That man has got to legitimately be one of the stupidest motherfuckers to ever luck his ass into a pile of money.
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This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.
The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.
These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.
Oh my god, this is just too funny.“The DDOS is coming from INSIDE the HOUSE!”
My lord. And they can’t/won’t piece 1+1 together? Hanlon’s razor dictates they are indeed idiots.
In order to quickly fix it they would probably have to roll back the change to require login to view tweets, which would be admitting that it wasn’t caused by “attacks” on Twitter, which Elon won’t do. Rock and a hard place.
you commented 3 times btw
The self-DDoS truly the height of idiocy. It’s been a good couple of weeks watching billionaires who have never faced consequences fuck around and find out.
Elon was right, firing off many engineers didn’t cause any DDoS attack from outside- as DDoS attacks are now happening from within
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
You can’t lose something you never had
Is spez rich?
Yes. While he loves to talk about how little reddit makes, he doesn’t mention how much reddit pays him for that.
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I really don’t believe at all that he would intentionally drive it to the ground. I can see him claiming that if he manages to actually kill it tho
They never had their minds. They just now have enough money to make that all of our problems… This is why no one deserves billions of dollars. It makes you go megalomaniacle.
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.
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!
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? 🤣
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
Not me!
Username checks out.
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!^
Elon Musk, the latest billionaire owner of the online screaming match known as Twitter, sat slumped at his desk, staring at a wall of monitors blinking with a technicolor smorgasbord of error messages. The reason? He’d just let Twitter’s hosting contract with Google lapse because he thought it’d be fun to see if he could migrate it somewhere else. The results? Not so fun.
A comment on Reddit had caught his eye, and he couldn’t shake it. “Every now and then Elon must have a moment of clarity. Where it occurs to him ‘Maybe I am just stupid?’ But then he violently buries the thought.”
“Stupid?” he scoffed aloud to his empty office, sending a mini landslide of Mars Rover prototypes tumbling off his desk. “I’m a genius.”
He remembered how smart he’d felt when he decided to axe the account verification system, only to reinstate it after a week of high-profile mix-ups that included the Dalai Lama being mistaken for a llama enthusiast.
And the content moderation! Who needs it? Well, as it turned out, everyone. Without it, Twitter had turned into a feral wilderness of conspiracy theories, insult slinging, and more unsolicited pictures of eggplants than a greengrocer’s catalog.
And then there was Kanye. “Free Kanye!” he’d declared one afternoon after one too many rocket fuel coffees. But after the notorious rapper had declared war on flannel shirts and clogged up the site with CAPS LOCK tweets, the ban was back on faster than you can say “Kim Kardashian for president.”
“Stupid?” he muttered again, watching as Twitter spontaneously DDOS’d itself like a robotic bull in a digital china shop.
There was a pause. Then a grin spread slowly across Elon’s face, as if he’d just understood the punchline to a particularly tricky joke. “Naaaah,” he laughed, slapping the desk.
He looked at the chaos on the screens, the digital calamity his decisions had wrought, and couldn’t help but chuckle. There was something amusing about being this absurdly, cosmically, hilariously brilliant.
“Back to the drawing board,” he chuckled, picking up a Mars Rover and making it do little jumps across his desk.
Remember elon musk isn’t smart
We shouldn’t credit him for Tesla, spacex, etc because it’s the employees that actually put in the effort and contribute
Elon is just a Mr moneybags that thinks he smart because the things he funded have been good ideas when he actually never contributed anything to those ideas
I can’t wait until the companies he’s finding push him out completely
People call him an inventor. He’s not an inventor, he’s an investor. He’s not an engineer. He doesn’t know how to make cars or rockets. He didn’t invent the Tesla and he just plowed money into SpaceX. His brilliant ideas are things like having the Tesla make a fart noise. His experience is in coding and, based on comments of former Twitter engineers, he’s not even very good at that.
He doesn’t even have experience in coding either. He always pretends to but the only degree he has is in business or something.
Of course he’s a fucking business major
Probably wanted to do Computer Science but failed Comp Sci 101./s if it wasn’t obvious
Honestly this is probably more close to reality than anyone wants to admit.
This is art!
More please!
Twitter and Reddit both dying at the same time was not what I expected in 2023
The CEO of Reddit is a huge Musk admirer.
who had two social media companies dying on their bingo board?
They have never properly turned a profit - and relied solely on VC money. It was kind of “obvious” from the beginning - this house of cards of completely free services is increasingly unstable.
That has been his goal since he got forced to actually buy it rather than just boosting the stock so he could make a profit, which like most of his antics was really the only goal (publicity and money)
what’s the end game tho
Honestly with him it’s probably just “because I can and have made some money in the process”
Not having to break the contract with his investors who are some very powerful people. Better to say “the libs killed it because they don’t like me.” And then get bankruptcy protection.
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Right, it’s oddly calm and peaceful here. It’s nice watching it burn from the other side of the river.
Right, it’s oddly calm and peaceful here. It’s nice watching it burn from the other side of the river. - trying to delete this double comment but can’t. I’m guessing just press post once even if it says that it failed?
If YouTube dumpsters it the fediverse might gain a competitive foothold.
“Extreme levels of data scraping” my ass. This is probably meant to reduce server costs because Elon put a huge hole in this boat and now he does a very loud “look-what-you-made-me-do” scream. And what on earth would “system manipulation” exactly mean? Sounds like some pseudo-profound bullshit.
pseudo-profound bullshit
That sounds like every single public statement he’s ever made.
And people keep falling for it. It will be a happy day when/if I figure out why people fall for this horseshit so much and how to overcome it.
Most likely attempt to force people to pay if you ask me. Paid users have significantly higher limits according to him and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are not implemented for paying customers. Others have a casually low limit which can be reached easily.
For me, the biggest mistake he made was put the signup wall without an initial reading limit of 1-10 tweets. Tweets are used as citation by journalists in news articles because people use it as an official platform and many journalists use it to report on what’s happening to a fairly large audience of followers. This is only one example where the signup wall ruins it all. You can’t even go in to read a single tweet. However, look at Medium. I despise it on a personal level due to the quality reduction it caused, but at least it only shows the paywall after your 1sth/3rd/10th article. At least it provides a window to your website from the internet. Elon Musk has slain that dragon too now, and all the windows to look through have been boarded up. He has walled himself and all Twitter users in.
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It’s part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism’s status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we’re in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn’t be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
Hey I see you’re commenting from lemmy.world, since yesterday I’ve had troubles opening links, viewing posts and images, and posting comments. Are you having the same issues? I wasn’t even able to open this post on my lemmy.world account
https://lemmy.world gained 40%+ users on July 1st alone.
Methinks the servers are melting from #RedditBlackout.
That’s happening all around. I’m actually impressed that Lemmy still works that well. Reddit/Twitter would be in burning ruins if the daily active users multiply by a factor of 20 within a few weeks. And they aren’t run by a bunch of hobbyists doing this in their spare time, like most instances are.
I haven’t been having issues with my lemmy.world account, other than the occasional slow/failing to load page, but that gets fixed with a refresh.
He’ll probably get some total write-off when it fails and get $44B returned to him (from the tax payers, of course)
We truly live in the stupidest timeline.
As a former individual who understands the underlying systems, it seems like they botched deployment of a new feature causing issues and cannot figure out how to solve them.
Most of Twitter is and has been in maintenance mode since acquisition (think of 10 man engineering team and 1 left to handle maintenance).
This is why it cracks me up every time when someone is praising Elon for “cutting slack” when firing all those twitter employees. Yes, twitter did not implode immediately. Turns out, people can build software that is stable enough to run in maintenance mode. But good luck dealing with new issues cropping up.
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I’ve heard.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a former individual. What happened? Was it like a Frankenstein thing?
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I’ve heard.
I’ve noticed that my batch image downloader works on maybe 40% of all twitter posts, and only 40% of the time (It used to work 100% of the time before Musk arrived). It’s fucking annoying. I think they’re having major API and CDN issues.
Great for the fediverse! I suspect that these changes to twitter and reddit are mainly a response to the growing hunger of generative artificial intelligence companies who are hoovering up data, basically for free. Change is never easy, but i’m optimistic that this is the break open source and federated communities needed to start taking off. I hope people can see the value in decentralizing and help support these open source projects financially so that they can really start to scale. The reality is, scaling is expensive, and we all need to help where we can. These Ai companies will not hesitate to suck up federated data also. If we want to live in an ad free world its gonna cost us.
Question: Can’t AI companies just as easily Hoover up language content from the fediverse? Or is it something that we just kind of accept but don’t care about since it isn’t eating into fediverse finances?
I would assume it’s even worse for the fediverse considering the limited resources we have to run the servers. I wonder how the devs/server owners will handle this.
I don’t think (completely wild guess here) AI content crawlers should have any more impact than the dozens and dozens of spiders that make up must of my own site’s traffic.
The impact was magnified for Twitter because it generates so much new content every second. That wasn’t an issue when Twitter had a nice, properly cached API and it shouldn’t be an issue for fediverse instances either because we have RSS and caching and we’re not so stupid as to turn those off. Like, what kind of moron would do that?
I don’t think (completely wild guess here) AI content crawlers should have any more impact than the dozens and dozens of search spiders that make up must of my own site’s traffic.
The impact was magnified for Twitter because it generates so much new content every second. That wasn’t an issue when Twitter had a nice, properly cached API and it shouldn’t be an issue for fediverse instances going forward because we have RSS and caching and we’re not so stupid as to turn those off. Like, what kind of moron would do that?
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.
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.
He sure is an instable genius!
