paid

We (consumers) didn't put anything on a CC. VCs did.

And I count that for the blessing it was. I ordered tons of subsidized food on DoorDash, cheap rides on Uber, etc.

Now that golden era is over, and I will not be ordering any more of that stuff at the now exorbitant prices.

Thank you based VCs, for comping a bunch of stuff for me the last 10 years.


Except a lot of the formers ways of doing things / getting things have been pushed out of the market with all the capital influx. So there aren’t any small stores anymore, small restaurants don’t do delivery anymore, etc etc.


Are you living in the same world as me? When I go into town there's a ton of small shops. Small restaurants are absolutely everywhere, either to eat in or to get delivery from using one of several delivery apps. I cannot relate to your comment at all.


Small restaurants doing delivery doesn’t make sense as an example.

The only structures that were torn down were things that required capital and upkeep. So for example, once you starve the beast of the taxi industry, then the fleet decays and they can’t compete without new capital investment.

For a small restaurant delivery, they can at any point hire another person to run orders just as they always could, with no loss. The reason this is not viable is because the whole economy got disrupted by covid and now it’s not actually feasible for someone to earn a living just moving parcels of food around locally. Like literally the unit economics don’t resolve positively because CA minimum wage is $15 an hour and you need even more than that to have a decent life.


Thank you, Boomer pension fund managers, for giving nonboomers like me some of that pension fund money!


Uber and doordash yes, they operate a physical business with large costs per customer transaction. Twitter and reddit? No, I disagree. Those businesses should be relatively cheap to host (compared to ad revenue) with focused management and engineering. The only thing about them that could cost a lot is moderation, and twitter should have followed reddit’s lead to leave that to a volunteer brigade. If twitter and reddit lost money, it is because they were not being run efficiently, and they weren’t being run efficiently because the way to show investors they were creating value is launching a bunch of hyped but mostly pointless features and by having a high burn rate.

New reddit launched 5 years ago, and many people still prefer using old reddit. Twitter also did not add any feature in the past 5 years the majority of its users cared about losing. If most of your users are fine with giving up everything you’ve built in the past 5 years, and you have a large staff of engineers, then you’ve not been running the business effectively.


What's frustrating about all this is the resources wasted on growing businesses that were fundamentally unsustainable. I think a tougher economic climate would have been better for innovation long-term.


Honestly outside of the Youtube/Imgur I don't think these companies are unsustainable. The problem is the VCs are aiming for huge returns. Instead of focusing on their niche and running a lean but profitable business they are forced to chase trends and exponential growth.

Who on Reddit wanted chat or live streams. Why is Facebook spending so much money on videos. does Uber really make any money off hellocopters rides. These aren't what people came to these platforms for and are just costing them a huge amount of money.


Most of these companies seemingly were in a good place, and then started doing stupid pivots to try and make even more money than they already were.

Reddit was doing fine as a text-only forum supported by advertising and Reddit Gold. Then they went a billion dollars in debt building the redesign which is widely disliked by power users (who are responsible for most of Reddit’s actual activity thanks to volunteer moderation combined with the Pareto principle), and at the same time decided to add native image and video hosting and take on all the costs associated with that. Everything since then has really been chasing whatever’s popular. After Twitch got big, they added livestreams, which didn’t go anywhere. After Discord got big, they added chat, which didn’t go anywhere. During the NFT boom, they invested big in those, which wasted a lot of money and didn’t go anywhere. Now AI is the new hotness, and they’re following Elon’s lead by treating the site as a static text repository which more value being sold to people training AIs than any value that could be gained from just...running the site. This boom will end, either by way of hitting the peak of what’s currently possible, updates to copyright law or other regulations, or just by the AI companies remembering they can just download the Common Crawl database for free and get the exact same content without paying Twitter or Reddit (or even specific dumps of Twitter or Reddit content if that’s what they really want; those are widely available in places like the Internet Archive).

Imgur was never going to be sustainable on its own, since it’s basically impossible to monetize an image hotlinking service by definition. However, they brilliantly decided to pivot the site to being its own image sharing community (with all of the monetization opportunities that allows), while still supporting the original use case as a sort of “unintended” feature (while actually being the whole reason the site was originally made in the first place). Then they suddenly forgot that was the plan, probably after several managerial/executive swaps, and started shutting down everything that wasn’t part of the “community” system, even though the “community” was really created just to subsidize everything else.

Facebook’s adventures with video are probably the single most damaging thing to ever happen to the Internet. Basically, they saw that video ads were wildly more profitable than anything else they were doing, proceeded to inflate their video stats by counting anyone scrolling past an autoplaying video as a “view”, told the entire web that text was dead and video was the future (causing hundreds of major sites to shut down their writing departments in favor of mainly producing videos), used all of these manufactured stats to get massive investment in video ads, and then just kind of shrugged when everything eventually collapsed.

YouTube has been in a good place consistently since the mid-2010s, and just really likes pretending that they aren’t. Like I said with Facebook, video ads are really profitable when done right, and YouTube operates at a big enough scale that the bandwidth and storage costs of hosting all of humanity’s video content is offset by the number of people watching Mr. Beast eight seconds after he posts a new video. The problem is that they’re always trying to optimize for more revenue, leading to massive pushes for family-friendliness to keep advertisers happy, pushing whatever the latest “format” is (at the moment, Shorts) because that’s what advertisers are most interested in since it gets the most views, and just generally trying to hyper-optimize every aspect of the website to further improve their margins.

All of these sites could have simply continued with their original business models and maintained small but lean businesses, and they’d probably be able to even keep getting moderate growth thanks to network effects. But they wanted all the money and they wanted it right now, leading to extreme overextension into whatever else is currently popular, and it only ever leads to the core business collapsing because the people who were maintaining it are off selling NFTs or trying to build a video player.


> After Twitch got big, they added livestreams, which didn’t go anywhere. After Discord got big, they added chat

I never heard of twitch as a non-streaming site and discord as a non-chat website.


Yes. Overly cheap money has negative externalities, that’s been the lesson of the post-9/11 financial order, and one of those is that overly cheap money causes fart.app to crowd out economically productive activity. A lot of things were done that shouldn’t have been done at all and fundamentally sucked up money that could have been used for actual productive stuff.

Another is that it incentivized companies to try for the Uber strategy of burning investor cash to become a monopolist player rather than targeting a sustainable growth plan. Low-key this has led to long term consolidation to a greater level than otherwise would have occurred.


> I think a tougher economic climate would have been better for innovation long-term.

I am convinced that the overuse of cloud computing has largely been a byproduct of the money firehose of excessive funding. If money was tighter, massively overpaying for compute and bandwidth should be less attractive.

As someone who is deeply interested about performance, efficiency and scalability, I'm hoping there is a partial industry reversal to caring about these things again.


It's possible to make money on them. But not if you have tens of thousands of employees.

They fail because they need to become billion dollar behemoths to support the VC funding they've gotten. But plenty (not all though) of them could be profitable if they were ran as a "lifestyle" business.


If you actually looked at the balance sheet of twitter before Elon took it over it was quite possible to make it profitable. It would have needed to cut cost and probably try and to boost its ad platform a bit more but well within the realm of possibilities.

With the debt that Elon has saddled them with I doubt they will ever be profitable again without declaring bankruptcy.


> it was quite possible to make it profitable

Without the $760M settlement, they'd have made about $270M in 2021[1].

[1] "2021 operating loss of $493 million, or an operating margin of -10%, includes a one-time litigation-related net charge of $766 million" - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...


At the absolute pinnacle of ZIRP era, there were just barely able to get into the black (ex their legal settlement). That’s not an extremely healthy business. They were going to crash in 22/23 regardless of ownership.


Crash as in what? Get delisted from the Nasdaq and go bankrupt or just have a bad bearish couple years or something? Their cashflow had pretty consistently improved since their IPO, they would've maybe had a couple bearish years, would've laid off employees like most other tech companies and most likely would have roughly followed the overall Nasdaq trajectory in the market. But that's a normal business cycle, the stock market is full of companies in much worse shape (look at Amazon for its first decade) that can survive any storm as long as their DSCR ratio isn't crazy...like Twitter's is now.


Twitter never had a health P/E (Price/earning) ratio. 270M is great on a 2B company but terrible on a +40B company.


I think this is going to be known as "the Millennial subsidized lifestyle era." Not that it was exclusively used by Millennials, but it's largely what they grew up with.

AirBnb was maybe the worst of the bunch, because it has such a dramatic negative externality on housing markets. Entire areas of Barcelona have essentially no real residents because even those who didn't sell to AirBnb investors found it unlivable with drunk tourists screaming around the apartment buildings at 3 am. I stopped using AirBnb because it was making it enjoyable to visit other cities, but destroying my own. It's also a lot more expensive for fewer amenities.

Spotify hasn't made any money yet. I wonder if they're going to start charging $30/month. Time for the return of CDs, vinyl, MP3s?


How does Spotify lose money? Audio isn't nearly as big as video files. Likely they are just going to make the free tier absolutely suck.


They pay the record companies a lot of money to have their music on their platform.


Are they still paying exorbitantly for podcaster exclusivity?


Oh yeah, podcasts. I honestly don't know why they're so desperate on attracting people for podcasts. Podcasts are much more unprofitable compared to normal music


Estimated $200M for Rogan. I mean... did that really move the needle for them? Who thought, yes, they have practically every piece of music I want to listen to, but it's the Joe Rogan thing that made me finally sign up.

The graph of subscribers shows really no change in the rate of subscribers:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/244995/number-of-paying-...

Probably just more stock-pumping ZIRP big exit nonsense.


Probably harder to cut a good deal negotiating with the legal team of capital records vs a random podcaster.


Try bandcamp


Yep somewhere along the way we forgot that you can't become profitable on volume when marginal revenue is negative. This is first-year business undergrad stuff.


I don't think they forgot that, the general plan has been successive rounds of funding so you can say "valued at" at increasingly high values, then an IPO or a sneaky exit through secondary market share sales. Then some dummies who aren't you are left holding the bag.


Yep. That’s the worst part — all these startups and people’s time and effort are just a ploy by rich people to get richer.


In general yes, but Twitter was borderline profitable before Musk took over and saddled them with insurmountable debt payments and decisions alienating advertisers and users.

Twitters current issues are entirely the creation of Elon Musk.


Blue sales ultimately can't hope to come close to what big brand ads used to give.

And ironically enough, blue currently works as a crappy version of advertising thanks to the reply ranking. The promises of prioritizing "high-quality content" never came true; all we see are mid takes and, if you speak Mandarin, AI-powered sex scambots.

Well, worse for us plebs. Not sure if it's worse for the buyers.


> Blue sales ultimately can't hope to come close to what big brand ads used to give.

I don't know, I think the hope is there. With these rate limits and some Fermi estimates, we can guess what Twitter's hoped-for revenue per user might be.

Suppose that this move is designed to move regular users over to Twitter Blue, and a regular user might ordinarily see 2000 tweets per day. Suppose further that Twitter would show 1 ad per 10 tweets, and ad sells for 3$CPM on average, and a Blue user sees 33% fewer ads.

An ordinary user would then expect to give Twitter 200 ad impressions per day, at $0.60/day of ad revenue or $18. By seeing 1/3 fewer ads, that ad revenue drops to $12, but Twitter picks up $8/month in Blue subscription fees, increasing the gross revenue to $20.

That feels about right, and the math gets better in the short term for Twitter if it's having a hard time filling its ad spots — a proportionally greater share of its revenue would then come from the pushed-for Blue.

Likewise, if Twitter is having a hard time filling its advertising spots, kicking non-Blue viewers off the platform is not a short-term revenue loss: the marginal eyeball is unmonetized. In the medium to long term, of course, Twitter is strangling the very content that attracts those eyeballs, and this is still a bone-headed business decision.


>> Suppose that this move is designed to move regular users over to Twitter Blue

I hope you don't work in marketing. Why would a non-paying user watch Twitter arbitrarily limit the number of Tweets a _paying user_ can view per day, and think "yeah, I'll pay for that".


> I hope you don't work in marketing.

Hell no, but also don't mistake me for thinking that this was a good idea.

However, particularly when I don't understand a subject well, I try to take all reasonable-sounding claims seriously at first and give them some back-of-the-envelope analysis. It seemed to me that the original claim was that Blue sales couldn't replace ads, but it seems like the numbers are close under some reasonable approximation.

I do agree that this move is likely to drive many users away from Twitter entirely, but a short-sighted company could still think that an acceptable tradeoff if they're having trouble selling all available advertising space.


I think this analysis might work in a vacuum (but see sibling comments about the assumptions of how many ads are served to Blue users), but the biggest problem is the tremendous debt that the Musk takeover has saddled Twitter with. Perhaps you could run a social network sustainably at reasonable cost and profits.

Twitter has over 12 billion USD in debt though, and with rising interest rate the interest payments are going to be an absolute drag on financial performance. Those payments MUST be met, otherwise Musk will not own Twitter at all. Scaling down user numbers is unlikely to help. Even 3% interest rate on 10b is 300 million per year.


We’re already well into the medium term. Content has been leaving since November, and a lot of people are already primed to exit if the site becomes unusable for more than a weekend.


Nope. Blue users aren't going to see ads at all.


Wrong, they see half the ads of regular users, and only on certain spots of the site

"Half ads: See approximately 50% fewer ads in the For You and Following timelines. As you scroll, you will see approximately twice as many organic or non-promoted Tweets placed in between promoted Tweets or ads. There may be times when there are more or fewer non-promoted Tweets between promoted Tweets. The half ads feature does not apply to promoted content elsewhere on Twitter, including but not limited to ads on profiles, ads in Tweet replies, promoted events in Explore, promoted trends, and promoted accounts to follow. Blue subscribers will have access to this feature after their account has been reviewed for eligibility and the blue checkmark has been applied."

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue


With all of these companies outspending their revenue by so much, cash getting 5% more expensive or so seems like a drop in the bucket.


It doesn't feel like that to me. Elon reported that Twitter hit a new all time high of "user seconds" last week. Reddit usage doesn't seem to have gone down much. In my opinion, what you are really experiencing is wishful thinking.


Elon says a lot of things, like last fall when he was crowing about how Twitter had the bot problem licked. Fast forward to today and bot spam is worse than ever before.

You can believe what you want. I choose to believe what I see with my eyes.


I’m not taking a side of whether Elon is right or wrong.

However, you mentioned that today is an admission that the bot problem is worse. However that not true, the restrictions are specifically on viewing data (scrapers) rather than creating data (bots).


| Elon reported that Twitter hit a new all time high of "user seconds" last week

I’m not inclined to take Elon’s words at face value, he has an incentive to pump any statistic that makes it seem Twitter is growing.


That's pretty much majority of data science at tech companies. Stakeholders want numbers that make things look good, not accurate or useful numbers.


It's going to be hard to continue hitting record highs if you're limiting how much of your content people are able to see.


That's probably why the limits are temporary.


They're not temporary they're indefinite


> Elon reported that Twitter hit a new all time high of "user seconds" last week.

A famously trustworthy source.


How many times must Elon lie before people stop taking is word as truth?


Doesn't the current situation imply that a lot of those users were bots/scrapers?


I don’t have an account so all my interactions with twitter are via discord bots. I don’t know where that falls into scraping vs bots but I ain’t an organic user from their perspective.

In theory the goal would be to push people like me to register and get an account to at least view, and force me into their platform/ecosystem so I can be measure and monetized.

Unfortunately, much like ape pics, printscreen key exists and people will simply pivot to posting png’s of twitter instead of direct linking


How is user seconds defined?


Users coming for seconds, because they've been rate limited and deprived of their dopamine hits.


According to Elon, it's screen time as reported by Android & iOS.


Instagram doing a fediverse thing is a big deal, and makes me really optimistic about the future of ActivityPub. We don't have it all figured out just yet, but I do think we're going to see a decentralized future of social media, which is pretty exciting.


Their use of ActivityPub is just a way to quickly bootstrap social media functionality using time tested libraries. Just like they did with XMPP.


It's likely more a way for Instagram to avoid monopoly and associated regulatory discussions.

By basing it on an open protocol they can be one of many trusted clients rather than a closed, proprietary service.


Instagram is also apparently building a Twitter-like app, which as much as I hate FB/IG, would probably convince me to switch into their ecosystem again.


I don’t use Facebook because of all the crimes against humanity but I’ll be honest. If the cage match happens and Zuckerberg beats the snot out of Musk, I’m a Facebook user for life. I think a lot of people would feel the same. Meta has a chance to turn everything around.


I want this to release so bad. It would be the most natural step for me having used Twitter for the last 10 years off and on. There's just a comedic aspect that I haven't found yet in other social media apps. Twitter was a really special place before Elon took over.


The rest of the fediverse seems to disagree and is now in an obnoxious war to preblock Meta or not.


If Meta were smart, they'd immediately shift away from their Metaverse nonsense and use this as a massive opportunity to do things they are pretty good at (hate them or love them.) I know they are working on a Twitter competitor, but they need to find a way to help get the followers they once had back, if they were to switch. They could even ultimately challenge Reddit. I know that would not be an ideal outcome, but as a business with that core competency, I'd be putting a huge effort to take advantage of all of this.


> They could even ultimately challenge Reddit.

Frankly I feel Google would be more motivated to challenge Reddit. Since so many of Google’s search results go to Reddit, they might as well try to take over that part of the web rather than leaving it in the hands of mercurial leadership of Reddit.

The only problem is possible retaliation from Reddit and potential antitrust problems if other similar sites feel threatened.


Except Google seems completely incompetent at creating new products (though maybe YT shorts is the exception that proves the point) and very bad at handling community


YT shorts isn't a new product. It's a feature of an existing product, which happens to be the second biggest website.


I wouldn't say YT shorts is a good example of a well executed product. They all seem shit.


Call a spade a spade. YT shorts is a terribly named, half assed, years late copy.


Same with Instagram Reels, and they're also fairly popular.


Google should be hyper-motivated, they just appear to be incapable of executing on anything social.

Surprised they aren’t visibly scrambling to get it done anyway though


I d say the opposite. Their headsets are great and affordable, but their obsession with making everything social is ... annoying at this point? They keep adding social stuff to the oculus, but why the hell would i want to be stalked while i m deep into another world wearing glasses. They need to quit their old habits and focus on the future not the past


The future in question is not profitable (yet, if at all anytime soon). Social media is and will be for a long time in competent hands. You can think that their VR stuff is cool but also know their core competency is good social experiences. You can hate Facebook and Instagram all you want but they are both very popular and profitable.


If you think about it Google Groups could have been Reddit if presented in this way.


I mean Google Groups was just the colony of crustaceans living on the whale-fall of Usenet.


The weirdest thing of this era is that we don't see the big players (eg. Google) trying to take advantage of this situation and create an alternative.


Googs has showed us in the past it is unable to make a product that people want to use, and that they have no stomach for a slow grind to get a product to beat the establishment.


au contraire, they can definitely make products people like but then insist on either ruining them or shutting them down.


fine, I'll rephrase: social products. Remember Google+? You and 10 other people do. Most people's memory of Google+ was how to avoid it after it became a mandatory thing for all gmail users, and then it was just gone. So yeah, people really liked that product


Imo Google (basically by accident) owns the best place social network for the next decade - YouTube.

Human generated content will become rare and more valuable, which is why the remaining non walled gardens (Reddit and Twitter) are quickly raising the drawbridge.

Video will be the last medium to fall to AI generated content pretending to be human generated, and by cloning tiktok across to YouTube shorts they remove the barriers to entry for humans.

Social media nowdays is not about friends, it’s about algorithms & creator monetization. YouTube is #1 on monetization by a huge margin.

Any text based social media network will be absolutely overrun with LLMs.


> Imo Google (basically by accident) owns the best place social network for the next decade - YouTube.

Does it? I mostly use YouTube on my Apple TV, and the few times I open it elsewhere, I barely check the comments other than to check the audience reception. There are no conversations there.


> Imo Google (basically by accident) owns the best place social network for the next decade - YouTube.

That's pretty damn sad. Limiting discussion to some video link is just not very social to me. Facebook was the best overall to me until they fucked it up. As a concept, it is the most diverse in allowing users to be social with the various types of posts. Sure, you can do videos, images, text only, but also the events, direct messaging, and other features that i don't really remember because i haven't been there in 10 years.


Google and new products…

Hahahahahhhaha


Meta is reportedly working on some mastodon thing


Instagram has a Twitter-like product in the pipeline now.

Google had their foray into social media more than a decade ago and it failed miserably. Starting from that point they've produced a continuous stream of failed products that never received enough support to last long enough to see viability.


Imagine spending countless hours building up your follower base and accumulating the social media cachet, if you will, only to have Google shut it down in three years. Because that's exactly how that would go.


Nobody would join anything social based run by Google anymore. For one thing we all know it would already be in the phase of being closed down, not to mention nobody (Even Google customers) trusts them.


What big players are in a position to make an alternative, as well as be trusted enough that people will migrate to it? What an inane comment.


Meta. I’d move to a Meta-run Twitter in a moment. I use FB Messenger and Instagram every day, and Zuck has so far resisted the pull to the far right that Elon and Jack have.

I’d theoretically trust Apple/Google/MS to own the data and governance, but I don’t think any are capable of executing.


I bet Digg said the same thing ca. 2010


They can give it a catchy name too with their branding, because it adds so much value to their services. Maybe call it Google+?


A platform where everyone but nazis could say whatever they want (as long as it isn’t something a nazi would say) would be so popular.


I like the shadow ban system. Let users decide which other users get bannedthrough down or upvotes on comments.


There will be no observable long term impact from Reddit banning third party apps.

Only a few power users cared about it and no one cared about them.


I think this is a pretty naïve viewpoint - just look at what the mods of e.g. /r/iama announced today.

On social network websites, the vast majority of people are only lurkers, a relatively few people commenting, even fewer people posting, and fewer people still who want to put in the effort to build up a community.

Reddit's soul sits in those handcrafted small communities, the big ones sure will stay around and be popular, but there's lots of other places where one can get 5 second cat videos, and memes.

This event eroded a lot of the remaining trust between moderators and the admins, and while that can feel like it's not relevant to normal users, over time this will cause fewer people to be interested in starting a community on Reddit.


Yes I agree. What some seem to be missing is that public forums are a cesspit by default. While often invisible, the work of community managers and moderators is essential to maintain spaces people actually want to spend time in. These free workers are in limited supply. Once they leave, sites fill up with unmoderated spam and junk.


I would estimate 90% of worthwhile content on Reddit is posted by power users. Most subreddits are only alive because a few power users take the time to compile and post content. Nobody cares about them, but people will care once their content is gone.

Power mods suck, but power users are the backbone of the site. I predict information quality and density will continue to decrease rapidly on Reddit until it becomes no different from Instagram.

(I’m not personally a power user, I’ve just been on Reddit for a while)


Sample size of one, but I suppose maybe I’m in that category of power users - given that I’d post 3-10 “effort posts” per day.

Apollo finally went dark yesterday, I deleted it, and haven’t felt a single compulsion to check the mobile Reddit site. About the only Reddit related thing on my mind is whether I’m petulant enough to mass overwrite my posts - I’m only too familiar with the struggle of searching for something and finding dead blogs and forums a few years back.

I don’t think Reddit the company owes me anything, but I wonder how many other “high value” users (in terms of both content and value to marketers) simply drifted away once the iOS apps went dark.


The shift is that the content itself now has tangible value.

So far it's been the attention of the users that has been monetized, primarily via advertising.

But now the content generated by the users has value as input into AI training sets. And AI companies are scrambling to gather as much as they can as rapidly as they can.

The data itself, not the attention of the users, is what is now being harvested.

The companies hosting the data are right to intervene, there's no reason to allow incredibly well-funded AI organizations hoover it all up for free.

Where it's going wrong is how the social companies are intervening. Their goal is correct, their methods are not.


And yet, by shrinking the reach of posts, there must be far less content being generated. Isn't that the tightrope social networks have always been walking?


This seems to become this year’s biggest unanticipated second order effect of LLMs: UGC and organic human-generated content in general is suddenly valuable in a different way than before. This should totally accelerate the move of “quality content” behind paywalls or signup walls. Only commodity content, low quality content, and AI-generated content will remain on the open web.


I would love for an RSS reader/HN/Reddit thing to exist. You could get you personal news on one side, and subs/communities whith two columns, one for news from sources curated by the admins/mods of the sub, and other column for news, links and text posts submittes by the users.

You could only join by invitation, so as to make F2F social networks in self-hosted instances, or in a Discord-esque "server". I think the value here would be in exchanging opinions, information and new interests with an expanded social network (you woukd probably like and find interesting your friends' friends). Although I admit this model would be a closed community, if it's only one instance then it's not a problem because there are not a lot of people, and if it proves to be successful, it could span a renaissance of blogs or independent content-generation, i.e. these communities would be closed but reinforcing an open Web, instead of mega-silos with captive audience.

I think that a limit in size for each community would be essential, the first member/admin can invite, let's say, 80, people, each of those can invite 40 people, and the third "generation" just another 20 people. This way you get at most 64k people to interact with. There was a post here on HN a couple months [0] ago with a back of the envelope calulation of subreddits being hostile when reaching a 300k userbase.

[0] https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/scaling-problems-in-soc...


You can already follow hn and reddit and youtube channels and tweets on rss


> What technologies will take their place?

Someones going to say Lemmy and Mastedon - they're wrong.


It’ll probably get worse if anything


I'm all for a complete reboot of a 100% non-commercial version of the web.


Really it looks like the commercial web is about to lock itself down hard into strongly walled gardens.

It is definitely time to rebuild. I don't know if that'll be ActivityPub and decentralization, but it needs to be something else.


Lemmy has been great. I went SDF as a host. Never going back to Reddit. I left Twitter almost a decade ago so I can’t compare to mastodon but that’s been really nice too.


Incredibly bizarre way to intentionally kill your app, even after all the other nonsense he's been doing. Even if I were willing to pay for something as cringe as verification, 6000 posts a day is laughable for an app like Twitter. I hit the rate limit on my "unverified" account in about 5 minutes. I've been waiting for $newApp to get enough users to be fun, and this only motivates me more to be the change I want to see.


They are literally throwing away revenue with every denied impression. An act of desperation obviously. My take: they broke something and need to shed load to keep the site running. The "extreme scraping" thing is the usual Musk BS.


Is it really "running" if users can't use the site at all?

Fwiw there's a post trending on mastodon that they DDOS'd themselves as a result of forcing logins to view tweets.


You would think that forced logins would have stopped a majority of the scraping. Even if it didn't the rate limit they have well below what would be needed to stop scrapers.


the user-based DDOS bug is in the login wall, so lol


Alternatively, the costs outweigh impression revenue, they are actively running out of money, and trying to stall while desperately trying to find additional cash.


That seems… implausible? They used to be profitable; clearly at that point advertising revenue must have greatly exceeded infra cost. Now, I’d buy that it’s down, but surely not by _that_ much.


But there are now big debt payments that didn't exist before, from the massively leveraged buyout.


Oh, sure, I’d be amazed if it’s profitable today. But I understood the person I was replying to to mean that they were throttling to control infra cost, which makes no sense, as revenue from people using twitter (ads) must surely more than pay for the infra; effectively shutting down twitter won’t make the debt costs go away and would clearly be a net financial negative.


> But I understood the person I was replying to to mean that they were throttling to control infra cost

Or hard pushing for Twitter Blue subscriptions, which have 10x the rate limit.


A lot of advertisers left Twitter one after another after each change by musk. Especially his change to allow hate speech (because free speech!) led to an exodus.

Now there are only very low-quality ads by drop-shipping companies left. I bet they don‘t pay as much as the big brand names before.


> The "extreme scraping" thing is the usual Musk BS.

Right. I just don't grasp how people don't understand he is surely flat out lying.


> literally throwing away revenue with every denied impression

Any estimates for how much?


I find the scraping explanation plausible. Some search engine bots are aggressive. With all the AI hype, I first thought of Microsoft Bing scraping Twitter at full datacenter speed to suck in more information for OpenAI.


I would believe that scraping is why they now require users to be authenticated.

But given that they now require users to be logged in, it should be computationally cheap to drop unauthenticated requests at the front door before they incur real expense.

It'd also be cheap to just blackhole datacentre IP space.

The sort of attack that would require this level of limits is malware on tens of thousands of residential machines that can use a user's existing Twitter session cookies. I'm really skeptical that's the case.


These limits are far below standard scraping rates and deeply affecting the casual users, have to presume intentionally.


> I find the scraping explanation plausible.

How do you explain it suddenly being a problem today and not, say, during the recent World Cup when not only the AI scraping would have been happening but el Morko himself was crowing about how much extra traffic they were handling?


Someone with deep pockets flipped the ON switch?


The much simpler explanation is that elon lied again.


Actual human users are hitting rate limits under 10 minutes because every Tweet loaded counts towards the rate limit. This is like setting your house on fire at the sight of a few mosquitos.


This is the move that elevates “the Saudis funded this to kill Twitter” from silly conspiracy theory to maybe plausible.


Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by Elon’s incompetence.


Malice? He thinks he’s liberating us from the woke mind virus and defending poor oppressed Republican activists.


Isn't Musk personally liable for a lot of this burnt money? In this scenario, does Musk gain something or was he just outsmarted?


In that scenario Musk fills the "useful idiot" role.

I am not really convinced though, I think it's just plain old incompetence and hubris. But then, it's 2023 so who knows.


Now imagine being on Elon's Mars colony and having your breathing rate limited out of the blue one day. Today switched my vision of that from wonder and hope to seeing it as volunteering to become one of the belters in The Expanse. I'm kinda sad to have moved from the 'let me in' to 'hard pass' on that dream. It was one of that last big future dreams 1990s me had for the 20X0's.


Give this people air! https://youtu.be/X8lT-Sn-HqE


I'm kinda sad to have moved from the 'let me in' to 'hard pass' on that dream. It was one of that last big future dreams 1990s me had for the 20X0's.

Yep. Elon clearly lost his motivation for Mars at some point, either because he was confronted with unshakeable evidence that his goals were impossible to achieve, or because he just got bored and distracted.

My guess is that the latter explanation is closer to the mark. But on the other hand, learning that his dream was out of reach could easily have led to the kind of dissipative, self-destructive loss of focus that we've seen from him over the past couple of years.

For those of us who were on board with his original vision, he's just another Lucy, holding just another football.


Or it could be that the Mars narrative was more useful than it is now.


That hit me years ago when working conditions at Tesla came to light, I realized Elon can never have his Mars colony be self-sufficient or he'd be thrown out of an airlock.


The cherry on top is that even if you pay, you still get ads.


That's the main problem with Twitter Blue (other than its very bad reputation): it's just not worth the money. Instead of adding value to the subscription or making it cheaper, Elon just makes the rest of the product worse. It's a very weird way to do business.


Update from Elon: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754

> Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified

lolwut. Quoting a post from Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@maxkennerly/110640373859329500

> 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.


> 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.

This isn't accurate at all.

Standard operating procedure for large-scale scraping is to use a botnet, it's a sybil attack where you can have tens or even hundreds of thousands of IPs ticking away at 10 requests per minute or some such. Done correctly, it's nearly impossible to detect which nodes are complicit from their access patterns or user agents.

That said, rate limits work relatively poorly against this. A proof of work approach like HashCash might work though.


The solution is not simple but there is one (but it is complex). The question is are you going to spend time and money to implement the right solution or just pick up a cheaper one?

Could it be that they just stop paying bills for Akrose and they shut down their service?


Wouldn't limiting the number of IP addresses that can log in as a single user avoid the botnet problem?

That said, someone mentioned that the login page alone involves 11 MB of data transfer, so maybe that is the problem they are confronted with.


I'm 50/50 on whether they're actually dealing with catastrophic technical issues, or if this is just Musk being mad about something and insisting on an incredibly silly solution. Both are entirely plausible!


I’ve seen speculation correlating “Going down at 9am on the first day of Q3” with the fact that they have apparently been trying to migrate off Google cloud by June 30th because of Melon’s blanket policy of “Not paying bills”.

Needless to say, if true, this would be extremely funny.


If Google decides to graveyard GCloud, you can say you were here when it started.


Turning a big dial that says "rate limit" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on The Price Is Right


A garage startup doing this with a thousand users would be cool and fun. An established large platform with hundreds of millions of users doingg this is just undermining its own reputation.


A cool so I get about 3 more minutes of looking at tweets

My guess is he got rate limited himself after a few hours as a verified user so he’s already upping it


They probably have if (isElon) somewhere in the code to turn off rate limiting.


Bold assumption that anyone left there would know how to implement something like that


Boolean was banned for sounding too much like boo elon.


Update from Elon: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754 > Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified

Well, at least he's engaged over a holiday weekend.

If it was my company, this would be a fifteen meetings, a six-month series of sprints, and we still would only decide on a new color for the icon.


I guess a couple of well-run meetings would have prevented this disaster in the first place.


Six months of bureaucratic paralysis would also be better than actually rolling this out.


Sometimes things move slowly for good reason. Wasted meeting minutes is a reasonable tradeoff over rendering the main product unusable like this.


So, like, two more feed refreshes per day? Watching the requests in dev tools, it's definitely based on fetches and not impressions.


I suspect this is less about scraping and more about artificial manipulation of view counts to both push certain scams/tweets to the top. I don't think they are providing advertising kickbacks yet, but that would only amplify this.


Some are suggesting that the rise in scraping is a direct result from Twitter killing it’s free API, and that there are a range of organisations whos work relies on this information who have now had to resort to other means of attempting to get the same info.


There is no actual evidence of any of that though.


Alphabet people talking about Twitter on Mastodon


So 99% of accounts that are not verified are restricted to viewing max 600 tweets a day, which means if you do more than casually check Twitter once a day, you're fucked. No wonder everything is breaking.

But that's OK. Twitter has a big engineering team that should be able to sort this out soon. Oh, wait...


Yeah my limit hit after 20-25 minutes of total screen time. What a mess.


Same- rate limited after 20 mins. Way to force me to move elsewhere.

Advertising must really be in the hole to force users off the site like this.


This kills any advertising revenue they have and I'm sure twitter blue subscribers won't be happy about this if it keeps going on. I wonder if they will give twitter blue subscribers an even higher limit so that they can actually use it.


/s or not /s? 25 minutes seems like plenty to me. But I also have HN noprocrast enabled.


25 minutes is easy to hit when something is happening (be it a world event, sporting event, etc).

Case in point: I was watching the F1 sprint race this afternoon, taking part in a few discussions on Twitter about it as I always do. It took 10 minutes for my rate limit to come up, so thats me done on Twitter for the day, and advertisers not getting impressions.


25 minutes is nothing when a major event is happening. Like just last week, I was intensely following the Wagner Group rebellion minute-by-minute without sleeping. A limit would make it impossible to watch history unfold in real-time.


Conspiracy theory of the day: He knows about something big that is going to happen soon and the breakage is intentional.


I also have a Twitter screen time limit, just not for 20 minutes.


Which Twitter replacement are people moving to (edit:looks like Bluesky if they can keep the servers up)?

I’m a big fan of Elon and what he’s built so I wasn’t planning on leaving, but can’t even use it now. Mastodon still seems too complicated to get the masses on. Where will non-tech folks go?


I created a Mastodon account yesterday before I even knew about this and it was surprisingly easy and user-friendly. The big thing it's missing, for me, is a way to find the Mastodon accounts for people you follow on Twitter. If more of the AI/ML community switched to Mastodon, I wouldn't have any need for Twitter.


I don’t have a problem for myself, but many non tech folks I know were not going to move over and I like to have a mix of folks I follow.


had you done this before the API was closed you'd have had access to a bunch of tools that let you find twitter users on mastodon


There used to be tools for this but they went by the wayside with the Twitter api changes.


Bluesky is having some degraded performance due to "record-high traffic" (according to them).

As a casual user, it's noticeable how many people are posting now.


Yeah, noticed a lot of dormant follows pop up on my home feed again.


That’s still invite only though right?


Yeah. I think each user gets onr invite per week. Here's an invite code: bsky-social-ejzzv-3pehr


Thank you much. Greatly appreciated. Trying it out now


Looks like you got it. Have fun!


Been on Mastodon since November. Signup was done in seconds. Finding people to follow was done gradually.

It's lively, and I use it everyday.

TBH, I don't really miss the people that don't want to come over.


Not an engineering issue. Compute, and in the end, energy, has a cost. You weren't aware of it because, as someone mentioned, it was subsidized before. Now you are aware. You're free to contribute by paying, if content is worth to you, or walk away. There are alternatives, but you can't escape the fact that moving all those bits is not free.


Why is it suddenly so costly only after Elon took over considering Twitter was borderline profitable before he took over?


it was never profitable


Wrong, they had net profits 15 out of 18 quarters from 2018-2022

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...


Also, probably fairly considered the cost of doing business, but that includes a substantial fine Twitter had to pay. And Covid troubles.

Just good to know for context.

I’m really not sure where this narrative is coming from. It‘s always so weird to me. Why be so wrong?


> Compute, and in the end, energy, has a cost.

making sure that nobody can see ads by ratelimiting them too hard really helps with this, or so I'm told


I'm increasingly concerned that Bluesky has missed its moment. It got a ton of hype when it started rolling out invites, but that died down pretty quickly. Now it's been a couple months and they're still not open.

Events like this would be a perfect opportunity to grab users from Twitter. But they're not ready.


Sounds like Google+ in a way, they limited it to invite only for a long time which caused a lot of the second wave users to get fed up, only for the low interest on actually opening it up causing Google to feel the need to ram it down everyone's throat, and both periods contributed to its negative perception.


For the longest time I thought Bluesky was just another euphemism for Twitter, like this site is sometimes called Orange Site. I don't see it becoming the next Twitter; if anything Mastadon has the best chance except I always misspell it.


Don't forget about Nostr, which has seen an absolutely incredible amount of development over the last 6 months.

Damus (ios) - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/damus/id1628663131

Amethyst (android) - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitorpampl...

Satellite (web) - https://satellite.earth

Primal (web) - https://primal.net

Iris (web) - https://iris.to

Snort (web) - https://snort.social

Coracle (web) - https://app.coracle.social

All interoperable. All open source.


I've used Nostr a handful of times and am impressed with how responsive the network appears to be. But the problem I have with it is that the default feed (or whatever its called) is chock full of crypto nonsense. Terrible first impression.

I made a test post and was immediately pinged by two crypto bots. Yeah no thanks.


That's a fair point, and most of the people on nostr are aware of the need to diversify. In fact, as of last week you can create Reddit-like sub-communities on nostr with rules like "no crypto content" which should help a lot.


Snowden jumped on today https://satellite.earth/@Snowden@Nostr-Check.com


Yeah I signed up for the wait list, but it's been months, and...nada. Seems like if they're that bogged down, it's got some real problems.


The site seems like its creaking under the strain of everyone checking it right now.


Where is the bluesky site? I tried to find it recently and ended up on the app store where I saw that I needed an invite to join, and then I closed it and never came back.


It's still invite only, unfortunately.


https://bsky.app/


Would be a pity if so, such a promising technology where you finally have a chance to own your content and connections


Bluesky is great in comparison. Not sure it's going to ever be as big as Twitter, but it's a great alternative to Mastodon


I concur. For me the lack of an algorithm is a bug, not a feature, and the way bluesky lets you pick your own algorithms (via feeds) is an amazing improvement.

I am active on both Mastodon and BlueSky, but I'm finding my self way more on BlueSky lately.


So you're just posting to say you got an invite.


Didn't help that Jack jumped ship back to Twitter


If Musk had shut down the site completely, he could have had the same effect without looking like he was completely incompetent.

Pretty odd to see somebody burn up all their public goodwill, at the cost of billions of dollars. The man must be hurting internally, there's no other explanation for such self destructive behavior.


I doubt it's a reaction to him hurting internally. I think it's a consequence of being disconnected from the rest of the world. I think he thinks what he's doing is both right and popular, and in his bubble that's true.

Leaving aside completely that one of the luxuries you can buy as a billionaire is that you can develop an impermeable bubble, I've seen lots of people do similar actions at a smaller scale.


It probably doesn’t help that he surrounds himself with these weird sycophants. I mean, Jason Calacanis! I’d completely forgotten he even existed. You cannot convince me that his involvement was for any other reason than he’s really into Musk.

And the bluetick-reply-promotion thing will only have reinforced that. Presumably the reason he’s so keen to encourage all this is some sort of inadequacy, so the “hurting inside” thing still kinda works, mind you.


This is really classic divorced guy stuff. Even if he is showing a stiff upper lip, this behavior seems very transparent.

A bubble would probably manifest a bit differently, from my very limited experience. The billionaires of the past that did this had a lot more dignity as they fell apart, because they were at least more private and not trying to put on a public show.

But this is all arm-chair psychology, who knows what's actually going on. I believe none of the public statements from the PayPal mafia, it's all meant to influence public opinion and the statements have little bearing on their true reasoning.


The man must be hurting internally, there's no other explanation for such self destructive behavior.

Or he's high AF.


I’ve got the requisite three twitter accounts (one for being nice, one for trolling, and one for porno) and each of them got rate limited after less than two minutes of scrolling. Wasn’t he just yesterday crowing about their “user-seconds”?


I love that you were honest. I two of those three.


So, is the second account nice or for trolling?


Just personal and porn. No trolling.


I think it was a pro-DeSantis move because Trump had a rally Saturday


Needless to say, with those limits, Twitter is basically unusable. I really doubt these ridiculous limitations can be explained just by a sudden urge to scrape. Why limit verified accounts, for example?


I am guessing twitter fucked around and now are in the finding out phase.

I bet some of their infra is crumbling under the stress of all bs Musk pulled.


There was reporting that they were scrambling to move some infrastructure off Google since they were going to be cut off after refusing to pay their bills. The deadline was June 30, though there was additional reporting saying Linda Yaccarino restarted payments - https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-google-clo...


Hahaha. If this caused it and it's actually googlw cutting them off this is beyond hilarious.


I am 100% sure that I didn’t load 300 tweets in the official app today. I was only accessing an account where I follow 17 people. I just counted and there were 14 new tweets (RTs counted as 2 tweets) in my feed from today (the average for a typical day in this account). And I was rate-limited today.

In the best scenario, the change is really intended, but they messed something with the implementation and Musk will never admit it.

In the worst, their infra is crumbling and they are inventing excuses to save face.


Twitter crumbling is the best case scenario imho.

This will show that you cannot run it with a skeleton crew and that the decisions made were either extremely naive or extremely dumb and filled with hubris


The deadly combo is running a skeleton crew while rapidly implementing new changes. This just presents an exponentially higher workload for the remaining staff who may not have the institutional knowledge required to successfully tackle those problems.


And we get the nice side effect of Twitter being dead.


Guessing the app preloaded responses to the tweets you read?


That’s my guess. Or something on the “for you” tab


I read that they've resumed paying Google for their cloud infra... maybe Melon just paid for some low tier and he's yelling at his engineers and they're desperately trying to not hit the limits of those resources.


This was all foreseen:

“Things will be broken. Things will be broken more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in more severe ways,” he says. “Everything will compound until, eventually, it’s not usable.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...


Because they could be compromised and used by a careless third-party?


Why would Twitter's new verification system be compromised?


There’s nothing to “compromise.” Being generous and accepting that this is meant to deter scrapers, a scraper could simply pay their eight bucks to avoid the rate limit.


Stolen credentials of such an account and hardly ever used by its legit owner.

The hard part is the 'hardly ever used by its legit owner', not the "stolen credendials".


Verified accounts are limited to 6k tweets/day. Assume the average human is awake for 16 hours a day. That's 6.25 tweets/minute if you did literally nothing but scroll through twitter all day long for 16 hours straight. Please explain how that makes the site "unusable" unless of course you are a non-human bot scraping site content.


You only scroll past 6.25 tweets per minute?

An easier way of thinking about this is, 12 followed tweets with 50 replies each, 600 limit reached.

Do that in 10 idle times throughout your day (lots of people do more, like, say, Elon), and you hit even the verified limit.


Do you use Twitter? Even at the best of times, you learn to flip though fairly quickly skimming over the nonsense, and since the ascension of naughty ol’ mr car bluetick replies get promoted to the front of the queue, so you have to scroll past a sea of bullshit to get to the real replies.

Twitter with 600 tweets a day is clearly unusable. That’s one large thread, and you’ll scroll past most of it anyway.


I don't use Twitter. (Or haven't since ~2006).

That sounds like a miserable user experience in general, what compels you to seek out that experience?


I don't use twitter either but I guess it's the same reason many of us come here. We find it interesting and/or entertaining. I know I've had days where I killed hours on HN. I try to avoid it, but still probably spend more time here than I get in compensating benefit. Very little of what is discussed here is really important in a significant way if you take a step back and evaluate it honestly.


HN is very different in the sense that HN moderation and culture encourages users to be civic. Twitter incentizes for the opposite.


Twitter is extremely addictive and bring the worse in people. There's a constant flow of information, lots of arguments, lots of famous people (also addicted). For some reason, HN likes to pick on Facebook, but Twitter is by far the most toxic social network.


Oh, I’m essentially off it since naughty ol’ mr car took it over; it used to be better (though even then, there’s a reason it was affectionately known as the hellsite).


By your logic, everyone with a paid subscription constitutes "a sea of bullshit" and the "real replies" are at the back of the line? That's the most hipster-esque description of Twitter I've ever heard. Underground Twitter, it's where the cool kids hang out and vape behind the gymnasium.

This sounds more like unresolved personal grudges rather than an issue with the platform itself and the masses that use it. If you have a problem with the 600 tweet limit you can pay $8.

Everyone seems to forget that Twitter was bleeding money under the previous leadership. Unlimited free shit has its practical limits.


This is incorrect, Twitter was profitable 16 quarters of the last 20 quarters under the past leadership. Elon tried to rewrite some of Twitter's history, suggesting Twitter's financial problems were always this bad... but the financial situation only really became drastically worse the moment he bought Twitter, saddled it with 13 billion high interest rate debt, and advertisers fled, cutting Twitter's revenue in half. Neither firing 80% of employees nor shutting down multiple datacenters & skipping rent can compensate for this.


Thank you for shedding light on this. Twitters biggest financial problem prior to Elons purchase was growth. There loses were mainly them spending money on try to find an avenue of growth.


In general, yes. Those who have to pay for attention are very rarely worth paying attention to, and the bluetick option doesn’t get you much other than artificial attention.

This isn’t theoretical; look at any high-traffic tweet (well, you can’t now; it’s broken. But if it comes back.) The top replies these days are virtually guaranteed to be nonsense.

Again I must ask, have you actually used the bloody website? It’s hard to imagine a regular user not being aware of this; it’s hard to miss.


The sea of bullshit is the fact the page is laid out like this

Interesting Tweet Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweet x 20 Related Replies x 20 Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweet x 20 And so on.

The sea of bullshit to me is the huge chunks of Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweets that are thrown into the reply chains.


One correction: It’s tweets fetched via the API, not tweets actually viewed. An unattended open tab could easily bust the limit as twitter fetches more for your feed.


It isn’t actually “tweets read”, it’s tweets loaded.

If you for instance open the @elonmusk tweet announcing this, it will load dozens if not hundreds of replies, and those will all be counted against your quota. Do that a few times and you’re done in a few minutes.

I got rate limited after a few minutes of normal use. (Like most users I don’t have Twitter blue.)


>That's 6.25 tweets/minute if you did literally nothing but scroll through twitter all day long for 16 hours straight. Please explain how that makes the site "unusable" unless of course you are a non-human bot scraping site content.

Are you kidding? 6,000 tweets is literally like 10 minutes of scrolling through twitter. You're assuming each tweet to be worthy of being read. They aren't. You scroll through hundreds of them to find good threads.


6.25 tweets/minute is nothing. The feed generates a ton of junk (ads, redundant QTs, straight up noise) so there are certainly periods where I will scroll past 6 junk tweets in 1-2 seconds.


With a more normal 100 tweets viewed per minute, a verified user would hit the limit in an hour, which is quite low for the kind of power user that would purchase twitter blue.


I can't imagine someone scrolling as slowly as in your example. I'm certain I scroll at least 100 tweets/minute.


For 16 hours straight with no breaks? Your phone's battery would die before that was exceeded.


16 hours? If you're scrolling 100 tweets/min, you'd hit the unverified user limit within 6 minutes, and the verified user limit within an hour


I don't understand, are you actually reading 100 tweets/minute, or just endlessly scrolling through random data for thumb exercise?

When you make the good faith assumption that people are actually reading through the content, the numbers start to seem a bit more rational.


Did you actually read the tweet that you replied to?

> "I'm certain I scroll at least 100 tweets/minute."

Many Twitter users, including literally the person you are in conversation with, scroll through dozens/hundreds of tweets a minute.

Not sure if you're actually used Twitter before, but many tweets are only a line or two of text, and it doesn't take more than a second to process them.

Additionally, if you're quickly scrolling through replies or someone's history to try to find something, it can render hundreds of tweets in a matter of seconds.


The grandparent comments are saying that allegedly the limitation is tweets loaded not read. If you scroll past tweets to get to content you actually want to read, allegedly people have reached the daily limits after only a few minutes after opening twitter.

The good faith assumption here is that Twitter only counts tweets read but does that mean the client reads the tweet or the user? The server delivered them all the same, whether a human reads it or not. So does delivery of the tweet by loading it onto the device count or some nebulous amount of time spent lingering on the tweet?


I don’t believe assuming every tweet is read in a feed is good faith. There isn’t a single social media app that I use where I am not quickly scrolling past nonsense all the time.


Just for reference, let's say HN added a similar rate limit. Opening this thread would cost you over 500 comments towards that rate limit. It doesn't mean you read all 500 comments on this post.


Your "good faith assumption" is just not the consumption profile of a twitter user. Scrolling through 100 tweets in a minute is completely plausible.


Nobody consumes twitter that way.


At 100 tweets/minute they would reach the limit in an hour, wouldn't they?


More like 6 minutes (600/100) if they're scrolling throughout. Perhaps unrealistic but even given generous allowances, a frequent user of Twitter is screwed within the hour, yes.


Twitter can also be used on the desktop.

I leave it running in a window while I do other things, and check in a few times a day. Thanks to Twitter product "development", the feed now auto-refreshes itself when you get back to it.


I hit the 600 post limit in about an hour, so how they're counting that seems kind of suspect. There are dozens of tweets you may scroll past or comments you may load for any one that you care about.


This is going to hit their impression numbers really hard? And probably avg. CTR as well since most of those hardcore users will not be able to see most of tweets.

I guess Elon probably decided this something like "ok, 99% of those users are reading less than 300 tweets a day! If it's more than that, then those are all bots! Why don't we block them? It will save API cost a lot!"


Elon is fixing Twitter by reducing the amount of ads people see. Brilliant strategy.


That seems plausible. Which is incredibly sad.


Yes it will


I don't know whether or not Twitter is actually seeing unprecedented levels of traffic due to ChatGPT plugins or whatever else—I personally doubt it, but I'm willing to believe it's possible.

However, that Twitter can't keep up with the load is completely unsurprising after the way Musk treated Twitter's engineers. You can't indiscriminately shed 80% of the company[0] and expect to have magically retained the key people who understand your distributed system well enough to adapt it to new strains and pressures. There were people in that 80% who knew how to solve this problem and are no longer available to help. There are probably people in the remaining 20% who know how to solve it but are afraid to speak up because Musk has created a hostile work environment.

[0] https://www.engadget.com/80-percent-of-twitters-full-time-st...


I refuse to believe that Twitter is so hammered by scrapers that it can’t even serve text content.


Yeah, it sounds like bullshit, even before you notice who is saying it.

I absolutely love that the solution is to penalise users for engaging with the platform; looking at replies for one tweet must be, what, a hundred tweets? And better not reply to something yourself because it’ll cause a timeline refresh and cost you another hundred quota!


if they penalize users, how they're going to get more data from the said users to sell.


I don't think it's about servers getting hammered so much as it's about AI causing them to rethink the value of their data, then deciding user hostility is the best way to extract said value


Or just another stick to try to get people to pay. It’s like watching a precocious 7th grader play product manager.


Can't wait for Elon's AI startup sending me answers in 1/35 threads.

I think Elon's real plan is to ride the AI hype train, and the best way to do that is to pretend that Twitter is their "moat".

With his capacity for bullshit and the market's willingness to give gobbles of money to bullshit, I'm sure he can ride his bullshit AI startup to $50B valuation easily.


Or that they haven’t paid Google server bills for 4 months and Google threatened to cut them off on July 1st


And do tell us, what value would thar data actually have ?

I mean apart from maybe training a model to run influence operations on failing twitter?

In which world is the ‘data’ from twitter actually of any real world value with Chinchilla law pushing us from quantity to quality?


There might be a huge uptick in scraping recently because of AI companies trying to train their own LLMs.


But also to penalize paying customers. Sad part is people are defending him.


It has been absolutely hilarious watching the death of Twitter but also concerning because Twitter served (until this terrible decision) as an important tool for popular personalities and important local services or government officials to communicate with the general public or their audiences and without that, getting important information might become a little more difficult which concerns me.


ZDNet published an article just yesterday that looked into Twitter's engagement data and it looks like Twitter is bleeding users like never before. [0]

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-seeing-record-user-eng...


https://mastodon.social/@sysop408@sfba.social/11063983312372... Like I don't know if this even counts as analysis let alone if it's right, but damn it would be funny if this was self inflicted.


They're calling him Space Karen in the comments. Hilarious.


Can I get a refund for tweets that I didn't want to see so I'm not locked out? If viewing a bad tweet means I can't view a good tweet, that seems unlikely to increase my unregretted minutes.


With the SNR of Twitter that would mean 100 bad tweets and maybe one good one.


It's a brilliant plan, AI means the data is more valuable (for today at least), users generate the data, so punish the users until they flee and... profit?

Even for Musk, even for a debt-ridden Twitter with no hope of survival, this is impressively terrible.


This is just insane. He really wanna take this app to zero users. Can't believe there exists people who think Elon is smart.


People are not unidimensional creatures. It's possible to be smart when it comes to certain things and a complete dumbass for ALL other things.


Yea. Perhaps elon is good at other things than sound business decisions.


He seems to be pretty good at taking credit for other's people work.


He’s good at butchering a quote from “The Princess Bride”


Unfortunately. And specialization pays.


Some people will stick to their priors through thick and thin. I've learned to just enjoy watching the blue check mark crowd contort to whatever is the new thing they agree with Elon about and then vehemently back it up with other reasons too. Pretty sure a lot of the Twitter accounts that are famous because he interacts with them started out as liberals who liked EVs and are now tweeting about how they're worried about too few white babies


But with the rate limits, we can’t even hate-read their tweets anymore. This is probably a good thing.


I’ll really be able to get my procrastination under control, now that Reddit has banned third party clients, and Twitter has limited users to viewing 600 tweets/day.


All these Twitter Blue subscribers who thought they could buy views and engagement must be thrilled that they're now competing for a very limited resource


My first thought on reading this was: "I'm going to unfollow some high volume posters in that case", so they will lose some followers too.


My first thought was: I delete my twitter account and get more productive.


Good guy Elon, giving people time to contemplate on each tweet, helping them unlearn mindless scrolling habits

Can we also have it closed on Sundays?


> Can we also have it closed on Sundays?

I'm getting flashbacks to the awful luddite boomer propaganda Spielberg crowbarred into the end of "Ready Player One" where he made the online virtual world closed on Tuesdays and Thursdays.


That was from the book


wow _really_? Sorry, I had no idea someone could be capable of writing a book about virtual worlds and then imagine shutting them down two days a week. My apologies Mr Spielberg.


it’s a story about how all of society takes place inside of a video game and at no point in the story does it ever contemplate whether or not that is a good thing. The story is just “save the princess from the dragon” but the princess is the oasis.


This is actually pretty disastrous.

Right now people are logging onto Twitter to catch up on events in France...and it's not working.

I never believed that the exodus of users after the takeover would be terminal for the platform, but this definitely could be if they don't fix it fairly quickly.


Noteworthy if true that Twitter's Google Cloud renewal date was June 30th and they were attempting to migrate away as quickly as possible:

https://twitter.com/RiverTamYDN/status/1675164339274240001


To those getting "Rate Limit Exceeded" or without an account, this is Elon Musk's tweet:

   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


The fact that even paid subscribers are limited to 6000 posts a day (seems like a lot, very much isn't if you're a remotely active user) is utterly bonkers. What other platform works like this?


And that's probably 6,000 tweets loaded via API, not 6,000 that you might care about. Don't they promote and show you posts from blue checkmark people even if you're not following them?


Yes, they count


I've been busy all day, and when I just opened the app I instantly got "cannot retrieve tweets at this time". No way I've reached 600 or 6000 posts. Got it from the first tweet I tried viewing.


From comments and personal experience, it is incredibly likely Elon screwed up the rollout and the "600 posts/day" isn't accurate and is triggering much, much sooner than expected.


I think a ton of users will hit 600 "posts read" really quickly, if that's what they're measuring.

Refresh your timeline, load 20 new tweets. Tap a tweet, load 10 replies, etc.


Even if Twitter loads 20 tweets, it doesn't mean you've read 20 tweets.

This is not semantics, as tweet impressions are a separate metric Twitter tracks and would more intuitively represent reads.

Unless Twitter engineering did some malicious compliance for Elon.


Personally I wouldn't assume that the app that's been demonstrated to count "views" in extremely sketchy ways has suddenly started caring about the distinction between loading and reading a post. Especially when the intent is pretty obviously to herd users towards subscribing.


Fair counterpoint: Tweet views are a vanity metric (which is why Elon likes them), but tweet impressions are a required metric for advertisers to track ad CTR and any shenanigans there will actually kill Twitter.


If the point is to stop scrapers, they would _have_ to use “tweets fetched” as the metric.


The bullshit reason given for this was to “prevent bots and scrapers”, so I strongly suspect they’d be using API responses, rather than impressions.

Especially so considering how quickly some people are reporting the rate limiting impacts them


600 tweets is like 1 timeline reload for me and i follow less that 100 accounts


Don't forget about Nostr, which has seen lots of development this year with multiple interoperable clients.

(iOS)

Damus - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/damus/id1628663131

(Android)

Amethyst - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitorpampl...

(Web)

https://satellite.earth

https://primal.net

https://iris.to

https://snort.social

https://app.coracle.social


>Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won't happen again.

Are there any Musk dickriders still willing to defend this guy who just lies to your face?


This has to be the dumbest idea I've ever seen any social media company make and that says a lot.

First, I can't find any documentation explaining the rate limits. Just his tweet. Is this a rolling limit? Where do I see how many posts I've allegedly read? Do replies count as posts? Also, you can't go back and re-read the tweets that counted toward your limit.

His tweets are getting over 20,000 replies. That means that if posts count, even if you paid for your account you still can't read all the replies for a single tweet. This also worsens the experience for existing paid users because the whole point of posting something is so that your followers see it. And if he's trying to get new paid users, why would anyone pay to get a far worse experience than they were just getting for free yesterday?

To add to the absurdity, the error you get is "Something went wrong. Try reloading." And once you hit the rate limit you can't even view the Twitter Support account or your own profile. You can however still see Tweets in your notifications.

On top of that, this isn't how you handle bots/AI. That's not the purpose of rate limiting. Wrong tool for the job. This is incompetence no matter how you look at it. None of this makes any sense.


I can confirm that scrolling through replies does count. So reading the replies to Elon's tweets to figure out what's happening makes you hit the rate limit.


I can't use Twitter today after about an hour of browsing my feed this morning. Which is hilarious because it's the first day I stopped using Reddit.


Part of me is loving this effective dismantling of Twitter and Reddit.

Not because I’m addicted to them but because the barrier to access them is sufficiently high that I virtually never access them and for Twitter especially (my Reddit/Apollo just shut off yesterday) it’s decreasingly occupying space in my mind, creating more “boredom” which is super useful for imagination and introspection.


I guess he's trying to get more people to pay money for access to Twitter but in exchange they still must view intrusive ads in the replies. If Twitter is unsustainable without such measures then it's unlikely that the changes he's making are going to make it more sustainable. Whoever steps into the CEO role will have to continue constantly shoving ads in people's faces to pay for the data centers and bandwidth.


Why are tech elite types continuing to be supportive of this guy? Never seen $44 billion get lit on fire so plainly.


They're all temporarily embarrassed unicorns


Because members of the same collective interest groups cover for each other.


The past seven months of Twitter as observed through HTTP response latency of various endpoints exposed to the client.

Interesting to see the drop of latency in May inline with BlueSky and the rise in the latency of backend services which looks like a “robbing Peter to pay Paul” situation with compute.

https://bsky.app/profile/ifred.bsky.social/post/3jzi7qzjzzd2...

The Grafana - https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/0ybkyhO4k/twitter-death-wat...


It's amazing how much a rate-limited Twitter isn't Twitter any more:

- It makes the "for you" tab even worse, now their discovery mechanism takes away quota from the Tweets you wanted to see

- I have no idea how many tweets I view in a day: but now that I'm thinking about it I'm actively closing after a quick check

- I feel pressured to read to the end of what's loaded before refreshing (I paid for those!) but it's new content that makes Twitter special

- 6000 is awfully low for your highest paid tier

- I bet most new users don't hit 300 -- but most new power-users will. I don't know if there are any future-power-users who haven't already tried Twitter but they might never get hooked, especially since your first day is going to have the highest junk:goodstuff ratio


I have no idea how my browsing of Twitter via the web UI is exceeding any rate limit, but I want to thank Elon for breaking my Twitter addiction because now it won't let me see anything. Please keep limiting the ways in which people can use Twitter.


Interesting to imagine how a Mars colony might be run under this sort of leadership.


Exactly like in Total Recall when Cohaagen cuts off the air.


Non-verified colonists are now limited to 600 breaths per day.


Are people really under the delusion that Elon will be alive in time for a Mars colony?


My theory is the demise of Twitter is intentional, giving people a voice on a platform that competes with the MSM is too uncomfortable for those at the top who had control for decades. They want it like they had it before, where they had total control of all media dissemination. Consider right now certain words and phrases get automatically shadowbanned. That many far left political commentators have been outright banned. The goal of this system is monopoly, control of mass media is part of that.


Let's see what happens to twitters ad revenue when they reduce the V in CPV to 0.01% of what it was the day before.


If feels weird that this is happening on the same day that Reddit is also limiting their API. Both are citing AI as a major reason for this.

It’s suicidal for the platform, I think it’ll be reversed - in less than 24 hours probably.

In the unlikely event it isn’t, there’s more to this. Wild conspiracy: OpenAI is about to open source their code. Sam Altman is on the board at Reddit and gave them a heads up, maybe Twitter caught wind of this and is locking things down whilst they still can


As always, follow the money. Yesterday was the last day of the financial quarter. Q3 reporting starts today. What better way to show that hockey stick graph to investors?


I genuinely don’t understand what he’s doing, twitter is an ad supported businesses and and how is making it so that no one can see ads going to work? Engagement is going to absolutely tank when no one can use the site


Scraping using a verified account (6000*30=180k tweets for 8$) seems to be cheaper than using the API (you would need 4 basic accounts (50k tweets, 100$/month) - is this pricing for real?)


At first I read it as a limit on the number of posts per day you can create, which seemed very generous. Realized that it was the number of posts you can read which is unreasonably low.

Maybe it's a test to see how many power users would convert to verified?


Another master stroke of genius from this first principles maverick. Everything in every field is so simple for him, it's a wonder every one else has been just too stupid to try these ideas before. Horribly mismanaged Twitter that was before Elon failing to the tune of around break even is now going to have hundreds of millions of paid blue checks for sure


He's trying to get more people to commit to giving Twitter $8/month. I'm not sure if it's going to work because I suspect people will just change their browsing habits and continue not paying. Next CEO will have to figure out how to continue getting more advertising dollars to continue paying for the servers and the bandwidth.


Think about the Twitter Blue users you’ve seen on Twitter before this.

Who on Earth would want to pay $8/month to join a site where you can effectively only interact with that kind of person?


In fact, I'd be more likely to pay money to never see a verified post ever again.


Maybe that’s the plan.


6000 posts/day is still nothing because I probably consume faster than 1 post/second on Twitter.


Nothing is more likely to drive people away from social media than trying to put a dollar value on it.

None of them are worth paying for, not a single one.


I do pay for YouTube. I don't know if it's worth it, are ad blockers working well there these days?


Is Youtube social media? I mean it has a comment section, but to me it's always been a content delivery service for videos, first and foremost.


There are also far fewer creators/posters and far more value per post, especially when you consider that YouTube carries a lot of commercial content (music & music videos)

Would I pay for ad-free access to a giant catalogue of music (even though I can use an ad blocker) or to support talented people putting hours into composing and editing content I like? Sure, why not. Would I pay to see people's random short-form thoughts? Hell no.


You said it, paying for YT is a no-brainer for me, because it's how I discover new music, listen to jazz and classical concerts, and follow a few big names I enjoy.

There's nothing like that on Twitter, FB, Reddit, etc.


uBlock Origin is working (at least for now). There are various anti-paywall lists as well for your NYT/WaPo/Boston Globe needs.


> New unverified accounts to 300/day

This rate limit may stop the most extreme scrapers, but it won't come close to stopping moderately large operations. AFAIK nothing is stopping you from creating as many accounts as you want, each of them associated to either an email address or a phone number. Even if they made it more strict and required both a phone number and an email address, it would still be a trivial process. They will give up in the near future and implement some annoying Amazon style captcha, which scrapers will again circumvent with rotating proxies and captcha solvers :-)


600 posts/day... seriously? I'll exceed that limit in 10 minutes(I probably browse tweets like 1 post/second in my native language, Japanese).


Actually it seems to be 900 detail views. So it is 15 minutes.

Response headers for me:

X-Rate-Limit-Limit: 900 X-Rate-Limit-Remaining: 0 X-Rate-Limit-Reset: 1688318503


I wonder if there will be a counter somewhere in the corner: "You had read 95% of today's quota".


@elonmusk: Good idea! Rolling out next week, along with payments to creators and Tesla FSD!


Oh awesome, yeah I hit the limit by about 5pm. How damn stupid do you have to be to not only restrict viewing to logged in users, but to then limit how long those eyeballs can look at your adverts.

Between Reddit's implosion and Twitter being run by a moron it's making it incredibly easy to get work done.


Interesting that he doesn't even want my ad revenue anymore. Well good riddance. The sooner I can be off this addictive website the better.


Remember when he said twitter would have 1 billion users by 2024


He misspoke and actually meant one, billionaire user by 2024


I wish I had a bookie that would give me odds on musks statements.


People that paid the $84- are you going to seek a refund? Doesn't seem like 8000 tweet-reads/day was the service you paid for, particularly if this lasts more than a few weeks.


More and more, I'm starting to root for Zuck in the fight.


I really want to see cage match between them; pretty sure Zuck will wreck Musk.


Zuck did compete in a BJJ event, so yes pretty sure he'd crush him.


I'm not a fan of Zuck, but Elon and Spez have worked really hard to become even more unlikeable and detestable than Zuckerberg, that's a huge feat.


Hard to imagine limiting the ad views of your non-paying users is going to help fix your revenue short-fall.


That's why none of the explanations given can possibly be thorough, and I'm finding very few plausible explanations on HN either.

Most seem to be happy to blame whoever they view as their opposing team, which rarely leads to wisdom.


In the era of "if it's free, you're the product", I have to admit that this is a strange move.

While I personally would never pay 8$/month for the blue check (who cares?), I can understand that someone might want to pay to be up-to-date. 600 posts per day in some cases might not be enough, considering how easy it is to navigate through tweets in an hour or so. However, I think this is the wrong move.

I would have added the possibility to monetize with tweets, only accessible to blue checks - like premium content. This way, you pay the content creator and who wants to access special content will have to pay for it (with the subscription first, eventually with micropayments). But never block access to free content, never ever!


Maybe i am wrong, but isn't that what happens currently with different services a sign that the "it's free, you're the product" thing kinda starts to fail or needs to get renamed into "it's free, you're our product"?

Let's assume it's all about ML/AI learning or data mining. Then you either keep a free, but walled garden (to be the only one to mine the data of your users) or you offer a "for pay" service (to offset the cost of the increased load on your network / systems), not mining your users data and allowing them to share content public.


If this stays around that's Twitter dead and buried as a product.


For many official goverment channels public Tweets was the only reason to stay in twitter. In many countries (e.g. in europe) the information from these organisations need to be public by law. Could be the turning point for many agencies etc. to leave twitter


People getting rate limited message cannot see that due to rate limit.


Yeah the whole site just seems broken to me.


i can't even see mine ..


Sad week for the internet, both twitter and reddit gone to shit


Reducing the amount of time spent on the app will surely make advertisers happy!


Thinking about how both The Flash and Indiana Jones 5 are doing disastrously at the box office, and likely spent a lot of ad budget on Twitter that is now getting zero return. Can't imagine Disney and WB are going to be thrilled.


With Reddit API changes, and now this I think the universe is sending us a signal to start being productive


lol, I created an account yesterday after it went into authenticated only mode and was hit by rate limiting after like 3 minutes - gg elon


This seems like death for an ad supported model on Twitter. Why would you buy ads on a social network that deliberately restricts the number of posts (and thus ads) that a user can view?


"following temporary limits"

So there is a targeted attack on twitter?

Long term, it would kill Twitter which is the opposite of what Elon has said before about being the town square.

Time will tell.


Is it really because of scraping? Or because he didn't pay the GCP bill? xD


Is openAI (and all new upstart model training data scrapers) really this scary to Twitter's existence? I understand that their desire to scrape all of your content for free is absolutely total bullshit, and I actually find myself sympathetic to this. So I get the rate limit idea, but can you really not detect a bot vs a user?


It isn't. This is a nonsense excuse.


Twitter is a crack pipe for dopamine hits, which OpenAI has no business in. Highly doubt bots is the actual reason, since they have had that problem since forever. Now, infrastructure bills could be a real reason.


which makes me wonder what's wrong with me that i get absolutely no pleasure from twitter like that or any socials really. i see no difference in reading twitter than watching kardashians, yet everyone else clearly does making me the outlier. i spend so much time solving for edge cases that i am one


And here I thought Silicon Valley’s Datageddon concept was just something Mike Judge and his writers cooked up to make Gavin Belson seem like a lunatic:

https://youtu.be/YPgkSH2050k


Elon has slowly become new model of the comedically eccentric tech CEO parody (e.g. Knives Out: Glass Onion)


Thanks elon for helping me quit twitter addiction.


Will obviously hose Tweetdeck, especially if you follow a lot of active accounts (e.g., reporters and other news sources) and have several columns. OTOH, there are few or no ads on Tweetdeck so Musk et al. likely couldn’t care less.


The sooner Twitter dies the better. Let's hope Musk loses big when it craters.


Lot of Musk bashing in the comments but I'd love to have more technical insight behind this decision. For instance, what rate limiting policy is reasonable for such a service. What was the policy before this decision?


https://mstdn.social/@maxkennerly/110640373859329500

> 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.


It's definitely not a data scraping decision because there are more effective ways to do this. It's something to do with the actual system itself and he wants to delay the truth.


If there really are excessive scrapers i wonder if they will actually attempt to fan out across a bunch of accounts immediately or play chicken with Twitter here. How long does Twitter have to play chicken with them to get them to pay?

Does anyone have any ideas as to how they would approach this differently trying to achieve what twitter is? It seems like a proof of work captcha cost, balanced to the api fee, in the background or past a threshold of post views could drive scrapers into paying for the api. But that still requires playing cat and mouse well at the new accounts gate.


Noticed this earlier but didn't realize how intentional it was until now. Since Musk claims the account-wall for guests will be lifted eventually, I wonder how this rate-limit will be enforced for those browsing without an account. If by IP address, guests using any somewhat popular VPN would have permanently maxxed out limits. If it is done with some sort of guest cookie / ID, then it will be instantly evadable by clearing cookies. I believe this is similar to what you can do with Quora's account-wall. I am very curious to see what happens.


Semi related: it looks like twitter is currently winning the battle vs adblockers, which made me notice how every third or fourth post is a "promoted" advertisement. I guess it's the same (or even worse) in their mobile apps. There's no way that twitter isn't making money (A LOT) with 1/3 the site being ads? Especially with twitter being much less media heavy than other sites (very far from youtube or even twitch that can easily add up to tens or even hundreds of gigabytes of traffic every month just for myself).


No ads for me, using uBlock origin.


Which adblocker are you using? I don't see any on UBlock Origin.


Less active users -> lower AWS invoice. Smart move... not.


Why not just pull the same move they did with gcp and simply stop paying?


Not sure if it is intentional or not, but it appears that you can still load tweets you received notifications for even after hitting the limit. So a workaround is telling twitter to notify you about all tweets from people you care to read and then scrolling the notification feed (after new tweets come in). If you don’t actually want notifications for these you can turn it off in phone settings and it still works.


1. Hit the account wall imposed, what, yesterday?

2. Begrudgingly make a new account to view Elon's latest meme

3. Scroll for a few minutes

4. Boom!

Now that is how you make a conversion stick. What a genius.


This may have already been discussed. But, if Musk is being honest and this has to do with blocking efforts to scrape content for ML/AI models, then why not block IP ranges from the most common compute services (i.e. aws, gce, digital ocean, etc.)?

That's what streaming services do to block VPNs as far as I understand it.

I would think most efforts are by orgs using those platforms.


Can somebody explain to why all these social media platforms are suddenly clamping down? It’s not that complex or expensive to deliver text at scale in the cloud. If twitter wants to make more money off it’s users, it should add premium features that users will actually pay for instead of killing their golden goose.


This is so strange. Why on earth wouldn't you start with a randomly higher threshold for these apparently abusive use patterns then march them down over the next couple of days? You know, see if the magic smoke comes out. It's just .. weird. It's been down for half a day for me.


Elon seems to have adopted the same business model as Reddit. Lock down the data and sell it to the LLMs. Quite short sighted, but if you're desperate for cash then its probaly an inviting option. Im hoping the alternative to twitter start becoming more generally available soon.


Steve Huffman got the lock-down-the-API idea from Elon.


After hitting rate limit I cannot even read my own tweets (Profile->Tweets). I find it hilarious.

One more thing - it look like rate limit is per client. When hit on mobile app I could normally use TT on web interface till fresh allowance was exhausted. Which did not lasted that long, too.


In early days people left because of leadership reasons, but the tech was still fine. But now, although the tech is there it is caged. I guess early people knew the future better than others and took initiative to leave. At this point no one have to decide between the two.


"Something went wrong. Try reloading."

Edit: I think this made more sense when the thread linked to a tweet.


So, this is an account-associated limitation, even when browsing with the official app and website.


Because twitter is no longer publicly visibly can HN stop accepting submissions pointing to it?


There's also some radical rate-limiting going on, to the point where expanding a tweet on the timeline (to see replies) usually results in an "You have been ratelimited please try again in a few moments" message on the first couple tries.


there's no way on earth they cannot trivially distinguish between a normal user hitting the backend a few times and scrapers so blatant they grind the site to a halt. Is this yet another lame attempt to get people to sign up for his subscription?


So foes anyone have a solution for circum eating this using something like twint or the likes?

I legit just started scraping twitter for competitor info three days ago with it and now that's gone to shit. Could use selenium too but these rare limits...


As a compulsive Twitter user who follows the Russian invasion of Ukraine non-stop, I thank Elon from the bottom of my heart for ridding me of my addiction. I am also trying to launch a product, so the timing is [chef's kiss]/


I wonder if they made this decision because data said revenue from subscriptions from power users could be a lot more than ads.

Reducing dependency on ads, reducing bots & creating their own LLM on top of twitter data may not be a bad idea.


Only if they are making up numbers. Ads are incredibly lucrative, and people don't like spending money.


I wonder why amazon doesn't/can't do this. Either Twitter is doing something terribly wrong by rate-limiting logged in users, or it is absolutely brilliant and innovative.


For me twitter become unusable. I can't verify myself and i don't know really why. After 2 minutes of scrolling i reach my daily limit, so for me Twitter is dead.


You can't even see your own tweets while rate limited, so if I tweet something it goes live but I have no way of deleting it if I made a typo or for example shared sensitive information by mistake; I have a feeling this might be a GDPR violation or similar?


Elon gutted infrastructure, and now Twitter can barely handle Internet loads. It’s one DDoS attack away from service unavailability. Cheap bastard.


A 24 hour reset window for rate limits seems dumb for engagement. I ran out of rate limits on my non paid account in the early afternoon.


Ah, the AOL era is back. First 500h free everyone!


while rate limited i could still view tweets that was sent to my phone via the notification feature. i have it turned on for a few users, so these weren't tweets sent at me.

now i'm just waiting for Huffman to do something similar on reddit. he could get rid of some of those moderators he dislikes by charging to be a moderator. also, to access to nsfw subreddits.


Twitter is unable at this point. I deactivated my account just now. Sad but it was becoming an increasingly frustrating experience.


It's actually a blessing in disguise. I don't get much productivity, and instead waste hours sometimes on there. Thanks!


Honestly? Since the Elon drama started, I've been addicted to this website. This is actually helpful in breaking that.


So when's that first billion-dollar-per-year payment due?

Just trying to calculate the number of years before twitter becomes myspace.

Two? Three?


Could be they are trying to identify bots. Real users will probably leave the app/website on rate limit hit.


So will bots


Has it been reversed already? I'm actively trying to hit the limit on my unverified account without success


Will blue subscribers be getting refunds?


This is suicide


Elon is truly running the platform into the ground. This doesn't even begin to make sense on any level.


I used to think tech/VC was smart…


This is probably good for humankind?


I’m speechless as a regular user. This is so dumb, sure Twitter will die within a year or twos.


I burned through the 600 limit in 13 minutes. This will kill this app, no question about it.


Ah yes, people are getting screen times. That will be appreciated by lot of parents.


Hopefully the data scrapers give up so that these restrictions can be lifted.


It seems the limit does not apply to Quotes and Liked tab on users profiles.


This made me giggle because when they turned off the free API I was using to copy images from tweets I liked so I'd have a backup copy, I replaced my script with a selenium using one that surely costs twitter more in resources. All it does is load my liked page and scroll down for several minutes collecting media as it goes.


It's almost if those "extra" servers had a purpose after all


Right at the beginning of Q3 is suspicious timing. Cloud billing cycle?


Elon Musk's abrupt requirement for users to be logged in to view tweets, along with rate limiting, suggests a problem with the backend. Why do I think this way? Because the decisions does not make sense from the business perspective.

The engineering is probably struggling to deploy the fix in scalable way.


Probably a good thing. People should use less social media.


Businesses gonna go bankruptcy due to "tech debts".


Did Elon not pay the AWS bill? Is that what this is about?


is this a symptom of something going beyond twitter? i'm experiencing loading and lagging all over the place. also hn and google are unusually slow.


I wish Twitter was a public company so I could short it.


Man, this is beyond reality, rate limiting on reading?


finally, society can have a break from all the doom scrolling. I wonder how much mental health benefits we're gonna see overall from this.


Note, twitter communities was down is it still down?


This is an absolutely baffling change. Blocking unregistered and now now throttling normal users? Why?

Handling scraping should be a cost of doing business - not a motive to kill your actual business.


unwinding user success = product death


This is history


How can that genius make such decision?


He's clearly trying to cut costs.


Something went wrong. Try reloading.


Good, back to do some real work.


This 600 tweets/per-whatever strategy certainly is an interesting approach to cutting cost.


Looks like I was right all along.. Elon Musk, the covert agent :)

Hint from years ago https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-spacex-secre...


Steve Huffman and Elon Musk both seem to be so mad about scraping (especially for ML training) that they're willing to make the user experience vastly worse for their users in pursuit of preventing scraping.


If users can't use the platform, there's no data to scrape. Scraping problem fixed. This is a 4D chess move.


Not sure I can believe Melon's reasoning, in any case he probably fired the team that can fight "DDoS'es", so, this is what we get.


didnt he bought twitter for free speech


"temporary"

Elon Musk is an idiot that doesn't know what he's doing. Literally anyone would instantly use up those views.


[flagged]


The "rrrreeeee" is coming from inside the headquarters of Twitter...


lmfao


[flagged]


Flagged for linking to a tweet I can't view since you haven't written what it says


You're complaining that I didn't copy and paste the text of the tweet in my comment?

In the time it took for you to decide to reply, write this comment, and submit it, you couldn't have clicked on a hyperlink?

Elon's tweet speaks for itself--I'm not sure what kind of "gotcha" you're trying to play here.


There's no gotcha. My account hit the rate-limit hours ago and twitter is no longer viewable when logged out, so I literally cannot view what the tweet you linked to is saying...


Twitter is currently broken and very few tweets are loading.


The "stop AI data scrapers temporarily" excuse doesn't hold under scrutiny since there's nothing Elon can do to stop scraping temporarily. If it appears in a web browser, it can be scraped, no exception.

And to what end? If the limits are dropped, the data scrapers will start scraping again.


To those who are blindly accepting this supposed reason, the answer is simple: engineering.


I can't view it. Can you quote it here?

Edit: Comments got moved. Is this the source of the OP's quote?


Twitter managed to withstand high load and scrapers before. Did this suddenly get significantly worse? Is it bad enough that caching or engineering solutions couldn't address the problem?

One reason it _could_ get worse is because Twitter effectively disabled and paywalled their API, which many of these groups could use instead of scraping


Yeah no, people are aware of the stupid excuse.


this is news because its twitter

because people love having the chance to say something bad about elon

because the new cycle is just circular negativity

lol

see you next week when the site is back to normal


Possibly. It is definitely notable that a CEO of a web product of this scale made an announcement that is essentially saying "Either myself and or my employees don't actually know jack shit about how to run a large scale web product". The problems he pointed out are the kind of things you hear in questions in a mid-level swe interview.


This is great. Reading more than 600 posts a day is probably unhealthy anyway.


If only Twitter had a 1:0 signal-noise ratio.


I think you might benefit from reading HN comments about Twitter from ~2010. You will find many you agree with, yet Musk had zero to do with the service.


Since Amazon & Microsoft own the hosting infrastructure, could they not cook up a Twitter/Reddit clone without having to rely on ads?




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