07-02-2023, 09:17 PM
No One Believes Elon Musk’s Explanation For Breaking Twitter
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2...7bd27a3bff
There are two main theories about what’s going on here. One involves the possibility that Elon’s big move before this, the new inability to view Twitter when not logged in, created some sort of technical spiral where Twitter is now effectively DDOSing itself based on how these changes were made. The limitation has nothing to do with scraping and everything with trying to keep the site together while this is addressed, according to Sheldon Chang on Mastadon.
The second theory has to do with Musk, in an effort to cut costs, refusing to pay his bills to places like Amazon or Google who provide essential services for Twitter. These issues suspiciously correspond with past reporting about this area, though follow-ups indicate that Musk eventually at least paid the Google bill. The more likely option is the former, it seems, about the logged-out viewing change badly messing things up.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/companie...r-AA1diWq0
The site is now requiring people to log on to view tweets and profiles — a change in its longtime practice to allow everyone to peruse the chatter on what Musk has frequently touted as the world’s digital town square since buying it for $44 billion last year.
After facing backlash, he tweeted that the thresholds would be raised to 800 posts for unverified accounts and 8,000 for verified accounts before later settling on 1,000 and 10,000 tweets, respectively.
In a Friday tweet, Musk described the new restrictions as a temporary measure that was taken because “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
The crackdown began to have ripple effects, causing more than 7,500 people at one point Saturday to report problems using the social media service, based on complaints registered on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technolo...b08e2bc26a&ei=54
That’s Mr Musk’s explanation, and he appears to be sticking to it. (He did not respond to multiple questions asking how the rate-limiting would work, or why it was happening.)
But sceptics of the idiosyncratic Twitter boss think there may be something else going on.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of safety, said it “doesn’t pass the sniff test that scraping all of a sudden created such dramatic performance problems,” adding that scraping “was the open secret of Twitter data access” and “it was fine”.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technolo...b08e2bc26a&ei=54
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2...7bd27a3bff
There are two main theories about what’s going on here. One involves the possibility that Elon’s big move before this, the new inability to view Twitter when not logged in, created some sort of technical spiral where Twitter is now effectively DDOSing itself based on how these changes were made. The limitation has nothing to do with scraping and everything with trying to keep the site together while this is addressed, according to Sheldon Chang on Mastadon.
The second theory has to do with Musk, in an effort to cut costs, refusing to pay his bills to places like Amazon or Google who provide essential services for Twitter. These issues suspiciously correspond with past reporting about this area, though follow-ups indicate that Musk eventually at least paid the Google bill. The more likely option is the former, it seems, about the logged-out viewing change badly messing things up.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/companie...r-AA1diWq0
The site is now requiring people to log on to view tweets and profiles — a change in its longtime practice to allow everyone to peruse the chatter on what Musk has frequently touted as the world’s digital town square since buying it for $44 billion last year.
After facing backlash, he tweeted that the thresholds would be raised to 800 posts for unverified accounts and 8,000 for verified accounts before later settling on 1,000 and 10,000 tweets, respectively.
In a Friday tweet, Musk described the new restrictions as a temporary measure that was taken because “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
The crackdown began to have ripple effects, causing more than 7,500 people at one point Saturday to report problems using the social media service, based on complaints registered on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technolo...b08e2bc26a&ei=54
That’s Mr Musk’s explanation, and he appears to be sticking to it. (He did not respond to multiple questions asking how the rate-limiting would work, or why it was happening.)
But sceptics of the idiosyncratic Twitter boss think there may be something else going on.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of safety, said it “doesn’t pass the sniff test that scraping all of a sudden created such dramatic performance problems,” adding that scraping “was the open secret of Twitter data access” and “it was fine”.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technolo...b08e2bc26a&ei=54
