[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> literally throwing away revenue with every denied impression

Any estimates for how much?

[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.

[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.

[randomfool]

These limits are far below standard scraping rates and deeply affecting the casual users, have to presume intentionally.

[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.