It’s been a few weeks since Twitter’s mayhem rose to a noteworthy level, but that changed this weekend when owner and CTO Elon Musk announced a limit on the number of tweets users could see each day.
It started on the afternoon of Saturday 1st July with a tweet from Musk to inform the tweeters that strict rate limits have been enacted to “address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.” Under the new system, unverified old users (i.e. those who chose not to pay for Twitter Blue) were told they could only view 600 posts per day, with new accounts limited to just 400 tweet views.
Verified accounts were granted the right to view 6,000 tweets, so chalk that up as another perk that comes with that blue subscription.
It only took a few hours for Musk to update This total, allowing for 8000/800/400 views for verified, unverified and new users, respectively. This followed soon after News The limits have been increased to 10k/1k/500, but it’s unclear if those increases have been implemented or when the Twitter rate limit will end.
log He was asked about the current state of Twitter’s price caps, how long Musk tends to maintain those caps, and questions Elon’s rationale. Despite the fact that there’s a new CEO saving water from the boiler room, Twitter doesn’t seem to have reconsidered the lack of a communications team — we just received the usual poomoji for our issue.
Maybe it’s time to hire a new CTO as well
Twitter has been in a lot of trouble lately, with Twitter’s CTO and CEO Musk, who stepped down as Twitter CEO when Linda Yaccarino took over in early June, blaming it almost entirely on the greed of AI companies.
The data Twitter contains, or so Musk argues, is invaluable to big language models like ChatGPT and Google Bard, and they should pay for the right to get rid of it.
In addition to charging outrageously high prices for Twitter’s data APIs, Twitter’s tech chief also decided last week to block all users who aren’t logged into Twitter from seeing any posts at all, inadvertently killing tweets embedded in other apps. This musk claimed On Friday, it will also be temporary.
“In my previous letter, drastic and immediate action was necessary because of the extreme levels of data scraping,” Musk said. “It’s annoying having to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate the outrageous valuation of some AI startup.”
As with everything related to Twitter and Musk, the truth of the matter is harder to sort out.
Take, for example, the fact that Twitter under Musk is used to not paying Invoices In order to save money and try to break even. Arguably, this ill-advised move wasn’t limited to bonuses, legal fees, and vendors — Twitter is said to leverage Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, which host much of its infrastructure as well.
Reportedly, Twitter is equally indebted to AWS $70 million (£55m) since March, prompting Amazon to threaten to stop ad payments over the bird site. Twitter’s $200-300 million a year contract with Google Cloud was reported to not be paid either. Yacarino It said He renegotiated starting those payments in late June, just days before Twitter’s contract with Google Cloud expired on June 30 — the day before the price caps.
We’ve contacted Google and Amazon to get insight into the status of their relationships with Twitter and whether they’ve cut off access to the parts of Twitter hosted in their cloud, but haven’t heard back from either.
If unpaid bills aren’t catching up on Twitter, bad coding might be to blame. A number of people claim to have found evidence that since Twitter has blocked access to anyone who is not logged in, Twitter’s front end appears to be DDoS’ing.
Developer Sheldon Chang pointed this out in a mail On to Mastodon over the weekend, complete with a Chrome developer tools video capture showing a wall of failed receive requests. Chang said the Twitter web app is “firing out about 10 requests per second to itself to try to fetch content that never arrives,” which he said potentially creates “hellish conditions that engineers never imagined.”
The problem is even worse on Tweetdeck, according To Molly White, who posted a similar video to Chrome Developer Tools riddled with 404 warnings as Tweetdeck tried to retrieve content that would normally be available to Twitter visitors who aren’t logged in.
That’s certainly a good reason to impose price limits, but like unpaid bills, it’s unclear if Twitter’s move is also the culprit behind the weekend’s mayhem. We asked that question too, and we have to hope Yaccarino decides to reverse course on another track Musk’s decision. ®
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