Twitter Introduces Rate Limits for Users

[VanayadGaming]

16 hours ago, starsmine said:

they already did that with their super expensive API that caused every useful bot to die. 

Its more likely that elon "forgot" to pay his google server bill.
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/video/twitter-refuses-pay-google-cloud-bill-report-100008260 

It has been confirmed that is not the issue. It's simply because of the bot scraping. Also this: https://twitter.com/misteryrobozo/status/1675217396670291971?s=20

 

[HenrySalayne]

52 minutes ago, VanayadGaming said:

It has been confirmed that is not the issue. It's simply because of the bot scraping. Also this: https://twitter.com/misteryrobozo/status/1675217396670291971?s=20

"Simply because of bot scraping" - Thank god, it wasn't an unannounced utter -show, but a thoughtful implementation only affecting bots and not the normal users...

 

And a link to a source on Twitter is as useful as a link to your personal download folder with the page as a html-file - worthless...

Spoiler

C:\Users\smartass\Downloads\that-s_not_how_this_works.html

 

[Thaldor]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

Don't worry guys this is yet another 15D chess move that will ultimately make the site better, daddy Elon is always right

Seriously, I think it is the 15D chess to minimize the losses Don Musk takes from the whole ordeal.

The only acceptable way for a businessman to loose his business is that the business fails, social media platform fails if it doesn't have users to make data that can be sold to keep the lights on, so, to "fail graciously" Don Musk must make changes that seem to be for the profit but the real goal is to cull the herd until the platform has no chance to be profitable ever and it fails. Don Musk can still scrape couple coins out of the rotting corpse of Twatter by selling the patents and immaterial rights to tend the gaping hole the "forced" acquisition left to his wallet and the loan sharks won't be as bad on his tail since the company just was doomed from the beginning and failed "naturally" and mainly Don Musk can claim that he tried his best but.

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Aol and Yahoo died slowly with users losing interest over time.

Twitter might actually just vanish if they keep their current trajectory. They most likely don't have the cash for any "drought" period and they are just operating from day to day with their limited resources. Musk himself said in March that Twitter is four month away from running out of money.

So tight on money that he's knocking out the foundation and selling it to the landfill. This is the kind of "business" Elon runs. Poorly.

 

Everyone is "going somewhere else", the social media foundation that twitter built is all but completely destroyed at this point. Any sane company would have declared bankrupty and sold the assets to some vulture company by now, but elon's doing that destruction on his own. Have fun, good luck convincing any other business to be bought by Elon, the man who torched a successful company because he's a rich dingbat with more money than sense.

 

Quite frankly, I'd hope at this point that any company who has him on board, takes the seat away from him before he starts doing more "cybertruck" stupidity.

 

[Brooksie359]

On 7/1/2023 at 1:58 PM, Yuiski said:

Waow, I hit it in ~5 mins doing relatively normal browsing. Pretty hardcore..

Let's be honest here. That's probably 5 mins longer than how long you should use Twitter on a daily basis. 

[Tanaz]

The best comparison to Twitter I can think of is League Of Legends in-game chat. Completely useless, almost never helps you improve anything and can only make you a worse person.  It was a horrendous hell-hole before Musk and now it's become the official Elon Musk discussion forums + all the old garbage - the few and far between quality posts that it used to have. At least Reddit gave you solutions to issues and information as a side dish to your cancer. Twitter is just the cancer, so I'm glad it's getting run into the ground. Also sad for the shere amount of addicted people that've been having a mental breakdown over the past 24hrs.

[sub68]

So uhm, I don't think its working. 

I legit did middle click and hold down for like solid 5 ish secounds.

I use twitter just for artists I follow ( people that know me on this fourm know) and updates for music bands I follow (japan is basically soloy social media is on twitter) some insta but not all).  TBF I dont really use it other than retweet art and random updates on some stuff I am trying to do.

[Teched Out]

My initial thought of not being able to see Twitter was; who cares. However, I later realised, Elon's hissy fit impedes access to emergency alerts and broadcasts.

[vetali]

Starting to wonder if its been silently lifted? Been browsing all day without issue. Should be way over my 1k that he backtracked on yesterday.

 

6 minutes ago, Teched Out said:

My initial thought of not being able to see Twitter was; who cares. However, I later realised, Elon's hissy fit impedes access to emergency alerts and broadcasts.

This and his prior moves have severely devalued the platform for its real time newsworthiness. Its what I found Twitter most valuable for, news... especially sports related content. Looking up the riots in Paris and its mostly fake shit being elevated because somebody paid 8 dollars to spread misinformation.

[Quackers101]

3 hours ago, sub68 said:

So uhm, I don't think its working. 

I legit did middle click and hold down for like solid 5 ish secounds.

elon has changed rules a lot, so things change a lot with him around. nearly thought ltt was down, but it was just down for a moment

[Sauron]

11 hours ago, VanayadGaming said:

and now he wants this to stop. Either pay the $ for the APIs, or don't scrape. 

that's his problem, hardly a good reason to make the site unusable for normal people.

10 hours ago, Thaldor said:

Seriously, I think it is the 15D chess to minimize the losses Don Musk takes from the whole ordeal.

The only acceptable way for a businessman to loose his business is that the business fails, social media platform fails if it doesn't have users to make data that can be sold to keep the lights on, so, to "fail graciously" Don Musk must make changes that seem to be for the profit but the real goal is to cull the herd until the platform has no chance to be profitable ever and it fails. Don Musk can still scrape couple coins out of the rotting corpse of Twatter by selling the patents and immaterial rights to tend the gaping hole the "forced" acquisition left to his wallet and the loan sharks won't be as bad on his tail since the company just was doomed from the beginning and failed "naturally" and mainly Don Musk can claim that he tried his best but.

Twitter was doing ok at the time of acquisition, he could have just let it continue as it had been and it would have been fine. He's doing this because he's both genuinely incompetent and ideologically committed to appearing as the visionary who singlehandedly revolutionizes everything he touches.

[VanayadGaming]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

that's his problem, hardly a good reason to make the site unusable for normal people.

It causes huge server strain, and such Twitter had to do something about it to stem the tide until they find a final solution. Stop thinking everything is Elon saying left and right what should happen. 

[Sauron]

58 minutes ago, VanayadGaming said:

It causes huge server strain, and such Twitter had to do something about it to stem the tide until they find a final solution.

No they don't, it was fine for years. There are also plenty of ddos protection solutions that don't disrupt normal use. You could just rate limit accounts and/or ip addresses for example, normal users have no reason to browse twitter at like 10gbit/s.

1 hour ago, VanayadGaming said:

Stop thinking everything is Elon saying left and right what should happen. 

He's the CTO, this is literally his decision to make. Even if he didn't come up with the idea himself he certainly had to approve of it.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

Twitter was doing ok at the time of acquisition,

Twitter was doing fine, it wasn't profitable but it was coasting along no problem and had carved a clear successful niche.

The problem is financial: Elon's acquisition saddled twitter itself with about one billion dollar a year of debt intrest repayment. In order for twitter to work as it was doing before the acquisition, Elon needs to somehow squeeze ten additional dollars a year out of each registered user.

Twitter simply could no longer work like it did before the acquisition because the way Elon structured the acquisition, hence Elon is trying everything from cost cutting to aggressive monetization. This baffles me. Elon was the richest man in the world. He could have just paid all of that out of pocket, cashing out 15 billion dollar more of Tesla shares, which were at an all time high, and he would have had lots of freedom to do whatever he wanted, even at a loss.

Even now nothing prevents musk from just... Repying the debt out of pocket. His wealth is still unfathomable. Elon just chooses not to.

[Sauron]

53 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Twitter simply could no longer work like it did before the acquisition because the way Elon structured the acquisition, hence Elon is trying everything from cost cutting to aggressive monetization. This baffles me. Elon was the richest man in the world. He could have just paid all of that out of pocket, cashing out 15 billion dollar more of Tesla shares, which were at an all time high, and he would have had lots of freedom to do whatever he wanted, even at a loss.

Even now nothing prevents musk from just... Repying the debt out of pocket. His wealth is still unfathomable. Elon just chooses not to.

I suspect it's not quite that easy since liquidating that much tesla stock would likely completely obliterate its market value, in turn making it not worth enough to actually repay the debt. Overall it's just a terrible financial decision made by a megalomaniac with more money than sense.

[Arika]

1 hour ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Even now nothing prevents musk from just... Repying the debt out of pocket. His wealth is still unfathomable.

what does that solve? he gets rid of the current debt...but twitter is not profitable, so it goes back into debt almost immediately.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

15 minutes ago, Arika S said:

what does that solve? he gets rid of the current debt...but twitter is not profitable, so it goes back into debt almost immediately.

Musk gets his own megaphone. If it has that role, it doesn't have to make money. Other bilionares bought their media outlet, Bezof owns the Washington Post.

31 minutes ago, Sauron said:

I suspect it's not quite that easy since liquidating that much tesla stock would likely completely obliterate its market value, in turn making it not worth enough to actually repay the debt.

Fair enough. 

[VanayadGaming]

2 hours ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Twitter was doing fine, it wasn't profitable but it was coasting along no problem and had carved a clear successful niche.

The problem is financial: Elon's acquisition saddled twitter itself with about one billion dollar a year of debt intrest repayment. In order for twitter to work as it was doing before the acquisition, Elon needs to somehow squeeze ten additional dollars a year out of each registered user.

Twitter simply could no longer work like it did before the acquisition because the way Elon structured the acquisition, hence Elon is trying everything from cost cutting to aggressive monetization. This baffles me. Elon was the richest man in the world. He could have just paid all of that out of pocket, cashing out 15 billion dollar more of Tesla shares, which were at an all time high, and he would have had lots of freedom to do whatever he wanted, even at a loss.

Even now nothing prevents musk from just... Repying the debt out of pocket. His wealth is still unfathomable. Elon just chooses not to.

it was heading for bankruptcy. It was not doing great.

[Sauron]

7 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Musk gets his own megaphone. If it has that role, it doesn't have to make money. Other bilionares bought their media outlet, Bezof owns the Washington Post.

yeah but he didn't immediately destroy it  

7 minutes ago, VanayadGaming said:

it was heading for bankruptcy. It was not doing great.

No it wasn't

Quote

It was reporting a steady quartely profit (aside from the covid dip) after over a decade of losing money and remaining afloat nonetheless. Debts were being regularly paid. Maybe it wasn't doing "great" but it wasn't on the verge of bankruptcy by any stretch.

 

Also if it was doomed why did daddy elon think it was a good idea to buy it? No matter how you look at it the man comes off like an idiot.

[turner89]

On 7/2/2023 at 7:20 PM, Teched Out said:

My initial thought of not being able to see Twitter was; who cares. However, I later realised, Elon's hissy fit impedes access to emergency alerts and broadcasts.

Yep. The mobile alerts from Alberta's Emergency Alert system hasn't been working for a lot of people since a few months ago. They suggested using Twitter until they fix it....

[mcsqueazy]

While its nice that people are boutta get a break off twitter.

 

Do we really want terminal twitter users leaking into other platforms, or worse, see them outside?

[wanderingfool2]

On 7/3/2023 at 5:06 AM, Sauron said:

No it wasn't

Quote

Expand  

It was reporting a steady quartely profit (aside from the covid dip) after over a decade of losing money and remaining afloat nonetheless. Debts were being regularly paid. Maybe it wasn't doing "great" but it wasn't on the verge of bankruptcy by any stretch.

 

Also if it was doomed why did daddy elon think it was a good idea to buy it? No matter how you look at it the man comes off like an idiot.

"Steady quarterly profit", then you blame covid...great analysis of looking at a graph without bothered looking at the financial statements released.

 

That "covid dip" revenue increased, the major fault was they started also increasing their expenses, but those large spikes you see in 2018 and 2019 are not good indicators of the companies position.  It's because in both those years they had a negative tax provision, but in 2020 they effectively reversed what happened in 2019 for the tax provision.  If I had to guess, and could be wrong on this one because I don't feel like looking into it on what exactly the tax provision stuff was; but I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to take the hit in 2020 because as a business you could blame covid and people believe it because they just look at things like net income.

 

I find it funny how people like you call people an idiot, yet he has a track record of making companies profitable and eventually succeeded over time...despite being an "idiot".  I remember people saying the same about Tesla, and how it wouldn't survive, or SpaceX in how landing rockets like that was stupid.

 

 

As for this topic, I do think that 300 is too low for unverified, I do think that there could have been other better methods behind stopping this.

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

"Steady quarterly profit", then you blame covid...great analysis of looking at a graph without bothered looking at the financial statements released.

 

That "covid dip" revenue increased, the major fault was they started also increasing their expenses, but those large spikes you see in 2018 and 2019 are not good indicators of the companies position.  It's because in both those years they had a negative tax provision, but in 2020 they effectively reversed what happened in 2019 for the tax provision.  If I had to guess, and could be wrong on this one because I don't feel like looking into it on what exactly the tax provision stuff was; but I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to take the hit in 2020 because as a business you could blame covid and people believe it because they just look at things like net income.

Man I love how you accuse me of superficial analysis and immediately proceed to just wildly speculate about financial decisions you were not privy to and have no evidence of. The point is that there's no indication of twitter being any closer to bankruptcy in recent years than any previous time in 15 years of operation. The claim has come exclusively from musk with 0 evidence to back it up and yet you guys lap it up uncritically.

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

I find it funny how people like you call people an idiot, yet he has a track record of making companies profitable and eventually succeeded over time...despite being an "idiot".

That view of him can only stem from simultaneously crediting him for every success he's enjoyed while deliberately not blaming him for any of the failures. Sorry dude, you can't pretend that he's fully in charge and responsible every time something goes right but never when something goes wrong. The reality of people like him is that they get lucky once, possibly even by having some genuinely good insight at the time, then coast along the wave of money being basically immune to failure thanks to the coalesced interest keeping them afloat.

 

Also... even if he really was fully and personally responsible for all of his success that wouldn't mean he can't be acting stupid right now. If you think he's such a genius who is definitely not lying about twitter's conditions before and during his tenure, surely it wouldn't be hard for you to explain how personally buying a failing company that, ACCORDING TO HIM, is going to go down the drain unless he's able to monetize 100 times more users than he was able to, was a good move...?

2 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

As for this topic, I do think that 300 is too low for unverified, I do think that there could have been other better methods behind stopping this.

The cognitive dissonance must be killing you! Is he or is he not capable of making bad decisions?

[wanderingfool2]

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

Man I love how you accuse me of superficial analysis and immediately proceed to just wildly speculate about financial decisions you were not privy to and have no evidence of. The point is that there's no indication of twitter being any closer to bankruptcy in recent years than any previous time in 15 years of operation. The claim has come exclusively from musk with 0 evidence to back it up and yet you guys lap it up uncritically.

lol, the only portion where I speculated on is where I clearly marked that it was just a guess.

 

It was a publicly traded company, they had to report specific things.  The numbers I mentioned were clearly marked in the balance sheet of the public financial statements, and with public statements like those filed with the SEC.

 

The tax provision bit where I speculated they took the hit in 2020 was the only bit of speculation, but there were lots of companies that did so during that time.  The company that I worked for even did that, got rid of their bad debt and wrote it off in 2020 because no one really was looking (and it meant they could effectively start back from scratch collecting bad debt but posting good numbers).

 

As for the whole bankruptcy, it probably wouldn't have gone bankrupt anytime soon but it was bleeding money and making up with taking on debt.

Twitter:

Year - Net Cash flow - Additional $ added by taking on debt

2017 - $646m - No additional debt taken on this year

2018 - $248m - $1,150m in cash taken on by debt

2019 - ($94m) - $700m taken on in debt [repaid $1,000m in debt]

2020 - $183m - $1,000m [repaid $23m in debt]

2021 - $199m - $1,437m [repaid $1,168m in debt]

 

So yea, they were not in a great financial situation

 

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

The cognitive dissonance must be killing you! Is he or is he not capable of making bad decisions?

I never said he isn't capable of making a bad decision, it's just asinine to assume someone is an idiot when you don't know what their decision ultimately was.

 

Again, back when Tesla was going through the issues with production there were tons of people who effectively called him an idiot, yet he managed to turn it around.

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, wanderingfool2 said:

As for the whole bankruptcy, it probably wouldn't have gone bankrupt anytime soon but it was bleeding money and making up with taking on debt.

Twitter:

Year - Net Cash flow - Additional $ added by taking on debt

2017 - $646m - No additional debt taken on this year

2018 - $248m - $1,150m in cash taken on by debt

2019 - ($94m) - $700m taken on in debt [repaid $1,000m in debt]

2020 - $183m - $1,000m [repaid $23m in debt]

2021 - $199m - $1,437m [repaid $1,168m in debt]

 

So yea, they were not in a great financial situation

Which is literally what I said. Maybe not doing great but not going bankrupt any time soon. As compared to musk's insistence that it was on the edge of the cliff, which is what I responded to. I guess you were too focused on trying to get an own to actually read what I wrote.

3 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

I never said he isn't capable of making a bad decision, it's just asinine to assume someone is an idiot when you don't know what their decision ultimately was.

What are you talking about? I'm exclusively referring to events that are public knowledge and his own statements. I won't just assume that this is actually some genius move that will end up working out with absolutely no evidence (and in fact, plenty of evidence to the contrary). Even if I did assume that, at the very least it would mean Musk is outright lying about the whole situation for seemingly no gain... if there's some genius plan under the purchase why not just say so? The man is certainly not known for being shy with his posts and opinions.

8 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Again, back when Tesla was going through the issues with production there were tons of people who effectively called him an idiot, yet he managed to turn it around.

You're giving him a lot of credit for solving an issue he likely had no hand in either causing or resolving. If you think the CEO of a company the size of Tesla gets personally involved with the details of the production chain you're sorely mistaken. In fact people in general seem to deeply misunderstand what the role of a CEO is in any given company... what Musk has done to twitter has been possible in large part because he was also the sole owner, giving him free reign to pretty much do whatever he wanted, which is not what happens with companies that have shareholders and multiple large production facilities across the world. Yeah, blaming him for everything that goes wrong with any of his companies doesn't make sense; however if you look at the things we know for a fact he was directly responsible for, most of them are either bad ideas or vaporware. I can also entertain the possibility that he's decent at making business deals while being an incompetent buffoon when it comes to technical solutions and personnel management.