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.
My lord. And they can’t/won’t piece 1+1 together? Hanlon’s razor dictates they are indeed idiots.
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
Yes. While he loves to talk about how little reddit makes, he doesn’t mention how much reddit pays him for that.
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 bureocracy style and now Twitter doing this shit. Hopefully shit sites like TikTok or Facebook jump on the wagon too.
For reddit at least, The money from VCs dried up. They have to monetise fast or go broke.
Elon way way way overplayed for Twitter and the company is hemorrhaging money paying the loans he took out to pay for the purchase.
Google in general is in decline. Ad sales are down as the net becomes SEO’d to death. Marketing teams just aren’t willing to pay for Google ads like they used to since the roi isn’t there anymore.
But there are so many ways Reddit could have played this better. It wasn’t just about monetizing. The API changes were in bad faith and meant to kill 3rd party apps without flat out doing it. Users would have been understanding if they charged a reasonable amount of started injecting ads into the API feeds, but instead they went full aggro and disrespected not just the devs working to make their platform better, but the users as well. If they wanted 3rd party apps to show their ads or charge a fee to remove ads I would have been understanding, but because of the disrespect I’ve dropped them.
In general, i agree with your post, but GOOG is up ~ 30% in the last 6 months. Specific parts of Google may be dwindling but their overall business is thriving right now.
Idk where you got the idea that Google is in decline, but they’re still the leader in search and advertising on the Internet, plus video hosting and livstreaming with YouTube. Googles only problem right now is how behind they are on AI and that they can’t support a new product so no one is willing to try anything new they make.
Twitter successfully sold itself to a private investment firm for over market value. That’s the dream for tech startups and never-made-a-profit digital services.
Anyone still using Twitter is an addict or a boomer, but that’s exactly the audience that Musk wanted to purchase.
The only reason twitter was popular is because you could check it for information. Towns and organizations would post updates there, it drove traffic, eyeballs, ads and revenue. This is the dumbest thing ever, even if he wanted to promote nazi ideology, it’s idiotic because your only preaching to the choir. You cannot convert people when you drive them all away, so even if it wasn’t about money, it’s dumb.
I maybe check facebook once every few months, and that’s only if someone sends me a link to an event. And it seems like almost everyone has left or is at least not active. A few years ago (well, maybe more than a few, time flies) I was pretty active and my feed would be full of my friends’ status updates. I would actually see what they were up to if I went on Facebook. Now only a handful of my Facebook friends are still active, and they’re all 35+ and have their own business or project of some kind that they want to share updates of. Not mlm since they’re all hippies; things like a community garden, handmade stuff, musicians, but still something to promote. It takes me 30 seconds to see everything. Most of my Facebook friends haven’t posted anything in years or months, just like me.
The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’
The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’
There 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
Not just less likely to be seen, but now a greater percentage of those views will come from Twitter blue subscribers as well who might not be their intended audience.
Is there some source on advertisers leaving in droves? I’ve heard a couple stories on people (big accounts ands advertisers) loudly leaving but is it really a noticeable trend? I wonder if there’s some publicly accessible way of knowing that.
CNN reported on it: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertiser-decline/index.html
It goes deeper than that.
This all started with the API changes. Before they were charging a fair price for the API and companies happily paid it for the convenience. Then Elon got greedy he started charging a ridiculous amount for the API so those companies decided it would be worth it to just deal with the annoyance and switch to scraping the website instead. But when you hit the website it’s way less efficient than hitting the API because it’s doing a bunch of mixing and ranking which is a lot more complicated and costly than serving static content, which costs a small fraction of real time algorithmic ranking. So now instead of making money off companies that want their data they’re losing money on the cloud costs to serve the scrapers.
More recently, they haven’t been paying their hosting bills to Google and their service was set to expire at the end of last month. What just happened at the start of this month? They added the limitations. That can’t be a coincidence. Now the Google services weren’t hosting the site itself, otherwise they’d probably be fully down right now, but it was hosting their trust and safety services for things like fighting spam. That could have also been hosting anti scraper services as well. Since they’re so under staffed they probably couldn’t swap the services in time, so instead of having anti scraping services like every other big company on the internet, they decided to cut service instead. It’s just built up incompetence coming to a head.
Much like the case of Reddit, Musk might want to reflect on who actually produces all the content he’s guarding so jealously, and ask himself what’s likely to happen to the value of his site if he makes it difficult for millions of us to write all his content for free
I think he just wants a private club with all the people already inside on a familiar and well respected platform imo, he just doesn’t realize that his 5 minutes of fame are over, people see for who he really is.
I don’t think this is that complicated. The hypothesis Musk and Spez are pursuing is that right wingers are easier to monetize because they are stupid. They are basically purging the old, liberal web2.0 userbase, under the premise that they are going to build back something which is more friendly to the conservative social media space.
He just wants a private club with a familiar venue. He knows people like twitter, so he buys it for himself to play king among the plebs and rubbing it into the faces of his “critics” who truly know who he is. Sometimes I wonder if he actually acknowledges the outside world at all since his 5 minutes of fame. Anyways, the emperor has no clothes, and his self destruction is highly entertaining.
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.
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
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 bureocracy style and now Twitter doing this shit. Hopefully shit sites like TikTok or Facebook jump on the wagon too.
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.
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).
That rate limit is insanely low, even for verified. I’m not verified, but I hit the limit in like 10 minutes of very distracted usage.
Yeah, 600/800 sounds like a lot until you realize that includes all the stuff you’re just scrolling past in your feed or comments, not even clicking on. I wouldn’t be surprised if they even overlooked the fact that ads might count against that cap too. I’m no heavy user but hit that cap in less than 20 minutes of reading people reacting to the news.
The hilarity is that these moves are the exact opposite of the so called Public Square he claims Twitter is or should be.
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.
