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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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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)