HN Explorer

Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

561 points by 3cats-in-a-coat ↗ HN
Elon Musk:

"To address extreme level 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"

Source: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz94eReWYAEhkHS?format=png&name=900x900

Source (backup): https://i.imgur.com/WvwtHez.png

760 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] thread
davidw
"Something went wrong. Try reloading."

Edit: I think this made more sense when the thread linked to a tweet.

damedesfleurs
Remember when he said twitter would have 1 billion users by 2024
kjkjadksj
I wish I had a bookie that would give me odds on musks statements.
meepmorp
He misspoke and actually meant one, billionaire user by 2024
madars
To those getting "Rate Limit Exceeded" or without an account, this is Elon Musk's tweet:

   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
damedesfleurs
600 tweets is like 1 timeline reload for me and i follow less that 100 accounts
minimaxir
From comments and personal experience, it is incredibly likely Elon screwed up the rollout and the "600 posts/day" isn't accurate and is triggering much, much sooner than expected.
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TillE
I think a ton of users will hit 600 "posts read" really quickly, if that's what they're measuring.

Refresh your timeline, load 20 new tweets. Tap a tweet, load 10 replies, etc.

minimaxir
Even if Twitter loads 20 tweets, it doesn't mean you've read 20 tweets.

This is not semantics, as tweet impressions are a separate metric Twitter tracks and would more intuitively represent reads.

Unless Twitter engineering did some malicious compliance for Elon.

filleduchaos
Personally I wouldn't assume that the app that's been demonstrated to count "views" in extremely sketchy ways has suddenly started caring about the distinction between loading and reading a post. Especially when the intent is pretty obviously to herd users towards subscribing.
minimaxir
Fair counterpoint: Tweet views are a vanity metric (which is why Elon likes them), but tweet impressions are a required metric for advertisers to track ad CTR and any shenanigans there will actually kill Twitter.
rideontime
If the point is to stop scrapers, they would _have_ to use “tweets fetched” as the metric.
ncallaway
The bullshit reason given for this was to “prevent bots and scrapers”, so I strongly suspect they’d be using API responses, rather than impressions.

Especially so considering how quickly some people are reporting the rate limiting impacts them

matsemann
I've been busy all day, and when I just opened the app I instantly got "cannot retrieve tweets at this time". No way I've reached 600 or 6000 posts. Got it from the first tweet I tried viewing.
faefox
The fact that even paid subscribers are limited to 6000 posts a day (seems like a lot, very much isn't if you're a remotely active user) is utterly bonkers. What other platform works like this?
meepmorp
And that's probably 6,000 tweets loaded via API, not 6,000 that you might care about. Don't they promote and show you posts from blue checkmark people even if you're not following them?
sidibe
Another master stroke of genius from this first principles maverick. Everything in every field is so simple for him, it's a wonder every one else has been just too stupid to try these ideas before. Horribly mismanaged Twitter that was before Elon failing to the tune of around break even is now going to have hundreds of millions of paid blue checks for sure
climatologist
He's trying to get more people to commit to giving Twitter $8/month. I'm not sure if it's going to work because I suspect people will just change their browsing habits and continue not paying. Next CEO will have to figure out how to continue getting more advertising dollars to continue paying for the servers and the bandwidth.
ezoe
6000 posts/day is still nothing because I probably consume faster than 1 post/second on Twitter.
EA-3167
Nothing is more likely to drive people away from social media than trying to put a dollar value on it.

None of them are worth paying for, not a single one.

sidibe
I do pay for YouTube. I don't know if it's worth it, are ad blockers working well there these days?
EA-3167
Is Youtube social media? I mean it has a comment section, but to me it's always been a content delivery service for videos, first and foremost.
filleduchaos
There are also far fewer creators/posters and far more value per post, especially when you consider that YouTube carries a lot of commercial content (music & music videos)

Would I pay for ad-free access to a giant catalogue of music (even though I can use an ad blocker) or to support talented people putting hours into composing and editing content I like? Sure, why not. Would I pay to see people's random short-form thoughts? Hell no.

EA-3167
You said it, paying for YT is a no-brainer for me, because it's how I discover new music, listen to jazz and classical concerts, and follow a few big names I enjoy.

There's nothing like that on Twitter, FB, Reddit, etc.

madars
uBlock Origin is working (at least for now). There are various anti-paywall lists as well for your NYT/WaPo/Boston Globe needs.
HL33tibCe7
Think about the Twitter Blue users you’ve seen on Twitter before this.

Who on Earth would want to pay $8/month to join a site where you can effectively only interact with that kind of person?

__jem
In fact, I'd be more likely to pay money to never see a verified post ever again.
3cats-in-a-coat
Needless to say, with those limits, Twitter is basically unusable. I really doubt these ridiculous limitations can be explained just by a sudden urge to scrape. Why limit verified accounts, for example?
sylware
Because they could be compromised and used by a careless third-party?
mackie342red
Why would Twitter's new verification system be compromised?
rideontime
There’s nothing to “compromise.” Being generous and accepting that this is meant to deter scrapers, a scraper could simply pay their eight bucks to avoid the rate limit.
sylware
Stolen credentials of such an account and hardly ever used by its legit owner.

The hard part is the 'hardly ever used by its legit owner', not the "stolen credendials".

x86x87
I am guessing twitter fucked around and now are in the finding out phase.

I bet some of their infra is crumbling under the stress of all bs Musk pulled.

soneca
I am 100% sure that I didn’t load 300 tweets in the official app today. I was only accessing an account where I follow 17 people. I just counted and there were 14 new tweets (RTs counted as 2 tweets) in my feed from today (the average for a typical day in this account). And I was rate-limited today.

In the best scenario, the change is really intended, but they messed something with the implementation and Musk will never admit it.

In the worst, their infra is crumbling and they are inventing excuses to save face.

x86x87
Twitter crumbling is the best case scenario imho.

This will show that you cannot run it with a skeleton crew and that the decisions made were either extremely naive or extremely dumb and filled with hubris

mattgreenrocks
And we get the nice side effect of Twitter being dead.
ssnistfajen
The deadly combo is running a skeleton crew while rapidly implementing new changes. This just presents an exponentially higher workload for the remaining staff who may not have the institutional knowledge required to successfully tackle those problems.
ProjectArcturis
Guessing the app preloaded responses to the tweets you read?
soneca
That’s my guess. Or something on the “for you” tab
netsharc
I read that they've resumed paying Google for their cloud infra... maybe Melon just paid for some low tier and he's yelling at his engineers and they're desperately trying to not hit the limits of those resources.
amatwl
There was reporting that they were scrambling to move some infrastructure off Google since they were going to be cut off after refusing to pay their bills. The deadline was June 30, though there was additional reporting saying Linda Yaccarino restarted payments - https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-google-clo...
x86x87
Hahaha. If this caused it and it's actually googlw cutting them off this is beyond hilarious.
housemusicfan
Verified accounts are limited to 6k tweets/day. Assume the average human is awake for 16 hours a day. That's 6.25 tweets/minute if you did literally nothing but scroll through twitter all day long for 16 hours straight. Please explain how that makes the site "unusable" unless of course you are a non-human bot scraping site content.
duped
I hit the 600 post limit in about an hour, so how they're counting that seems kind of suspect. There are dozens of tweets you may scroll past or comments you may load for any one that you care about.
Terretta
You only scroll past 6.25 tweets per minute?

An easier way of thinking about this is, 12 followed tweets with 50 replies each, 600 limit reached.

Do that in 10 idle times throughout your day (lots of people do more, like, say, Elon), and you hit even the verified limit.

user_named
I can't imagine someone scrolling as slowly as in your example. I'm certain I scroll at least 100 tweets/minute.
housemusicfan
For 16 hours straight with no breaks? Your phone's battery would die before that was exceeded.
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harshalizee
At 100 tweets/minute they would reach the limit in an hour, wouldn't they?
LordAtlas
More like 6 minutes (600/100) if they're scrolling throughout. Perhaps unrealistic but even given generous allowances, a frequent user of Twitter is screwed within the hour, yes.
greatwave1
16 hours? If you're scrolling 100 tweets/min, you'd hit the unverified user limit within 6 minutes, and the verified user limit within an hour
housemusicfan
I don't understand, are you actually reading 100 tweets/minute, or just endlessly scrolling through random data for thumb exercise?

When you make the good faith assumption that people are actually reading through the content, the numbers start to seem a bit more rational.

misnome
Nobody consumes twitter that way.
kemotep
The grandparent comments are saying that allegedly the limitation is tweets loaded not read. If you scroll past tweets to get to content you actually want to read, allegedly people have reached the daily limits after only a few minutes after opening twitter.

The good faith assumption here is that Twitter only counts tweets read but does that mean the client reads the tweet or the user? The server delivered them all the same, whether a human reads it or not. So does delivery of the tweet by loading it onto the device count or some nebulous amount of time spent lingering on the tweet?

nickthegreek
I don’t believe assuming every tweet is read in a feed is good faith. There isn’t a single social media app that I use where I am not quickly scrolling past nonsense all the time.
greatwave1
Did you actually read the tweet that you replied to?

> "I'm certain I scroll at least 100 tweets/minute."

Many Twitter users, including literally the person you are in conversation with, scroll through dozens/hundreds of tweets a minute.

Not sure if you're actually used Twitter before, but many tweets are only a line or two of text, and it doesn't take more than a second to process them.

Additionally, if you're quickly scrolling through replies or someone's history to try to find something, it can render hundreds of tweets in a matter of seconds.

squeaky-clean
Just for reference, let's say HN added a similar rate limit. Opening this thread would cost you over 500 comments towards that rate limit. It doesn't mean you read all 500 comments on this post.
emmp
Your "good faith assumption" is just not the consumption profile of a twitter user. Scrolling through 100 tweets in a minute is completely plausible.
LordAtlas
Twitter can also be used on the desktop.

I leave it running in a window while I do other things, and check in a few times a day. Thanks to Twitter product "development", the feed now auto-refreshes itself when you get back to it.

ramesh31
>That's 6.25 tweets/minute if you did literally nothing but scroll through twitter all day long for 16 hours straight. Please explain how that makes the site "unusable" unless of course you are a non-human bot scraping site content.

Are you kidding? 6,000 tweets is literally like 10 minutes of scrolling through twitter. You're assuming each tweet to be worthy of being read. They aren't. You scroll through hundreds of them to find good threads.

ummonk
With a more normal 100 tweets viewed per minute, a verified user would hit the limit in an hour, which is quite low for the kind of power user that would purchase twitter blue.
pphysch
6.25 tweets/minute is nothing. The feed generates a ton of junk (ads, redundant QTs, straight up noise) so there are certainly periods where I will scroll past 6 junk tweets in 1-2 seconds.
rideontime
One correction: It’s tweets fetched via the API, not tweets actually viewed. An unattended open tab could easily bust the limit as twitter fetches more for your feed.
rsynnott
Do you use Twitter? Even at the best of times, you learn to flip though fairly quickly skimming over the nonsense, and since the ascension of naughty ol’ mr car bluetick replies get promoted to the front of the queue, so you have to scroll past a sea of bullshit to get to the real replies.

Twitter with 600 tweets a day is clearly unusable. That’s one large thread, and you’ll scroll past most of it anyway.

eterm
I don't use Twitter. (Or haven't since ~2006).

That sounds like a miserable user experience in general, what compels you to seek out that experience?

SoftTalker
I don't use twitter either but I guess it's the same reason many of us come here. We find it interesting and/or entertaining. I know I've had days where I killed hours on HN. I try to avoid it, but still probably spend more time here than I get in compensating benefit. Very little of what is discussed here is really important in a significant way if you take a step back and evaluate it honestly.
yodsanklai
HN is very different in the sense that HN moderation and culture encourages users to be civic. Twitter incentizes for the opposite.
rsynnott
Oh, I’m essentially off it since naughty ol’ mr car took it over; it used to be better (though even then, there’s a reason it was affectionately known as the hellsite).
yodsanklai
Twitter is extremely addictive and bring the worse in people. There's a constant flow of information, lots of arguments, lots of famous people (also addicted). For some reason, HN likes to pick on Facebook, but Twitter is by far the most toxic social network.
housemusicfan
By your logic, everyone with a paid subscription constitutes "a sea of bullshit" and the "real replies" are at the back of the line? That's the most hipster-esque description of Twitter I've ever heard. Underground Twitter, it's where the cool kids hang out and vape behind the gymnasium.

This sounds more like unresolved personal grudges rather than an issue with the platform itself and the masses that use it. If you have a problem with the 600 tweet limit you can pay $8.

Everyone seems to forget that Twitter was bleeding money under the previous leadership. Unlimited free shit has its practical limits.

3cats-in-a-coat
This is incorrect, Twitter was profitable 16 quarters of the last 20 quarters under the past leadership. Elon tried to rewrite some of Twitter's history, suggesting Twitter's financial problems were always this bad... but the financial situation only really became drastically worse the moment he bought Twitter, saddled it with 13 billion high interest rate debt, and advertisers fled, cutting Twitter's revenue in half. Neither firing 80% of employees nor shutting down multiple datacenters & skipping rent can compensate for this.
bardak
Thank you for shedding light on this. Twitters biggest financial problem prior to Elons purchase was growth. There loses were mainly them spending money on try to find an avenue of growth.
rsynnott
In general, yes. Those who have to pay for attention are very rarely worth paying attention to, and the bluetick option doesn’t get you much other than artificial attention.

This isn’t theoretical; look at any high-traffic tweet (well, you can’t now; it’s broken. But if it comes back.) The top replies these days are virtually guaranteed to be nonsense.

Again I must ask, have you actually used the bloody website? It’s hard to imagine a regular user not being aware of this; it’s hard to miss.

upon_drumhead
The sea of bullshit is the fact the page is laid out like this

Interesting Tweet Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweet x 20 Related Replies x 20 Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweet x 20 And so on.

The sea of bullshit to me is the huge chunks of Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweets that are thrown into the reply chains.

evan_
It isn’t actually “tweets read”, it’s tweets loaded.

If you for instance open the @elonmusk tweet announcing this, it will load dozens if not hundreds of replies, and those will all be counted against your quota. Do that a few times and you’re done in a few minutes.

I got rate limited after a few minutes of normal use. (Like most users I don’t have Twitter blue.)

climatologist
I guess he's trying to get more people to pay money for access to Twitter but in exchange they still must view intrusive ads in the replies. If Twitter is unsustainable without such measures then it's unlikely that the changes he's making are going to make it more sustainable. Whoever steps into the CEO role will have to continue constantly shoving ads in people's faces to pay for the data centers and bandwidth.
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nperez
All these Twitter Blue subscribers who thought they could buy views and engagement must be thrilled that they're now competing for a very limited resource
r721
My first thought on reading this was: "I'm going to unfollow some high volume posters in that case", so they will lose some followers too.
I_am_tiberius
My first thought was: I delete my twitter account and get more productive.
spaceman_2020
I refuse to believe that Twitter is so hammered by scrapers that it can’t even serve text content.
nperez
I don't think it's about servers getting hammered so much as it's about AI causing them to rethink the value of their data, then deciding user hostility is the best way to extract said value
ethanbond
Or just another stick to try to get people to pay. It’s like watching a precocious 7th grader play product manager.
cududa
Or that they haven’t paid Google server bills for 4 months and Google threatened to cut them off on July 1st
spaceman_2020
Can't wait for Elon's AI startup sending me answers in 1/35 threads.

I think Elon's real plan is to ride the AI hype train, and the best way to do that is to pretend that Twitter is their "moat".

With his capacity for bullshit and the market's willingness to give gobbles of money to bullshit, I'm sure he can ride his bullshit AI startup to $50B valuation easily.

gmerc
And do tell us, what value would thar data actually have ?

I mean apart from maybe training a model to run influence operations on failing twitter?

In which world is the ‘data’ from twitter actually of any real world value with Chinchilla law pushing us from quantity to quality?

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misnome
Yeah, it sounds like bullshit, even before you notice who is saying it.

I absolutely love that the solution is to penalise users for engaging with the platform; looking at replies for one tweet must be, what, a hundred tweets? And better not reply to something yourself because it’ll cause a timeline refresh and cost you another hundred quota!

redsaber
if they penalize users, how they're going to get more data from the said users to sell.
dawnerd
But also to penalize paying customers. Sad part is people are defending him.
belltaco
There might be a huge uptick in scraping recently because of AI companies trying to train their own LLMs.
ezoe
600 posts/day... seriously? I'll exceed that limit in 10 minutes(I probably browse tweets like 1 post/second in my native language, Japanese).
michilehr
Actually it seems to be 900 detail views. So it is 15 minutes.

Response headers for me:

X-Rate-Limit-Limit: 900 X-Rate-Limit-Remaining: 0 X-Rate-Limit-Reset: 1688318503

EA-3167
It's a brilliant plan, AI means the data is more valuable (for today at least), users generate the data, so punish the users until they flee and... profit?

Even for Musk, even for a debt-ridden Twitter with no hope of survival, this is impressively terrible.

duped
I can't use Twitter today after about an hour of browsing my feed this morning. Which is hilarious because it's the first day I stopped using Reddit.
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smy20011
People getting rate limited message cannot see that due to rate limit.
davidw
Yeah the whole site just seems broken to me.
uni_baconcat
So, this is an account-associated limitation, even when browsing with the official app and website.
aqme28
Interesting that he doesn't even want my ad revenue anymore. Well good riddance. The sooner I can be off this addictive website the better.
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michilehr
Less active users -> lower AWS invoice. Smart move... not.
x86x87
Why not just pull the same move they did with gcp and simply stop paying?
TillE
I'm increasingly concerned that Bluesky has missed its moment. It got a ton of hype when it started rolling out invites, but that died down pretty quickly. Now it's been a couple months and they're still not open.

Events like this would be a perfect opportunity to grab users from Twitter. But they're not ready.

davidw
Yeah I signed up for the wait list, but it's been months, and...nada. Seems like if they're that bogged down, it's got some real problems.
__jem
The site seems like its creaking under the strain of everyone checking it right now.
TechBro8615
Where is the bluesky site? I tried to find it recently and ended up on the app store where I saw that I needed an invite to join, and then I closed it and never came back.
__jem
It's still invite only, unfortunately.
Macha
Sounds like Google+ in a way, they limited it to invite only for a long time which caused a lot of the second wave users to get fed up, only for the low interest on actually opening it up causing Google to feel the need to ram it down everyone's throat, and both periods contributed to its negative perception.
partiallypro
Didn't help that Jack jumped ship back to Twitter
eviks
Would be a pity if so, such a promising technology where you finally have a chance to own your content and connections
GaryNumanVevo
Bluesky is great in comparison. Not sure it's going to ever be as big as Twitter, but it's a great alternative to Mastodon
user_named
So you're just posting to say you got an invite.
runarberg
I concur. For me the lack of an algorithm is a bug, not a feature, and the way bluesky lets you pick your own algorithms (via feeds) is an amazing improvement.

I am active on both Mastodon and BlueSky, but I'm finding my self way more on BlueSky lately.

Jach
For the longest time I thought Bluesky was just another euphemism for Twitter, like this site is sometimes called Orange Site. I don't see it becoming the next Twitter; if anything Mastadon has the best chance except I always misspell it.
lovvtide
Don't forget about Nostr, which has seen an absolutely incredible amount of development over the last 6 months.

Damus (ios) - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/damus/id1628663131

Amethyst (android) - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitorpampl...

Satellite (web) - https://satellite.earth

Primal (web) - https://primal.net

Iris (web) - https://iris.to

Snort (web) - https://snort.social

Coracle (web) - https://app.coracle.social

All interoperable. All open source.

bentcorner
I've used Nostr a handful of times and am impressed with how responsive the network appears to be. But the problem I have with it is that the default feed (or whatever its called) is chock full of crypto nonsense. Terrible first impression.

I made a test post and was immediately pinged by two crypto bots. Yeah no thanks.

lovvtide
That's a fair point, and most of the people on nostr are aware of the need to diversify. In fact, as of last week you can create Reddit-like sub-communities on nostr with rules like "no crypto content" which should help a lot.
__jem
Incredibly bizarre way to intentionally kill your app, even after all the other nonsense he's been doing. Even if I were willing to pay for something as cringe as verification, 6000 posts a day is laughable for an app like Twitter. I hit the rate limit on my "unverified" account in about 5 minutes. I've been waiting for $newApp to get enough users to be fun, and this only motivates me more to be the change I want to see.
ceejayoz
This is the move that elevates “the Saudis funded this to kill Twitter” from silly conspiracy theory to maybe plausible.
rsynnott
Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by Elon’s incompetence.
fundad
Malice? He thinks he’s liberating us from the woke mind virus and defending poor oppressed Republican activists.
rvense
Isn't Musk personally liable for a lot of this burnt money? In this scenario, does Musk gain something or was he just outsmarted?
throw2022110401
In that scenario Musk fills the "useful idiot" role.

I am not really convinced though, I think it's just plain old incompetence and hubris. But then, it's 2023 so who knows.

throw2022110401
They are literally throwing away revenue with every denied impression. An act of desperation obviously. My take: they broke something and need to shed load to keep the site running. The "extreme scraping" thing is the usual Musk BS.
csiegert
I find the scraping explanation plausible. Some search engine bots are aggressive. With all the AI hype, I first thought of Microsoft Bing scraping Twitter at full datacenter speed to suck in more information for OpenAI.
randomfool
These limits are far below standard scraping rates and deeply affecting the casual users, have to presume intentionally.
cldellow
I would believe that scraping is why they now require users to be authenticated.

But given that they now require users to be logged in, it should be computationally cheap to drop unauthenticated requests at the front door before they incur real expense.

It'd also be cheap to just blackhole datacentre IP space.

The sort of attack that would require this level of limits is malware on tens of thousands of residential machines that can use a user's existing Twitter session cookies. I'm really skeptical that's the case.

zimpenfish
> I find the scraping explanation plausible.

How do you explain it suddenly being a problem today and not, say, during the recent World Cup when not only the AI scraping would have been happening but el Morko himself was crowing about how much extra traffic they were handling?

petesergeant
Someone with deep pockets flipped the ON switch?
gmerc
The much simpler explanation is that elon lied again.
ssnistfajen
Actual human users are hitting rate limits under 10 minutes because every Tweet loaded counts towards the rate limit. This is like setting your house on fire at the sight of a few mosquitos.
crote
Alternatively, the costs outweigh impression revenue, they are actively running out of money, and trying to stall while desperately trying to find additional cash.
rsynnott
That seems… implausible? They used to be profitable; clearly at that point advertising revenue must have greatly exceeded infra cost. Now, I’d buy that it’s down, but surely not by _that_ much.
lapcat
But there are now big debt payments that didn't exist before, from the massively leveraged buyout.
rsynnott
Oh, sure, I’d be amazed if it’s profitable today. But I understood the person I was replying to to mean that they were throttling to control infra cost, which makes no sense, as revenue from people using twitter (ads) must surely more than pay for the infra; effectively shutting down twitter won’t make the debt costs go away and would clearly be a net financial negative.
lapcat
> But I understood the person I was replying to to mean that they were throttling to control infra cost

Or hard pushing for Twitter Blue subscriptions, which have 10x the rate limit.

tpetry
A lot of advertisers left Twitter one after another after each change by musk. Especially his change to allow hate speech (because free speech!) led to an exodus.

Now there are only very low-quality ads by drop-shipping companies left. I bet they don‘t pay as much as the big brand names before.

duped
Is it really "running" if users can't use the site at all?

Fwiw there's a post trending on mastodon that they DDOS'd themselves as a result of forcing logins to view tweets.

bardak
You would think that forced logins would have stopped a majority of the scraping. Even if it didn't the rate limit they have well below what would be needed to stop scrapers.
davidgerard
the user-based DDOS bug is in the login wall, so lol
JumpCrisscross
> literally throwing away revenue with every denied impression

Any estimates for how much?

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bemusedthrow75
> The "extreme scraping" thing is the usual Musk BS.

Right. I just don't grasp how people don't understand he is surely flat out lying.

ROTMetro
Now imagine being on Elon's Mars colony and having your breathing rate limited out of the blue one day. Today switched my vision of that from wonder and hope to seeing it as volunteering to become one of the belters in The Expanse. I'm kinda sad to have moved from the 'let me in' to 'hard pass' on that dream. It was one of that last big future dreams 1990s me had for the 20X0's.
CamperBob2
I'm kinda sad to have moved from the 'let me in' to 'hard pass' on that dream. It was one of that last big future dreams 1990s me had for the 20X0's.

Yep. Elon clearly lost his motivation for Mars at some point, either because he was confronted with unshakeable evidence that his goals were impossible to achieve, or because he just got bored and distracted.

My guess is that the latter explanation is closer to the mark. But on the other hand, learning that his dream was out of reach could easily have led to the kind of dissipative, self-destructive loss of focus that we've seen from him over the past couple of years.

For those of us who were on board with his original vision, he's just another Lucy, holding just another football.

fundad
Or it could be that the Mars narrative was more useful than it is now.
wnkrshm
That hit me years ago when working conditions at Tesla came to light, I realized Elon can never have his Mars colony be self-sufficient or he'd be thrown out of an airlock.
wildpeaks
The cherry on top is that even if you pay, you still get ads.
dgroshev
That's the main problem with Twitter Blue (other than its very bad reputation): it's just not worth the money. Instead of adding value to the subscription or making it cheaper, Elon just makes the rest of the product worse. It's a very weird way to do business.
LordAtlas
So 99% of accounts that are not verified are restricted to viewing max 600 tweets a day, which means if you do more than casually check Twitter once a day, you're fucked. No wonder everything is breaking.

But that's OK. Twitter has a big engineering team that should be able to sort this out soon. Oh, wait...

pphysch
Yeah my limit hit after 20-25 minutes of total screen time. What a mess.
randomfool
Same- rate limited after 20 mins. Way to force me to move elsewhere.

Advertising must really be in the hole to force users off the site like this.

bardak
This kills any advertising revenue they have and I'm sure twitter blue subscribers won't be happy about this if it keeps going on. I wonder if they will give twitter blue subscribers an even higher limit so that they can actually use it.
Tempest1981
/s or not /s? 25 minutes seems like plenty to me. But I also have HN noprocrast enabled.
pphysch
I also have a Twitter screen time limit, just not for 20 minutes.
publius_0xf3
25 minutes is nothing when a major event is happening. Like just last week, I was intensely following the Wagner Group rebellion minute-by-minute without sleeping. A limit would make it impossible to watch history unfold in real-time.
morkalork
Conspiracy theory of the day: He knows about something big that is going to happen soon and the breakage is intentional.
esskay
25 minutes is easy to hit when something is happening (be it a world event, sporting event, etc).

Case in point: I was watching the F1 sprint race this afternoon, taking part in a few discussions on Twitter about it as I always do. It took 10 minutes for my rate limit to come up, so thats me done on Twitter for the day, and advertisers not getting impressions.

dbish
Which Twitter replacement are people moving to (edit:looks like Bluesky if they can keep the servers up)?

I’m a big fan of Elon and what he’s built so I wasn’t planning on leaving, but can’t even use it now. Mastodon still seems too complicated to get the masses on. Where will non-tech folks go?

rjtavares
Bluesky is having some degraded performance due to "record-high traffic" (according to them).

As a casual user, it's noticeable how many people are posting now.

dbish
That’s still invite only though right?
rjtavares
Yeah. I think each user gets onr invite per week. Here's an invite code: bsky-social-ejzzv-3pehr
dbish
Thank you much. Greatly appreciated. Trying it out now
rjtavares
Looks like you got it. Have fun!
Hamuko
Yeah, noticed a lot of dormant follows pop up on my home feed again.
techwizrd
I created a Mastodon account yesterday before I even knew about this and it was surprisingly easy and user-friendly. The big thing it's missing, for me, is a way to find the Mastodon accounts for people you follow on Twitter. If more of the AI/ML community switched to Mastodon, I wouldn't have any need for Twitter.
dbish
I don’t have a problem for myself, but many non tech folks I know were not going to move over and I like to have a mix of folks I follow.
samcat116
There used to be tools for this but they went by the wayside with the Twitter api changes.
pinkcan
had you done this before the API was closed you'd have had access to a bunch of tools that let you find twitter users on mastodon
Deestan
Been on Mastodon since November. Signup was done in seconds. Finding people to follow was done gradually.

It's lively, and I use it everyday.

TBH, I don't really miss the people that don't want to come over.

bassman9000
Not an engineering issue. Compute, and in the end, energy, has a cost. You weren't aware of it because, as someone mentioned, it was subsidized before. Now you are aware. You're free to contribute by paying, if content is worth to you, or walk away. There are alternatives, but you can't escape the fact that moving all those bits is not free.
davidcbc
Why is it suddenly so costly only after Elon took over considering Twitter was borderline profitable before he took over?
bassman9000
it was never profitable
davidcbc
Wrong, they had net profits 15 out of 18 quarters from 2018-2022

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...

arrrg
Also, probably fairly considered the cost of doing business, but that includes a substantial fine Twitter had to pay. And Covid troubles.

Just good to know for context.

I’m really not sure where this narrative is coming from. It‘s always so weird to me. Why be so wrong?

starlevel003
> Compute, and in the end, energy, has a cost.

making sure that nobody can see ads by ratelimiting them too hard really helps with this, or so I'm told

pawelduda
Good guy Elon, giving people time to contemplate on each tweet, helping them unlearn mindless scrolling habits

Can we also have it closed on Sundays?

Quarrelsome
> Can we also have it closed on Sundays?

I'm getting flashbacks to the awful luddite boomer propaganda Spielberg crowbarred into the end of "Ready Player One" where he made the online virtual world closed on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

cududa
That was from the book
Quarrelsome
wow _really_? Sorry, I had no idea someone could be capable of writing a book about virtual worlds and then imagine shutting them down two days a week. My apologies Mr Spielberg.
zemo
it’s a story about how all of society takes place inside of a video game and at no point in the story does it ever contemplate whether or not that is a good thing. The story is just “save the princess from the dragon” but the princess is the oasis.
spideymans
I’ll really be able to get my procrastination under control, now that Reddit has banned third party clients, and Twitter has limited users to viewing 600 tweets/day.