This is all Twitter is to me now
Twitter was once a publicly traded company. Then one rich man got tired of people being banned for reasons he thought unreasonable, like Nazism, transphobia, or stochastic terrorism. So he bought the whole website to enable those things.
Since then, the man has made decisions that have dramatically reduced the company’s value, caused advertisers—once the primary source of income for the platform—to flee, and has not given people enough value to pay for a (now pointless) Twitter blue checkmark.
The company has been heading for the ground since Musk took over. Failing to pay rent, laying off moderators who kept abusive material of children off the site, increasing the spread of hate speech into actual terrorist threats, and even failing to pay for the hosting software services, like Google Cloud, that keeps the site online.
In response to these failings, Musk has announced new measures that will… dramatically reduce the number of people engaging with Twitter. First, Twitter banned unregistered users from seeing the site at all. Next, they added a limit to usage for registered users. Long-term Twitter users could only see 600 posts a day. That’s so few posts, you can get through it in a few minutes before you even get ready in the morning. Advertisers went from being able to bid on hundreds of ad views a day to less than 100, and zero for unregistered users. Your ad buy now doesn’t go very far on Twitter, and that’s if you’re willing to share ad space with actual Nazis.
Musk hurt Twitter’s revenue when he brought back hate, driving away advertisers. Now, by limiting how much people can use the site, it’s removed the addictive aspect of social media, the part that makes ads worth the price. Twitter has been shooting itself in the feet, but now it’s going for the kill.
Registered Eyes Only!
I’ve either deleted or abandoned my Twitter accounts. Just couldn’t bring myself to support a platform used by Nazis and stochastic terrorists trying to eliminate transgender people. It wasn’t where I wanted to be giving my ad revenue time, you know? Starting this week, that means I haven’t been able to see any tweets. Friends would post items in Discord and I couldn’t see the preview (no one can), and clicking on the link gives me the error you see at the top of this post. Twitter, for those who are unregistered or logged out, is dead.
This could be devastating for Twitter. It’ll dramatically reduce Twitter’s pages in search results, and cause a similarly dramatic drop in views. Every one of those views is a missed opportunity for ads and a chance to upsell users on an account. All of that potential revenue is gone.
Musk says this is a temporary measure to stop scraping. According to Musk, AI researchers have scraped Twitter at a high rate. Because Twitter’s API pricing is prohibitively high, this means making more requests and loading more resources from Twitter to access the same data they could get through the API. Twitter, like Reddit, decided to increase their API pricing to force nearly all third party apps to abandon Twitter. This has had unforeseen (by Twitter and Reddit) repercussions. However, that doesn’t seem to be Twitter’s only problem. Instead, Twitter may be their own worst enemy… again.
Rate Limit Exceeded!
It’s easy to tell the difference between bots that scrape content and normal usage. Bots will make tons of requests at once, spend no time on the site, make no interactions, and create a barrage of requests. Normal users don’t do that. Well… normal users don’t do that when a website frontend is working properly. If it’s broken, artificially inflating the requests for all users, then both users and bots would effectively damage the site.
Requesting too much data from servers can slow down other processes. It’s actually a cybersecurity threat known as a denial of service attack (DOS). When a DOS is done across multiple devices, it’s known as a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDOS). This is a common cybersecurity threat. Sites protect themselves with DNS servers that include DDOS protections, limiting the rate of requests when they come hammering in from the same sources.
But when the problem is coming from inside a company, it’s a bit harder to protect against.
You can click the link in the photo above to check out the videos. According to Chang, he caught Twitter’s real problem with rate limits: Twitter is broken. The site was sending about ten requests a second to its own servers, just from sitting on a tweet. By using Twitter, users were participating in helping Twitter attack its own servers.
Twitter introduced rate limiting supposedly for bots, but the “bots” were coming from inside the house.
Reading Limits Introduced
If Twitter wasn’t broken or had a functioning API, scraping and rate limits wouldn’t be a problem. After all, usage on Twitter is likely down after Musk’s takeover. A leaked document claims that ad revenue is down by 59%, with advertisers and users leaving the platform. Now Musk has taken a strange measure: he’s limiting the number of tweets users can see in a day.
He does realize social media makes its money by getting users addicted to endless scrolling and showing them ads, right?
At first, users could only see 300 posts per day if they were newly registered, and 600 per day for users who have been more established. You could scroll through these before getting out of bed in the morning. Paying users could get up to 6,000 posts in a day. That’s still not unlimited. He then increased that to a 400/800/8,000 limit, and now a 1,000/10,000 limit. It seems Musk just can’t make up his mind.
Like many of the bad decisions that pop up on Twitter, it’s likely Musk will drop this decision by this week. Whether or not the platform can recover is another story. While Twitter was down from the rate limiting and self-DDOS, many users flocked to Mastodon and Bluesky. Personally, I think you should check out Mastodon, and free yourself from the silly decisions of one man whose wealth has left him detached from reason and repercussions.
Sources:
- Madeline Berg, Business Insider
- Igor Bonifacic, Engadget
- Sheldon Chang, via Mastodon
- Kris Holt, Engadget
- Maggie Johnson-Pint, via Threadreader
- Aamir Siddiqui, Android Authority
- Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch
- Paul Tassi, Forbes