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