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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34929 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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Twitter's been acting weird for several hours. Turns out that Musk has done something extraordinary:

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

Of course everyone on Twitter knows that 600 posts/day is basically nothing, so it's basically something to get people to pay for Twitter and get that blue check, but even then it's not an unlimited offer.

Is Musk knowingly just trying to run the website down, or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing? Is this, finally, the much-predicted Death of Twitter?

Twitter seems to be working adequately for me today where yesterday I got rate limited right away. Anyone else have similar experiences?

Yes, I found the rate limit on Saturday and then not again.

4D chess theory:

Elon is trying to teach the western internet users about the current Electricity situation in South Africa

Interestingly even the South Africans protect the internet / ISPs and cell towers from load shedding.

These measures would be extremely, two orders of magnitude, too harsh for a well-run social media site responding to scraping. Twitter doesn't have it any worse than every other site, and they accept some scraping and can identify bots and ratelimit excessive load. Limiting most of twitter's real users to just half an hour of use per day is absurd, I can't think of any situation that would call for it.

(roughly) For scraping to really harm twitter this much, it'd have to be significantly higher-load than twitter's real users as a whole. And requests = (requests/users) * users, so if all requests are from authenticated users (after login wall but before this) and scrape_requests >> real_requests, either the scrapers are making many more requests than real users per user (in which case a much less strict limit works), or there are many more scraping users than real users - very unlikely because creating accounts is hard (maybe requiring unique phone numbers), because it wasn't 'no ratelimit for accounts created before 2020', and because that many bot accounts would be noticed and could be distinguished from real users.

If it's just covering for an outage ... that'd be a 12-hour long outage at this point. When Facebook has an outage, let alone a 12-hour long one, they don't lie about the cause and only communicate it via the totally-not-CEO's personal account on the site with the outage. Twitter's status page is still green.

What must Tucker on Twitter be thinking now, or anyone else in or contemplating a professional relationship with twitter? The advertisers they're trying to court? The $1000/mo gold checkmark holders?

I have no good explanation for this decision. (edit: to be clear - if the real reason is scraping, the poor technical decisionmaking - otherwise, the decision to cover for an internal issue by pretending the issue is scraping). Maybe Elon's really on drugs? He put someone incompetent in charge who's feeding him bad information? The deadline for the Google Cloud bill they weren't paying was June 30, i.e. yesterday - supposedly they restarted payments, but maybe they didn't really? Maybe firing so much of Twitter plus all the changes he's made led to a buildup of problems, and this is what he had to do to keep twitter up for now? Idk. Either way, this is a much more significant failure than any of Twitter 2's previous missteps, which still could be explained as part of a high-variance strategy. Burning the credibility of verified, boosting shitty paid replies ... eh, it's bringing in money. Not paying bills ... aggressive approach dealmaking. This is just gross incompetence no matter the explanation.

And, "put any Fortune 500 CEO in charge of America and it'll immediately improve" ... feeling even worse than it did a year ago

Have you read any interviews or heard anyone talk about the twitter code base? It's supposed to be a mess... In the process of trying to fix things, would stuff like this happen, a lot?

It's funny that just about the worst possible assumptions are made because vice said musk bad.

so I've seen rumors around, and keep in mind these are just rumors, from HN and others that Twitter has been accidentally DDoSing themselves.

in the Twitter UI as of a few days ago (and earlier while looking for more information on a related thing I accidentally confirmed this), it'd start making hundreds of requests per minute to Twitter's servers. now looking through it, I found this

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.

[...]

https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057

obviously my source is pretty biased, but the self-request spam seems to at least be happening to some extent.

I strongly suspect that, while this happened, it isn't a significant cause of the ratelimits. I also do not have good information though.

The login wall was implemented within a day or so of the ratelimit suggests they have shared causes. I don't think the login wall caused the request spam, just the ratelimit - implying that the login wall couldn't have been caused by the ratelimit. And I think the ratelimit was intentionally imposed.

Also, if that was a primary cause - they've now fixed the request spam, why haven't they removed the ratelimit?

I also think (could be wrong vague memory) the request spam was a bug that existed on twitter months back when one was ratelimited (by the old anti spambot ratelimits that were 100x higher)

it's time for a new subscription service -- Twitter Brown, where you get to see all of the tweets. only $12/month

this is getting ridiculous. there has to be a better way than this

I'll be concerned if these limits last longer than a couple of days. I doubt the GCP stuff is related (even the article you link connects it to Twitter Trust & Safety while this outage is affecting Twitter's core infra). FWIW Twitter seems fine for me now. It was severely degraded for a few hours on both app and web earlier but looks to have improved. I suspect someone fucked up deploying the new login-wall and they're running damage control, and possibly using the situation to run some experiments (or as leverage for their negotiations with API customers). This is the first major service interruption since Musk's takeover and (unless it persists!) I really think you're catastrophizing too much. I mean, Reddit was completely unusable for several days just a couple of weeks ago (though that was due to managerial incompetence rather than technical); 12 hours of degraded service is a bad look for a major tech company but hardly apocalyptic like you seem to imply.

FWIW Twitter seems fine for me now. It was severely degraded for a few hours on both app and web earlier but looks to have improved

If the rate limit is covering for the outage / GCP / etc, 'the rate limit still existing' means the issue is still ongoing because Twitter's still losing money

12 hours of degraded service is a bad look for a major tech company but hardly apocalyptic like you seem to imply

I agree, should've made that clearer - a 12 or 24-hour outage is bad, but not unprecedented, tech is incredibly complicated and it can happen without any mistakes on Elon's part. Facebook was down for 24 hours in 2019, Roblox was down for three days at some point, etc. The very-bad part is that it's either totally unnecessary (combatting scraping) or they're lying about it (internal outage, GCP issue, etc). When Facebook has a long outage, they have clear updates on the status page every hour. Again, imagine you financially depend on Twitter, just got ratelimited, and now have to look at screenshots of Elon's tweets and guess if he's being honest or not, guess when the ratelimits are disappearing, etc.

And the weirdness of the cause, unfortunately, significantly increases the likelihood of the rate limit persisting.

updates:

It gets better

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

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754

Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675260424109928449

all within the span of a few hours

I saw someone semi-jokingly say that the rate limits were increasing as Elon ran into them himself, and at this point I find that distressingly likely.

Man should have stuck to rockets and electric cars, though a more based Twitter is still nice to have.

Man should have stuck to rockets and electric cars

Consider the idea that he's not actually running the rockets and electric cars any better...

I can't see how SpaceX is anything but an unqualified success in every single way.

As soon as Starship is flying, Musk will have achieved every single goal he had short of the Mars colony, which is likely to happen when the reduced launch costs make it cheap enough for governments beginning to wake up to a space race.

Tesla could be run better, but it's still highly successful and has absolutely achieved Musk's vision of democratizing electric cars, and even if other companies overtake it, they're doing so by adopting the technology themselves.

God damn Starship is going to revolutionize everything. I can't wait.

Same gentleman's bet offer I made to self_made_human: care to make any guesses as to when we see it in orbit? I'll be more than happy to take the opposite side of it.

Me neither. It would be hella funny if the Artemis astronauts struggled to land on the moon and found a whole platoon of SpaceX people waiting there with airport placards and another tesla roadster haha

This.

We're living in a world where SpaceX has become the standard to beat for commercial sattelite launches and Ford EV's are licensing Tesla batteries and charging tech. If this is Musk "screwing up" what does "success" look like?

Well, what I'm saying is Elon's companies are part-bubble, and part promises he'll never fulfill. Something being a bubble doesn't mean stuff isn't getting done, failure is more a question of sustainability. For unfulfillable promises it's more obvious - success is when he actually fulfills them.

Frankly I find Musk to be one of the strongest reasons to doubt general intelligence (which I still believe in). The man is super-effective at running his core enterprises, people who deny SpaceX and Tesla's results seem to me to be in denial of overwhelming evidence. This doesn't stop him from being a goof with terrible takes and a streak of very bad calls, including this whole Twitter nonsense.

I can't see how SpaceX is anything but an unqualified success in every single way.

If it's a hype bubble, you're not going to see how it's a failure until it crashes.

As soon as Starship is flying

Yeah... that's a big if. Care to take a guess when we might see it in orbit? I'll be happy to take the "no it won't" side of that prediction.

My 50% confidence interval is within this year, and 70% within 2 years and 90% within 3 years for the first successful orbital flight and return for a Starship. I haven't actually checked further launch plans before writing this, but I think I can still hold myself to this.

Frankly speaking, I don't see any reason to be anything but bullish on SpaceX. Even if Elon was eaten by a wild doge today, the company has already revolutionized space travel, reusable rockets were as outlandish as fusion power for fucking forever. Starlink is profitable, and even the humble Falcon and Falcon Heavy have made lunar exploration feasible on post-Cold War budgets.

My 50% confidence interval is within this year, and 70% within 2 years and 90% within 3 years for the first successful orbital flight and return for a Starship.

Ok, I'm going "no way" on all 3. The one in 3 years might surprise me, but for the sake of simplicity I'll round it down to "not going to happen". And I'm talking about simply going to orbit, if it successfully lands, I'll be shocked.

reusable rockets were as outlandish as fusion power for fucking forever

That's just not true. Others will point out that the actual innovative thing is making reusability cost-effective. We've seen reusability as a "mere" technical feat working for decades in the form of Space Shuttle.

Starlink is profitable

Is it? I seem to remember a leaked email where Elon was complaining about Starlink's financials.

That's just not true. Others will point out that the actual innovative thing is making reusability cost-effective.

Are you serious? The only example in the entire history of rocketry of cost effective reusable rockets is SpaceX's Falcon 9. Other companies have caught up after 10 years by copying their design. If anyone can do it, it's Gwynn Shotwell.

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Well, the whole crux of the issue is making reusability profitable! That's what people really mean by that statement, or at least I do.

You can make the claim that fusion power exists today, except it costs more to get energy than you can sell it for. But nobody claims that we've "got" fusion power do they?

The Space Shuttle was a flying white elephant swollen with pork, too compromised from it's original vision to satisfy anyone except horny Texan senators. Same deal with SLS, though it doesn't even pretend to be reusable. It would be cheaper to fuel the Starship with dollar bills or just pile them to the Moon (this is hyperbole).

Is it? I seem to remember a leaked email where Elon was complaining about Starlink's financials.

I find such a claim dubious, and it's more likely Elon kvetching even if it's true.

It is such a stunningly superior product to any other orbital internet provider that it's ludicrous. And they have massive positive feedback from the experience curve of having so many launches on hardware they own.

It's not like anyone is forcing them to do it, if it wasn't profitable or on the road to profit with massive growth they simply wouldn't do it.

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Tesla is worth over 800 billion so he has certainly done something right there. To your point it is pretty crazy that the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world is a full blown/terminally online twitter addict.

No I think this makes sense. The thing he did right was hype. With hype he attracted people good enough at the actual work to make a functional company, and enough funding to get it of the ground. At least functional enough to generate more hype. But 90% of what he personally is doing right is the hype. He has a ton of projects that didn't really go anywhere, but did generate even more hype, like hyperloop (heh. Hype-rloop). So of course he's terminally on Twitter. He's a PR CEO. He does Hype and Culture War and it makes his stock increase in value.

I'm not going to say he's a bad CEO in the getting funding and making his stock value rise sense. I'm not even going to say his pure Hype strategy hasn't been working, it's been causing all sorts of forces to gas him up like a DND deity powered by faith. But like- he's casting with Charisma, not Int. If his company is really worth 800 billion, its because he can be expected to generate enough hype to get other people to pump energy into his ideas until they become reality- I don't think it would be worth that in anyone else's hands though.

It's not that crazy, considering that the US already had a full blown Twitter addict as a President.

Tesla is worth over 800 billion so he has certainly done something right there.

That's actually an argument against him. There's no way Tesla is worth more than all other car companies combined.

So how much money have you lost shorting Tesla for years at this point?

I think Tesla’s valuation is high because (1) they do have a reasonably high margin car department, (2) they basically now have a national gas station chain as all other electric vehicles are using the Tesla charging stations, and (3) the hope that Tesla can solve battery storage turning them into the world’s largest utility by far.

The valuation obviously is based off of hope, but there is real substance and actual profit. Elon built a car company in the 21st century. People thought that impossible. Maybe we don’t assume he is an idiot?

There is very much a way because thats currently what it is.

Are you saying Elon is a bad CEO because the market places such a high valuation on Tesla?

There is very much a way because thats currently what it is.

Nah, stock market prices can get wild, and end up not indicative of actual value of the company.

Are you saying Elon is a bad CEO because the market places such a high valuation on Tesla?

Not directly, but sort of yes. It's more that when a company's valuation is so out of whack with it's fundamentals, it's a good indication the company is running on pure hype, and when that happens it's not uncommon for companies to crash and burn when the hype runs out.

SpaceX succeded with things where many others failed, did things considered basically impossible and Musk's takes on spaceflight seems to make more sense.

Maybe simply "disregard common opinion, order company to do weird stuff because you thing that it is a good idea and double down on everything" worked in case of SpaceX and imploded in case of Twitter? After all such strategy cannot work every time?

Or Musk started to believe fanboys, thinks he is smarter than God himself and stopped listening to others? Or is surrounded by bunch of sycophants?

Or for Twitter there is no way for profitability and task is impossible and Musk flails trying to achieve it?

A big part of it is Musk blew the first critical step in doing a leveraged buyout when he substantially overpaid for Twitter. He took a company that was losing money and added a ~$1 Billion interest payment it had to make every year. He had to do something drastic to make it more profitable than it ever has been. A typical LBO is done by private equity with a clear plan to do that but I think Elon mostly wanted to buy Twitter as a fun mildly money losing toy when Tesla stock was at an all time high and then tried to back out when the price of both collapsed.

SpaceX succeded with things where many others failed, did things considered basically impossible and Musk's takes on spaceflight seems to make more sense.

What was that, reusability? Other people have done it, the only question is whether it makes sense. People always point to how much the costs to orbit have fallen, but I'm not sure I buy it's because of reusability. He also does some interesting things with accounting, like overcharging governments by 2-3 times, and with that I wonder if the private launches aren't just subsidized by government contracts.

Maybe simply "disregard common opinion, order company to do weird stuff because you thing that it is a good idea and double down on everything" worked in case of SpaceX and imploded in case of Twitter? After all such strategy cannot work every time?

Of all the companies I would have expected it to work, it was Twitter. There's no way they needed all the people they were hiring, so trimming the fat was a good move. Alternative sources of funding like Blue, and letting people put tweets behind a paywall was a pretty good idea. Maybe it was the advertiser boycott, maybe Twitter was in a lot worse shape at the time of purchase than anyone let on, but as good as his initial ideas were, it seems they're not enough.

Maybe it was the advertiser boycott, maybe Twitter was in a lot worse shape at the time of purchase than anyone let on, but as good as his initial ideas were, it seems they're not enough.

As someone with a slight amount of tech knowledge (10 years of experience) my reading of the situation was that he was totally correct that there was a lot of fat that needed to be cut - but the problem was that the fat was heavily contributing to keeping twitter on one side of the culture war even as they let technical debt accumulate to absurd levels. He is facing an avalanche of negative press and stories because not only has he threatened to make Twitter a place where dissenting opinions can exist at all, but also because he just made a whole swathe of social justice jobs evaporate. Even if they don't get explicit about it, I believe that activists understand on a basic level that someone demonstrating you don't need to pay their cultural commissars in money or do-nothing sinecures is a real, serious threat to their movement and way of life. If you're a diversity officer who helps people deal with micro-aggressions at Meta, you REALLY don't want to see Elon fire everyone with a job that looks remotely like yours and then have the company do better as a result - so you lean on the advertisers and government connections, make sure the legacy media savages them, make them an acceptable target for mockery, etc.

He also does some interesting things with accounting, like overcharging governments by 2-3 times, and with that I wonder if the private launches aren't just subsidized by government contracts.

The problem with this argument is that SpaceX still charges the government significantly less than ULA (i.e. Lockheed and Boeing) do.

What was that, reusability?

Yes. Or more specifically, reusability that reduces costs unlike space shuttle failed attempt.

And some smaller changes that resulted in overall reduced costs.

Starting and running private company building brand new rocket is also really unique achievement. Also human spaceflight as private profitable company.

Other people have done it

Not in way that makes sense. Space shuttle was a major prior attempt and ended more expensive than disposable rockets.

He also does some interesting things with accounting, like overcharging governments by 2-3 times

Well, they still launch cheaper than competition or launch at all. It is hard to say how much overcharging is here, given that almost all activity in this space is governmental.

Of all the companies I would have expected it to work, it was Twitter.

There is possibility that Twitter was fundamentally unprofitable or that Musk is worse fit, or that he started to believe that he is perfect and makes no mistakes.

Yes. Or more specifically, reusability that reduces costs unlike space shuttle failed attempt.

Is there an official breakdown of costs on Falcon 9, showing that they are actually saving money on reusability?

Not aware of anything so detailed (and would be happy to read it!) though not saving on that just means that they managed to

  • find savings elsewhere
  • hide actual saving source

In theory they may run with the same rocket costs and less bloated company and/or less outrageous profits than ULA etc, but it also would be impressive.

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I feel like all of the above applies in the case of Twitter.

Damn that's actually a scary point. Not just for the rocket/car users themselves but also for the rest of humanity considering that he's 100% the best in those areas at the moment.

Consider that, this too, is not the case.

Look, I appreciate the ethos Musk represents, but that's also the main reason I'm so critical of him. If this guy crashes and burns, which I find likely, the ideas he represents are going to get discredited.

As long as the rockets continue to fly, and land, and the competitors continue to largely not do that, or do that plainly worse, at some point you're asking me to disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes.

I don't believe in ideas, I believe in dollars per kg to orbit.

All I'm asking for is some skepticism of his accounting, surely that's not too much of a stretch?

It is a bigger and bigger stretch as time goes on. If SpaceX were losing money on each commercial flight, you would expect them to minimize the number of those flights and attempt to maximize the number of government flights. Instead, they are turning down almost no commercial partners and have increased launch cadence every year, to the point that they are putting more commercial tons into orbit than everyone else in the world combined, and growing. This would not make sense if it were not profitable for them. You believe they are burning investor capital to do this...why, exactly?

The government overcharge theory doesn't make sense either, because even if they are inflating their bids, they are still beating all competitors and managing to deliver. They could only do this if their costs are unusually low by industry standards. But if that is true, then it is also true that their commercial costs world be lower, so the lower price for those would also be profitable.

The more parsimonious explanation is just that their costs actually are lower, which makes them more profitable at market clearing prices and enables then to discount the market price without losing money.

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does reading a post mean viewing the timeline , refreshing it, or clicking a tweet and reading it individually? it is possible to read posts in many ways.

twitter seemed to work so well from 2010-2022 and then all a sudden it doesn't

Is Musk knowingly just trying to run the website down, or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing? Is this, finally, the much-predicted Death of Twitter?

no, not the death at all. it is to test the waters on this idea. if it fails to generate enough verification signups, he will abandon it. also, it helps generate free press about the site being down

twitter seemed to work so well from 2010-2022

AFAIK Twitter was not profitable overall in that time. Running nice to users unprofitable website is much easier than running one that gets enough income/donations.

Twitter would be profitable now (and indeed he could have fired fewer engineers) if he had kept his mouth shut after acquisition, calmed the advertisers down and just kept the ship afloat.

Elon’s dumb move was firing 75% of staff and then also losing half the advertisers, such that even the former could not make the company profitable.

He lost the advertisers because Twitter wasn't really selling advertising. They were providing control of the social commons through their "Trust and Safety" censorship policies. The payment for this was in the form of advertising dollars. If he'd done what the "advertisers" wanted, he'd have to continue with the policies that he bought the company in order to end.

He didn't have to continue with the policy at all, he only had to gesture toward it. If he'd been overtly supportive while quietly implementing exactly the same speech policies he has, while not tweeting much himself and putting out the occasional corporate press release with the right words, he'd be fine. Advertisers don't care about policy, but they do care about the appearance of policy. Kind of like how Trump would have had a much easier time passing his plans through congress if he hadn't tried to claim they were actually much more radical than they were.

As I said, these aren't really "advertisers", these are ideologues using advertising dollars to pay for control of the social commons. They do care about results.

does reading a post mean viewing the timeline , refreshing it, or clicking a tweet and reading it individually? it is possible to read posts in many ways.

from what I understand, the answer seems to be yes. also all the replies appear to be included.

I understand the principle of experimentation and generating buzz. But there's experimentation and then there's setting yourself on fire to see what happens.

it depends how long it stays broken. i am sure if he wanted he could revert twitter to how it was yesterday

This is good for crypto Twitter. We will poast less and shame people for mid poasts, this will usher in a Twitter Renaissance!

Just kidding. I'm absolutely sure there's no 4D chess behind it all; maybe he's balancing his KPI obsession with actual, transient infrastructure problems and his spite for OpenAI, but that's the extent of it. The funniest part is that Twitter has a CEO (what's her name?), but apparently Musk still decides this unilaterally, in the fashion of Putin-Medvedev «castling».

On the plus side, I'll probably be spending more time here.

My old faithful Reddit app died, Twitter is being a bitch both through rate limiting and blocking access from unregistered users. If it wasn't for The Motte I'd have to stop doomscrolling and do something productive, shudder.

We're always here for you. Don't worry.

Luckily the Motte only provides like 1-2 hours of scrolling per day, max. At least for me.

Guys! There is a simple explanation for this that explains everything:

This is an outage. Twitter's load balancers or whatever are fucked and they can serve a small percentage of typical traffic. This is damage control, i guess to avoid acknowleging an outage?

It feels likely this is in some way related to twitter not paying their google cloud builds as has been reported by various sources.

deleted

so trying to put up a login window caused them to nuke their servers? very impressive.

I happen to think your correct but I wonder why they don’t just admit it?

Apparently it’s because of their new login wall, so their own stupidity caused it.

Because it might naturally lead to questions like "Has Musk known what he's doing or had any plan at any point of this whole ordeal?"

Is Musk knowingly just trying to run the website down, or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing?

  1. The site has never been profitable.

  2. Musk bought at a major premium he needs to pay off

  3. (Maybe?) Tesla is likely going to face more competition moving forward so it's worrisome that the Twitter debt is tie to Tesla stock.

  4. Musk is panicking and throwing whatever he can at the wall.

twitter has a positive ROI indirectly by affecting elections and sentiment in musk's favor, which benefits tesla, spacex , and his other companies.

Yup. Twitter is the "town square" of the internet - or at least it was until these latest disasters. It confers social capital that cannot be measured in a balance sheet to whoever controls it.

It confers social capital that cannot be measured in a balance sheet to whoever controls it.

I mean, that's almost trivially true. But that doesn't actually mean that it provides enough of a benefit to make any payments on the purchase less biting, especially given the overpayment.

I can buy the recent argument that things like the Bud Light and Target boycotts or the success of the rerelease of What is a Woman all trace back to Musk taking over Twitter - and that's a hard to quantify bonus for conservative culture warring.

But that's just the public good problem: it may be good for Matt Walsh and co. to be able to get the head of a major tech company on speed-dial to help push their causes.

But they're not the ones paying for it

Surely it's all about the site's contents as AI training data. This and the Reddit shit. It's silly to try to discuss this with that unmentioned or as an afterthought.

both in this and reddit's case, it's an obvious cop out. the people using training data on reddit have access to the entire corpus from 2005-2022 via torrent, and it's probably way more clean than any future data

but most notably of all, the corpus of reddit contains a lot of spam, and when I say a lot I mean it. it was amazing how much is just completely unmoderated spam on there.

in twitter's case, I don't buy it either. I guess maybe pre-2022 but it's like the best data has probably been already scraped

Why would he destroy the site just to prevent AI data scraping? This is like if KFC decided to only sell unseasoned chicken in order to keep Bojangles from stealing the 11 herbs and spices.

How many tokens are in Twitter? How many new ones are generated per day? What proportion are they of humanity's total output? What are they worth?

It's not much when naively calculated, but we're learning over the last few months that you get vastly more bang for buck out of high-quality datasets, to the extent that you can match models 1000x bigger and trained on 20x more data if you just get real good tokens. And in terms of both quality and especially recency, Twitter is unmatched, I believe. If you want a model that knows not only that there's a war going on in Ukraine but how it's going, you'll have to scrape Twitter.

That said I don't believe Musk knows or cares about that, seems like they just have problems paying the bill for their infra. Sounds insane I know.

Why don't you believe Musk knows or cares about that? There's extensive evidence that he's extremely AI pilled.

I haven't seen enough evidence or skepticism on display to fully buy into the Google Cloud claim (or any of the other just-desserts infrastructure stories), especially against the motivations and track records at play.

This seems to be the only source that ever reported anything about it:

Weekend scoop with @ZoeSchiffer for subscribers: Twitter is stiffing Google on its payments for Google Cloud, and significant parts of the company’s trust and safety infrastructure could collapse by the end of the month

I noticed some Musk replies in the ML/eacc/doomer sim cluster like 2 weeks ago, but this is still pretty esoteric stuff and he's presumably a busy man. In any case, I am not convinced these measures are effective at all.

If you're trying to determine how close he is to culture where that kind of thing in general is common knowledge: even ignoring the high-tier practitioners he employs and presumably has reasonably technical discussions with, I've been reading his /with_replies on and off for a year and am reasonably confident he's been lurking around the "ML/eacc/doomer sim cluster" since at least December and probably before.

If you're trying to determine whether he is aware of that research specifically, I don't think it matters enough to modulate his reasonably well-evidenced sense of considerable AI-training worth in Twitter's content.

And whether or not the measures are being perfectly effective this early on is orthogonal to any explanation for taking them, whether token-hoarding or infrastructure-comeuppance.

I can't see any mainstream social media site besides reddit being valuable for AI training data. Twitter isn't longform enough.

This is the first change that is actually going to majorly impact my Twitter use. Only being able to load 600 posts a day is about 5 minutes of activity on Twitter. There’s so many replies that get loaded every time you click on a tweet, and even refreshing your timeline probably results in loading several hundred. Even the paying users will be severely throttled. Between this and Apollo for Reddit shutting down today, I might have a lot more free time!

Does Twitter not do infinite scrolling for you? Whenever I am baited into clicking a post, it only loads like 20 replies max unless I am foolish enough to scroll down farther than that.

For some anecdata, I guess I am what you would call an unverified registered user, and have noticed no change in my (regrettable enough as it is) use case.

Have you considered that you might be spending too much time on Twitter if this is a problem for you?

This is wild and evidence that Twitter's ad revenue has fallen by a lot.

Which, if true, also means that advertising on Twitter has little measurable benefit. Why? Because if Twitter advertising could deliver measurable, immediate value, someone would advertise.

In less than 1 year, Elon has proved the following theories correct:

  • Most jobs are useless

  • Most advertising is useless

4D chess at its finest /s

huge, deep-pocked advertisers such as IBM do not really care about ROI or benefit, but rather just want to spread awareness, like about IBM and its Watson program. however, those are also the type of advertisers most averse to risk and may not wish to be associated with Elon

Yes, agree. But given that Twitter laid off 75-90% of staff and also stopped paying bills, costs must be down hugely. Therefore, if they still aren't making money, the price of ads has also fallen off a cliff.

Let's say that, pre-Elon, they got $1 per unit of hand-wavy awareness campaigns. It's possible that now they get $0.10 per unit of actual measurable performance ads. The loss of the hand-wavy shit really hurts because ads don't really work.

Related:

https://archive.is/yBS9E

"When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?"

Trigger warning: Boomer-tier mainstream media

Is it known whether the loans are fixed rate? If they aren't, costs are presumably also going up as the Federal Reserve keeps raising interest rates to fight inflation.

Most LBO debt (which this is) is floating rate.

LBOs need to have optional principal payments because they don't know if the company will make enough free cash flow to make principal payments on the debt. Fixed rate debt with a prepayment option is a nightmare for banks to price and risk manage (see SVB passim, or the S&L crisis for an earlier example - LBO debt would be even worse than mortgages because there isn't the huge volume of historical prepayment data) so it tends to be expensive. And private equity firms have the necessary skills and market access to manage their own interest rate risk with derivatives. Most (but by no means all) LBO loan covenants require the borrower to buy an interest rate cap which protects itself (and thus indirectly the lenders) from big interest rate rise.

To be fair, Musk-owned Twitter is exactly the sort of organisation that would "forget" to buy the cap, and it turned out to be a working assumption among Musk-aligned right-wing VCs that they were bailout-eligible.

I think most "big" loans are fixed rate. You want the cost/cashflow to be predictable.

marketing for these big companies seems like a billion dollar red queen's race. obviously some advertising needs to exist, but it feels like a massive human inefficiency that there are ads everywhere.

Because if Twitter advertising could deliver measurable, immediate value, someone would advertise.

Web advertising is patronage, not about measurable outcomes.. Once twitter slipped from the grasp of the managerial regime, the advertisers were told to back off.

All the old big company ads disappeared after the the takeover, and some large companies came back months later, but in a greatly diminished number.

Do you truly think Raytheon ads on MSNBC, ads by a company which doesn't sell anything civilians can buy, is using ads as anything but patronage?

Most web advertising is for products or services you can purchase, though. And there are so many different products for accurately measuring the effect of your ad spend. This seems facially false.

Most web advertising is for products or services you can purchase, though

I've read accounts claiming online advertising is mostly a sham. That is, there are really little reliable metrics, all the power is in the hands of those selling the ads, etc.

I may post about it if I find the relevant write-up.

Most web advertising is for products or services you can purchase, though

That someone can purchase. I've been on twitter for years. I'd estimate maybe 5% of ads I saw were ever relevant - most were irrelevant trash. I mean, job offers for software devs? It's hard to tell how bad their ad targetting was.

Rest complete trash I'd not even glance at or would block immediately like say, ads for Pepsi.

Facebook seems slightly less bad at showing irrelevant stuff, but it hasn't even figured out that as a far-right type I'm not going to buy liquid food substitutes. So online ads are really kind of meh, if even supposedly some of the best companies cannot figure out how to target ads.

I've read accounts claiming online advertising is mostly a sham. That is, there are really little reliable metrics, all the power is in the hands of those selling the ads, etc.

Note that the following is a much worse argument than it should be - I should just go through a big advertising product's offerings here and explain how they work.

Advertising is a massive industry. I don't doubt this is true for some buyers and sellers in some areas, but others effectively measure the impacts of ad spend. Teams put a lot of effort from very intelligent people into measuring it, and from what I have seen it works well.

Examples to consider: Some google search terms are much more expensive to advertise on than others. Why? Well, they're terms like 'Insurance', 'loans', 'mortgage', 'attorney', where people are looking to purchase expensive services. How would that price be maintained if they didn't work?

Another example: Multiple small online business owners have told me that advertisements get them most of their customers.

That someone can purchase. I've been on twitter for years. I'd estimate maybe 5% of ads I saw were ever relevant - most were irrelevant trash

Twitter's advertising has always been terrible (i i r c), I'm referring to internet advertising in general.

but it hasn't even figured out that as a far-right type I'm not going to buy liquid food substitutes

You may also just be in a hard-to-target demographic, most of us are outliers. I have never intentionally clicked and will never intentionally click on an ad unless I'm investigating advertising itself, and whenever I notice an ad for a product I think 'this is trying to manipulate me ... I better be extra sure to never buy this!', I use ublock origin, half the sites I spend a lot of time on have no ads, I'm not interested in almost all advertised products, and the weirdness of my internet habits mans ads are poorly targeted at me. If advertising was like that for everyone, very little about the ad industry would be recognizable. But most people are not like that.

I agree!

"We need all these employees for X, Y, Z reason" - FALSE!

"We spend all this money on advertising because it works" - ALSO FALSE!

So proveth Elon the Shatterer of Sacred Myths. (For the record I believe that Elon is not playing 4d chess here and is just shooting from the hip with poor results).

I don't understand the logic at all, it seems like it would cost a lot of ad revenue to throttle user engagement that much. But maybe ad revenue is so low that anything he can do to juice subscriptions is good? Though once you cut low follower engagement by demanding a subscription then it stops becoming a good promotional platform for power users and they use it less which it makes less attractive to subscribers and the death spiral starts.

power users are not going to be deterred by some downtime

This is insane. I haven't used Twitter for awhile and forgot my previous username, so I created a new twitter account and infinite scrolled for about 20 seconds and I hit the read-limit and got rate limited. The entire website went blank. What is he trying to accomplish here? Save on infrastructure costs? I don't remember another website trying anything like this.

Also why start this on the weekend? I imagine the poor engineering oncalls will start getting paged about massive egress and engagement drops, possibly split by each individual product pillar. It's not like this decision was leaked beforehand, so I don't believe it was widely communicated across the company. Basically, chaos.

I predict a walk-back within hours or days.

Since he stated "temporary limits", a walkback would be very easy to do, but it's still just evidence that the whole site's basically hostage to a capricious weirdo.

One theory I saw that it's the first day of the month and some ISPs are finally starting to pull the plug.

As Musk is a certified Very Smart Man^tm (IT must be true, a verified dude in his truck wearing sunglasses told me so!) I bet it's actually a legitimate hail marry attempt to get some money out of the site.

This is based purely on vibes because the MuskMan clearly wakes up and throws the bones to determine all his choices for the day eg. challenging a reptilian to a wrestling match before getting his card pulled by his mother.

As Musk is a certified Very Smart Man^tm (IT must be true, a verified dude in his truck wearing sunglasses told me so!) I bet it's actually a legitimate hail marry attempt to get some money out of the site.

Yet another company run into the ground by an African diversity-hire CEO. When will the woke madness end?

This is the only legit funny take I've seen regarding ratepocolypse . All of the "twitter is dying" noise reads so performative to me.

Yet another company run into the ground by an African diversity-hire CEO. When will the woke madness end?

While it's not great, I have to admit I'm clodhopper enough that it made me laugh 🤷‍♀️

Funny. The post you're responding to isn't much better, but don't do this.

or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing

Best guess I've got is that it will last exactly until a deal is signed with some big AI company for access to the dataset.

I really don't want to see an AI trained by Twitter.

That was just Tay, right?

https://gwern.net/leprechaun

There appear to be several similar AI-related leprechauns: the infamous Microsoft Tay bot, which was supposedly educated by 4chan into being evil, appears to have been mostly a simple ‘echo’ function (common in chatbots or IRC bots) and the non-“repeat after me” Tay texts are generally short, generic, and cherrypicked out of tens or hundreds of thousands of responses, and it’s highly unclear if Tay ‘learned’ anything at all in the short time that it was operational;

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