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.
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.
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?
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.
cldellow|2 years ago
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|2 years ago
zimpenfish|2 years ago
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|2 years ago
ssnistfajen|2 years ago