what. the fuck.
Elon Musk, the latest billionaire owner of the online screaming match known as Twitter, sat slumped at his desk, staring at a wall of monitors blinking with a technicolor smorgasbord of error messages. The reason? He’d just let Twitter’s hosting contract with Google lapse because he thought it’d be fun to see if he could migrate it somewhere else. The results? Not so fun.
A comment on Reddit had caught his eye, and he couldn’t shake it. “Every now and then Elon must have a moment of clarity. Where it occurs to him ‘Maybe I am just stupid?’ But then he violently buries the thought.”
“Stupid?” he scoffed aloud to his empty office, sending a mini landslide of Mars Rover prototypes tumbling off his desk. “I’m a genius.”
He remembered how smart he’d felt when he decided to axe the account verification system, only to reinstate it after a week of high-profile mix-ups that included the Dalai Lama being mistaken for a llama enthusiast.
And the content moderation! Who needs it? Well, as it turned out, everyone. Without it, Twitter had turned into a feral wilderness of conspiracy theories, insult slinging, and more unsolicited pictures of eggplants than a greengrocer’s catalog.
And then there was Kanye. “Free Kanye!” he’d declared one afternoon after one too many rocket fuel coffees. But after the notorious rapper had declared war on flannel shirts and clogged up the site with CAPS LOCK tweets, the ban was back on faster than you can say “Kim Kardashian for president.”
“Stupid?” he muttered again, watching as Twitter spontaneously DDOS’d itself like a robotic bull in a digital china shop.
There was a pause. Then a grin spread slowly across Elon’s face, as if he’d just understood the punchline to a particularly tricky joke. “Naaaah,” he laughed, slapping the desk.
He looked at the chaos on the screens, the digital calamity his decisions had wrought, and couldn’t help but chuckle. There was something amusing about being this absurdly, cosmically, hilariously brilliant.
“Back to the drawing board,” he chuckled, picking up a Mars Rover and making it do little jumps across his desk.
This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.
The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.
These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.
Oh my god, this is just too funny.I find it especially bizarre that spez took inspiration and guidance from Musk. I can entertain the possibility of Musk intentionally driving Twitter to the ground (though he sure is taking the scenic route), but Reddit? It just seems like the rich tech bros have collectively lost their minds
Yo for real, what’s up with all these social media sites literally shooting themselves in the foot as we speak?.
Youtube planning to antagonize adblock users and limiting video watching, Reddit killing itself with
bureocracystyle and now Twitter doing this shit. Hopefully shit sites like TikTok or Facebook jump on the wagon too.It goes deeper than that.
This all started with the API changes. Before they were charging a fair price for the API and companies happily paid it for the convenience. Then Elon got greedy he started charging a ridiculous amount for the API so those companies decided it would be worth it to just deal with the annoyance and switch to scraping the website instead. But when you hit the website it’s way less efficient than hitting the API because it’s doing a bunch of mixing and ranking which is a lot more complicated and costly than serving static content, which costs a small fraction of real time algorithmic ranking. So now instead of making money off companies that want their data they’re losing money on the cloud costs to serve the scrapers.
More recently, they haven’t been paying their hosting bills to Google and their service was set to expire at the end of last month. What just happened at the start of this month? They added the limitations. That can’t be a coincidence. Now the Google services weren’t hosting the site itself, otherwise they’d probably be fully down right now, but it was hosting their trust and safety services for things like fighting spam. That could have also been hosting anti scraper services as well. Since they’re so under staffed they probably couldn’t swap the services in time, so instead of having anti scraping services like every other big company on the internet, they decided to cut service instead. It’s just built up incompetence coming to a head.
Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
This is really, really bad for Twitter. The whole reason so many groups and people use it for official communications and announcements is because their audience can easily and freely see it. Rate limiting and requiring an account completely destroy that. And without it, Twitter really doesn’t have much to offer.
Plus this goes directly against advertising lol
This actually isn’t right. It’s because musk has refused to renew twitter’s Google Cloud Services partition, which expired June 30th, and has been (unsuccessful obviously) frantically trying to move twitter’s cloud usage to in-house servers. Twitter has been the most popular social media website for almost a decade and never once have they had this issue. As usual everything musk touches turns to shit.
Oh my god, this is just too funnyThere are several negatives to the limitation too. Advertisers (which are already leaving in droves) are even further discouraged from placing ads that have a much smaller chance of being seen.
Edit: spelling
Therefore any company that puts out notices or alerts via Twitter should immediately exit the platform. Running their own server on mastodon would be a better bet
Transcription for the blind: Screenshot of a Twitter post from Elon Musk, Twitter handle @elonmusk, that says:
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
1:01 PM Jul 1, 2023 3.6M Views
-Transcription from a human volunteer. Let me know how I can do better.
I find this more mildlyhumorous than infuriating. I’m looking forward to a new era where every news article no longer includes a string of embedded tweets. :) As a non-twitter user, this certainly doesn’t encourage me to bother making an account.
I bet the throtteling is not caused by data scraping but by Twitter not paying their Google Cloud bills and therefore now with the new month they got services suspended.
As a former individual who understands the underlying systems, it seems like they botched deployment of a new feature causing issues and cannot figure out how to solve them.
Most of Twitter is and has been in maintenance mode since acquisition (think of 10 man engineering team and 1 left to handle maintenance).
Why are so many people suddenly against Twatter burning? I thought we all wanted that?
Image Transcription: Twitter Post:
Elon Musk, @elonmusk
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits
- Verified accounts are limited to reaching 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
^I’m a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
Twitter and Reddit both dying at the same time was not what I expected in 2023
who had two social media companies dying on their bingo board?
I’m betting on the Trifecta.
We’re still not quite halfway through the year. I just need Zuck to require a VR hat to access facebook and I’ll get a big payout!
Come on Zuck, Metaverse is the future, man! Don’t listen to the naysayers, everyone wants to live in a legless world, you just gotta give them that final push!
I just need Zuck to require a VR hat to access facebook
Didn’t he already require facebook to access VR “hats”? Oh yeah, he did it for occulus headsets.
They have never properly turned a profit - and relied solely on VC money. It was kind of “obvious” from the beginning - this house of cards of completely free services is increasingly unstable.
Both could have been profitable overnight if they wanted to. Reddit doesn’t need 2000+ employees. It’s a simple forum, led by volunteers. It is definitely possible to run it profitably on ads and volunteer premium services.
Spez is simply a moron. Reddit doesn’t need multiple chat/messaging features. It doesn’t need NFTs. It doesn’t need to be tik tok.
the biggest thing to me, in terms of server load, is that reddit does not need to host videos/images. It’s a link aggregate.
I’m only a layman in this particular field, but I imagine it’s a lot lighter on resources to direct people to sites streaming video than to host and serve it all yourself.
Text and database entries are, indeed, Vastly lighter on resources (compute and bandwidth). Bandwidth cost for text is practically free. Managing voting is surely not easy though; every single vote is an additional database entry which means that they cost money to store. Then the vote sorting algorithm has to run pretty frequently. Comments themselves are probably nothing compared to the votes.
But managing voting and sorting is a one-time-cost. Reddit doesn’t let you vote on old things which means that they can completely discard the votes and keep the totals and never resort ever again. They have no real ongoing costs there.
Oh yeah, I completely agree with that. However, don’t forget that setting up the IT infrastructure for such large sites to be performant and scalable takes a ridiculous amount of resources. And people expect snappy, quick websites with the perfect algorithm for constant dopamine shots.
That’s the reason why I think the Fediverse is the future of social media - but it’s still very young and will take a lot more work to be friendly for the masses.
It is very noticable the snappiness/responsiveness coming to Lemmy.world. My smaller mastodon instance is generally fine but images and stuff are noticably slower.
depends on the hosting setup. my lemmy instance was slow too until i set it up with a cache, now it’s hella snappy
They could have even made a profit from third party apps if the pricing wasn’t 100x a reasonable rate.
Anyone who did should go buy a lotto ticket ASAP
Definitely not me. Crazy I hear talks of MySpace making a come back. That’s one social media site I enjoyed and would love to visit again.
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The CEO of Reddit is a huge Musk admirer.
I see that a lot of people complain about reddit, twitter, and whatever mainstream website completely fuck the consumer, but fail to realize one crucial thing. The only time change happens in mob settings is when the pain of no change is greater than the pain of change. I applaud Elon, spez, and who ever else wishes to put there services behind their paywall whether it’s an API or just simply viewing tweets. Anyone in the know knows that it’s a crock of shit and anyone who isn’t is annoyed to the point where change is preferable. The sooner people figure out posting information, entertainment, and other forms of media/knowledge to the benefit of a company is horrendous the better. Now we have the opportunity to get rid of the corporate greed and basically open-source peoples knowledge from around the globe. Although like with reddit, mob mentality poses a real threat to communities like this one, I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother (as corny as that sounds). I much prefer it over giving more information to companies who use it to profit off of my content, while I receive nothing.
*Edit: Thank you kind stranger for the reddit gold! Glad you spent real hard cash so I can have reddit premium and reddit coins! The lovely people at reddit will be spending your money sitting on a yacht eating grapes in one hand and lobster in the other. I’m sure they are real thankful too! :) *
I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother
Not me!
Damn, what an articulated bastard
I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother
First day as a human being? 🤣
I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother
Not me!
Username checks out.
The Future
Come on Cohagen, you got what you want! Give these people air!
That quote sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I’m embarrassed.
Since I googled it up, I may as well put the link… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANa9Oku-JM
Musk will be dead by then, so which one of his 200 kids will be running the empire?
He’s impulsive and doesn’t know when to shut up. I got the distinct impression that, initially, he was absolutely not serious about buying Twitter. It was a joke/jest. BUT, because his antics affected their stock price he actually got forced into the purchase and now he’s desperately trying to figure out how to make the purchase worth what he actually paid, which is fine and all, except he seems to be leading by impulse, not by consensus or logic. He wakes up in the morning, has some random ass idea and implements it without any oversight. Even his new CEO straight up admitted that she is basically a straw man CEO who will offer no friction to anything Elon wants to do.
This is pretty much what ive thought all along. He already owned a huge chuck of twotter when he said he’d buy it. The Ftc called him out and accused him of market manipulation. He then tried everything thing he could to weasel his way out of buying twitter but failed. Now he’s purposely trashing the site so he can declare bankruptcy and get his money back. That’s my theory at least.
When a company declares bankruptcy the only money anyone gets back are the value of the company’s assets. Which some quick googling indicates is somewhere around $14B. So $30B less than what he paid for it.
I’ve heard Twitter was actually worth somewhere around $25B when he bought it. If he did nothing and left it alone for a year and then sold it, yeah he’d have lost around $20B from the whole mess, but that’s still better that driving it into bankruptcy.
I think it’s more an ego thing. He obviously overpaid for Twitter, and he can’t admit he made a mistake, so he’s trying to find a way to blame the mistake on the “woke” left or whatever.
I’m really intrigued what the composition of that 14B is. I’m doubting that they have big investments in the stock market, or oil fields, or whatever. It’s clear that the core IP of Twitter can be largely re-coded by a few bored guys (we’re here aren’t we?). If the actual value of Twitter is in the name and userbase, and that gets trashed, then it’s certainly not worth 14B.
The code needed to handle as many users as Twitter has isn’t trivial.
But yeah most of the value is in the brand and the userbase. A big factor with social media is how it allows people to build friend networks that are bound to the platform. People can esily move to another platform, but convincing all of their friends to do the same is much more difficult. It’s insidious how it locks people in.
The fact that Musk is behaving like a complete asshat and people re staying there anyway just goes to prove how valuable that social media lock in is.
Of course AOL was valued similarly… just before the dot com bubble burst.
I buy that too.
Get his money back from whom? It’s not like a toaster that he can bring back to the store.
He even tried to get out of it by claiming Twitter had a bot problem. Courts ruled that he stepped too far into the shit to back out of it.
And now, it seems, the alleged bot problem is worse than it’s ever been. Sheesh.
This is pretty much what ive thought all along. He already owned a huge chuck of twotter when he said he’d buy it. The Ftc called him out and accused him of market manipulation. He then tried everything thing he could to weasel his way out of buying twitter but failed. Now he’s purposely trashing the site so he can declare bankruptcy and get his money back. That’s my theory at least.
That man has got to legitimately be one of the stupidest motherfuckers to ever luck his ass into a pile of money.
intergenerational wealth is a interesting topic for sure
Mmmmm remember that time Elon offered 1m dogecoin to whoever could prove he owned an emerald mine? And then his dad was all like “can I play too I have the paperwork here!”. Elon tries not to.
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