Twitter is the first social Network to publicly commit ritual suicide. It's somewhat fascinating to watch. Would be very interesting to see how much the login wall affected their traffic and thus ad revenues. But the real damage will be visible in Q4 when ads campaigns simply won't be booked anymore for Twitter because everyone begins to write it off.
I still don’t understand what Elon is trying to do. If you had asked me before he bought it what twitter’s core problems were I would have said “poorly moderated toxicity”, “lack of conversational depth”, “high friction onboarding”, and “excessive operating cost”. Apparently Elon only agrees about the cost part, because on all those other dimensions twitter is now worse?
In all his other businesses Elon started by offering a grand vision of where they were going: “electric cars for everyone”, “humans on mars”, “tunnels everywhere”, “direct mind machine interface”. It was often ridiculed, but the goal made sense. What is the vision for twitter? I still don’t know. Nothing he says makes any sense.
Maybe we could say that advertising revenue is toxic to community spaces? If they really want to be the town square, well nobody wants a town square that’s primarily billboards and advertising. People who actually live in New York don’t go to Times Square, and there is functionally no actual community there.
As an counterexample, Discord specifically is trying a subscription “free-to-play” model. I think this could work pretty well for future sites - a little more expression or some cosmetics to make you stand out, but still a very usable and unobtrusive service.
Too many people worth following still are using Twitter. Until they leave and there isn’t a reason to go on the site then there won’t be any mass exodus. I doubt the forced login is having a huge impact so far. Maybe Meta’s alternative will have a bigger impact.
It’s interesting, I’ve seen ton of my people I follow complain about Twitter yet they still keep posting. The site is only going to go under if people start if actually leaving.
I was a supporter of what Elon was trying to do. I am against big tech censorship and felt that moving to a subscription model where they didn’t need to appease advertisers was a good step. I subscribed to support the model even though I barely use Twitter.
I also think the staff cuts were the right call in principle. I believe that tech products are better when you have a small team of really good people and get out of their way.
This paywall could be the thing that brings them down though. There must be millions of people per day being trained not to click on Twitter links. I myself have done this a few times on different devices and incognito windows and I’m a paying subscriber. They will also slowly be evicted from Google SERPs.
Engagement on the platform for creators was already terrible, and this must accelerate people looking at other platforms.
To do a paywall or forced login to reduce spam/bots/scraping is throwing the baby out with the bathwater unless it’s an existential risk.
Why Twitter is better now than before. I used to never use it and now i use it more than any other platform.
Don't really get why people are hating so much. Finally there is somewhere where people can post without being banned or having posts removed. Why do you want filtered social media it's fake.
This is content-free gibberish, but a particular highlight for me is the promise that "we will provide an update when the work is complete" that is immediately followed by "this work will never be done".
> To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform. That’s why we temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform. Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.
Ah, so they're intentionally making everybody suffer to punish the bad guys, and promising that everything will be peachy keen afterwards.
This sounds essentially identical to the Indian government's justification for suddenly demonetizing the 500 and 1000 rupee notes in 2016, leading to massive cash shortages.
This directly led to 1.5M people losing their jobs, a stock market crash, and GDP dropping by at least 1%. The silver lining was that it also kick-started the Indian digital payments system.
This justification makes zero sense to me. Why would they need to use rate limits to detect bots? They can trivially observe account behaviour without using rate limits.
It's corporate talk for "we f up and systems are failing". Musk's act of not paying people now bites him back. I guess they don't have enough servers to sustain the service.
I'm pretty sure this is provided solely for the benefit of Musk's weird fans, who can now go "see? Dear Leader broke the site as part of the 4D chess!" Normal people probably shouldn't take much notice of it.
About the only thing I could think of is, limit the rate and see what accounts keep trying to post even though they fail?
But there would be so many false positives on that idea. Would punish many that are legitimate users and probably harden those that have more sophisticated posting techniques.
To be honest, it doesn't bother me because I've moved to other platforms. The main reason I log on to twitter is to see if anyone I follow has moved to another platform.
“Bill in IT says we need to reboot the router but no one knows the router password and Comcast says the password is on the router but Bill says Jim must have torn off the sticker so we called Best Buy and the soonest the Geek Squad can get here is Thursday. We tried unplugging it and plugging it back in but it’s not turning on.”
> To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform.
Well about that, I noticed heavy inflow of spam and bots traffic right after Mr Musk starts selling the blue patch for money. These spammers purchased and utilized the "first-class citizen" privilege to bend the display priority to their favor. Now days, you open a Tweet, the top replies are almost all spams.
You know, at this point, it is obviously apparent that the spammers knows better about Twitter than Mr Musk do.
But all and all, this (as well as the recent events related to Reddit) is a good thing. Because it serves a good reminder that we (the users) are products, sometimes the self-paying type.
So maybe next time you when plan to spend some chill time on some services, think how much you can get out if it for exchange.
Scraping services work by going through thousands of intermediate proxies run on unsuspecting people's compromised computers. Each scraping request will be a unique IP with a normal looking header.
They may be able to look at the number of unique requests per account but given the ridiculous amount of spam/bots that exist clearly creating new accounts isn't an impediment.
The far more likely scenario is that they were throttled by AWS/GCP for not paying bills and are behind on their migration project.
Strange they should mention spam when these last few days I've seen a steady stream of near identical advertisers appear in spam-like ads.
The advertisers have very similar profile pictures which look generated, use a particular colour palette, and all sell the same sort of unwanted junk.
Despite a mix of blocking/muting, a new one pops up every few hours!
So I'm assuming this is because he thinks the data is so valuable for LLM training he doesn't want anyone getting it for free. Does he really think there will be that much demand for it that it outweighs the fundamental purpose of Twitter?
As I'm sure you've probably guessed, it's not about the bots. It's that his contract with Google for servers ran out on July 1st. So now they have to pay a lot more.
Absurdly, this is a cost saving measure. And yes, I've no idea how it ends up saving either.
[+] [-] choeger|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joeri|2 years ago|reply
In all his other businesses Elon started by offering a grand vision of where they were going: “electric cars for everyone”, “humans on mars”, “tunnels everywhere”, “direct mind machine interface”. It was often ridiculed, but the goal made sense. What is the vision for twitter? I still don’t know. Nothing he says makes any sense.
[+] [-] tetrisgm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taurath|2 years ago|reply
As an counterexample, Discord specifically is trying a subscription “free-to-play” model. I think this could work pretty well for future sites - a little more expression or some cosmetics to make you stand out, but still a very usable and unobtrusive service.
[+] [-] x3sphere|2 years ago|reply
It’s interesting, I’ve seen ton of my people I follow complain about Twitter yet they still keep posting. The site is only going to go under if people start if actually leaving.
[+] [-] swyx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] immibis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samwillis|2 years ago|reply
(That's not to say I like the decisions that are being made)
[+] [-] benjaminwootton|2 years ago|reply
I also think the staff cuts were the right call in principle. I believe that tech products are better when you have a small team of really good people and get out of their way.
This paywall could be the thing that brings them down though. There must be millions of people per day being trained not to click on Twitter links. I myself have done this a few times on different devices and incognito windows and I’m a paying subscriber. They will also slowly be evicted from Google SERPs.
Engagement on the platform for creators was already terrible, and this must accelerate people looking at other platforms.
To do a paywall or forced login to reduce spam/bots/scraping is throwing the baby out with the bathwater unless it’s an existential risk.
[+] [-] FrozenSynapse|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tropicalbeach|2 years ago|reply
Don't really get why people are hating so much. Finally there is somewhere where people can post without being banned or having posts removed. Why do you want filtered social media it's fake.
[+] [-] williamsmj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resolutebat|2 years ago|reply
Ah, so they're intentionally making everybody suffer to punish the bad guys, and promising that everything will be peachy keen afterwards.
This sounds essentially identical to the Indian government's justification for suddenly demonetizing the 500 and 1000 rupee notes in 2016, leading to massive cash shortages.
This directly led to 1.5M people losing their jobs, a stock market crash, and GDP dropping by at least 1%. The silver lining was that it also kick-started the Indian digital payments system.
[+] [-] WheatMillington|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tvbusy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NovaDudely|2 years ago|reply
But there would be so many false positives on that idea. Would punish many that are legitimate users and probably harden those that have more sophisticated posting techniques.
Like you said, there are better ways.
[+] [-] shanks512|2 years ago|reply
Any ideas on how to do this more trivially than toggling a global rate limit flag?
[+] [-] toomim|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethcat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etchalon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nirui|2 years ago|reply
Well about that, I noticed heavy inflow of spam and bots traffic right after Mr Musk starts selling the blue patch for money. These spammers purchased and utilized the "first-class citizen" privilege to bend the display priority to their favor. Now days, you open a Tweet, the top replies are almost all spams.
You know, at this point, it is obviously apparent that the spammers knows better about Twitter than Mr Musk do.
But all and all, this (as well as the recent events related to Reddit) is a good thing. Because it serves a good reminder that we (the users) are products, sometimes the self-paying type.
So maybe next time you when plan to spend some chill time on some services, think how much you can get out if it for exchange.
[+] [-] dathinab|2 years ago|reply
are they sure, it seem to have hit literally everyone I know who still uses twitter frequently
[+] [-] ignoramous|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wg0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|2 years ago|reply
Where "verified" means you paid $8 or something, I see no reason to trust pretty much anything else coming from them
[+] [-] threeseed|2 years ago|reply
Scraping services work by going through thousands of intermediate proxies run on unsuspecting people's compromised computers. Each scraping request will be a unique IP with a normal looking header.
They may be able to look at the number of unique requests per account but given the ridiculous amount of spam/bots that exist clearly creating new accounts isn't an impediment.
The far more likely scenario is that they were throttled by AWS/GCP for not paying bills and are behind on their migration project.
[+] [-] supsep2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nmstoker|2 years ago|reply
The advertisers have very similar profile pictures which look generated, use a particular colour palette, and all sell the same sort of unwanted junk. Despite a mix of blocking/muting, a new one pops up every few hours!
[+] [-] drumhead|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|2 years ago|reply
Absurdly, this is a cost saving measure. And yes, I've no idea how it ends up saving either.
[+] [-] DaSHacka|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comprev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]