Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter’s links from its search results after the social network’s owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.
Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users who are not logged in and sets limits on reading tweets.
According to Barry Schwartz, Google reported 471 million Twitter URLs as of Friday. But by Monday morning, that number had plummeted to 227 million.
“For normal indexing of these Twitter URLs, it seems like these tweets are dropping out of the sky,” Schwartz wrote.
Platformer reported last month that Twitter refused to pay its bill for Google Cloud services.
Elon going to complain about another conspiracy going on while in reality it’s just that when crawlers are not able to open a certain URL they simply assume that the page doesn’t exist anymore. Google certainly didn’t “retaliate”, bots simply couldn’t find those pages anymore.
The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.
This is correct.
Yeah, that’s a pretty easy and reasonable conclusion to come to if you think about if for more than five seconds. I’m not sure Elon has any toes left after he keeps shooting himself in the feet.
If your company cares about it’s SEO rankings, you don’t make changes like these without considering the SEO implications.
Not even a month later and said company rebranded itself without checking trademarks. Now we have “X”, a brand that non only risks infringement of quite a few registered eu-trademarks but didn’t even apply for an own eu-trademark…
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Just like reddit. Looks like the Speztic and the Elongated Muskrat are caught in an ouroborus of like-minded stupidity.
Elongated Muskrat 🤣
The latest in a seemingly never-ending series of self-owns. Apart from the stress it must put on their devs, it’s been entertaining
They have more than one dev left?
No it’s just one guy called Dev.
And he’s on a H1B visa and can’t leave.
They screwed up his name tag, because reasons.
His name is actually Dave. But there aren’t any other Dave’s working there anymore so he is ok with being called Dev.
Deb on the other hand is pretty pissed off.
Or maybe it’s this guy, Dev from a canadian tv show called The Listener. They called the hacker ‘Dev’, I’m assuming it’s on purpose.
https://thelistener.fandom.com/wiki/Dev_Clark
Dude was just a marketing intern and is mad stressed and knows he’s in WAY over his head now.
Fake it 'till you make it.
Or the multibillion dollar company collapses into a heaping, flaming pile of slag as a result of your actions. One or the other.
It’s a win/win
My understanding is there’s group of people whose visa is sponsored by Twitter. If they leave the company, they may well have to leave the country.
That’s a big yikes and I hope they will find another way…
Coercing workers built America! They can’t leave… because of the implication.
Are you gonna hurt these workers?
Yeah, he lives in the break room on a cot.
Twitter still has devs?
Twitter’s dev(s)
Crawl issues I am sure but also user experience issues. Google is sensitive to sending visitors to sites where metrics indicate users do not, like bounce rates etc. I don’t use twt but if it is the case you have the be logged in to see anything now, a non-logged in user will click a link from Google hit a login page, and use the back button. I would assume Google will see that as a bad search result and use it less.
that actually makes a lot of sense
The word bots triggers the muskrat.
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My urge to eat a liberal amount popcorn has been triggered a lot by twitter’s slow motion train wreck.
I wonder if Google prioritized recrawling all those Twitter links.
If I were making a web crawler, I would make it so that if a crawler finds a domain that appears to have changed dramatically or gone offline it will re-crawl the domain and flag already-crawled pages as potentially obsolete.
Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.
Spez is already doing his best work to fuck over the platform. Are you certain Elon could do any better?
Spez already said he admires how Elon is running Twitter.
I mean there’s admiring a ruthless mob boss - and then there is admiring a petty thief that keeps getting arrested and all his plans blow up in this face.
Spez is losing his tiny mind.
The best part is that Elon is proving to be a pro at losing money left and right while simultaneously inventing new ways to make a social media platform suck to use.
Oh, there’s scope to introduce “official” Reddit user badges for 10 bucks a pop and all of sorts of suicidal Musk shenanigans
I’m down, Spez. What’s bad for Reddit is good for us.
Honestly… We’re all (or a massive chunk of us are) Reddit refugees. I don’t give many fucks about that place. If it thrives, whatever. It’s out of my control. I’m not going to hate post here with fantasies of spez seeing it and being like, “WHYYYYY?”
What little I’ve seen here seems like a disproportionate amount of passionate and quality users came over here. Users that were likely a bit more than casual; ie we we invested enough to use 3rd party clients, some of us are probably former mods who got disillusioned, etc.
We’re all giddy and it is the honeymoon phase and I HOPE HOPE HOPE the users’ enthusiasm doesn’t fizzle like Mastodon seems to but I would say, just use this. Enjoy it. Post worthwhile things. I don’t think Reddit is necessarily going away, but if it’s just some weird bot riddled, low effort posts sort of place, why would we want to be there anyway?
The fediverse will probably last as long as the internet does, if the BBS is anything to go by. And I’ve seen people starting to realize federation is an actually decent option at the very least.
Wait until you have to be logged in to read any posts on Reddit.
Didn’t we achieve this by turning all subreddit NSFW?
Yes, but when the users and mods who built the site do it, it’s petty and selfish. When the ceo does it, it’s brilliant, compounds user value, and improves the security of the user experience. /s
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Ah, I see. I only used reddit through Apollo, and was only sent to new reddit page by NSFW links, after i deleted my account, it seems.
but isn’t there no ad revenue on NSFW subs? I thought I read that
I saw people unironically saying this and being upvoted for it in hackernews, completely turned me off from the site lol
Doesn’t sound like retaliation to me, it sounds like their scheduled web crawlers are finding that content they used to index is now no longer viewable and this removed from search results. Pretty standard. My guess is that there were 400 million URLs listed and as the crawler uncovers that they are no longer available, that number will keep dropping to reflect only content publicly viewable. If only 500 URLs are now publicly viewable (without logins) then that’s what they will index. Google isn’t a search engine for private companies (unless you pay for the service) they are a public search engine so they make an effort to ensure that only public information is indexed. Some folk game the system (like the old expertsexchange.com) but sooner or later google drops the hammer.
God, I hated expert sexchange so much. It was a blessing when stack overflow started.
I’m only an amateur but I’m happy to give it a go
I don’t think Twitter would rate limit the Google indexer, though.
It’s probably the increased bounce rate, as people click Twitter links in the search results, get Twitter’s login wall and click back to continue searching instead of creating an account.
I tried to access twitter by impersonating a googlebot. I was denied. The bots aren’t so much rate limited, but unable to access tweets as they don’t have a Twitter account.
Impersonating a Googlebot user-agent isn’t a perfect test though, since you’re supposed to implement IP verification too - either checking against a known list of Google crawler IPs or doing a PTR lookup. See https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/verifying-googlebot
Question is whether or not Twitter has competent software developers implementing stuff correctly anymore. Anyone’s guess at this point.
It’s funny how Spez idolizes a guy who doesn’t pay his bills. It’s also funny watching the hate pplatform Twitter get absolutely destroyed by its owner. The internet in 2023 is a wild and crazily changing place.
I am genuinely curious. What’s the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?
She straight up admitted that she was essentially a sock puppet CEO and would offer no friction to anything Musk wanted.
Musk is a manchild who can’t handle being told “no”, so that’s a given.
But it’s smart of her to put that out in advance. It informs Musk that she will stay out of his way, and she doesn’t have to take the blame for idiotic decisions made by him.
He’s the child of an emerald mine owner. Do people think that men like that choose wives based on how good a mother they’ll be? Doubt.
I think it’s called a ”Fucker-Upper“
Lol, this made me chuckle! 🤭
Lol
Someone needs to make this Musk’s official title. Chief-Fuck-Upper. I also heard Chief-Twit circling around.
Can we perhaps add a list of notable titles to his Wikipedia entry?
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“CFU of Twitter” does have a nice ring to it
Then Spez could be CFU of Reddit. I kinda miss Ellen Pao. And Chooter.
Edit: A word.
Both Musk and Huffman seem to think the E in CEO stands for “Enshittification.”
Edit - typo
Ever heard of the glass cliff? You might even see a name or two on that list that you recognize.
Yup, I remember the absolute outrage when Ellen Pao became CEO of reddit, though it is nice at least to finally see her vindicated on there now. I hadn’t heard of the glass cliff until long after she left, but people have been referencing it left and right on reddit recently. Turns out, Ellen Pao wasn’t the problem…
Remember this?
-( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)╯╲___卐卐卐卐 Don’t mind me just taking Ellen Pao for a walk
Yeah that’s crazy, I was furious when they fired Victoria back in the day. It’s nice to see that Alexis Ohanian is the one who deserves the blame for that massive fuckup. Man that gives me a pang of nostalgia for the old days of reddit though. Interesting that the Wiki article points to Obama’s presidency and the 08 financial collapse as a “glass cliff” event.
Gotta have someone to push off the glass cliff
Thanks for sharing, I hadn’t heard of that expression or phenomenon.
Has anyone noticed too that if you put AI Blockers on your website Google delists it from their search?
decimates
Twitter absolutely DESTROYED by RATE LIMITING and ELON
Um actually 🤓 decimating it would be 47 million links 🤓 not 227 million
Um actually a word’s etymology does not define its modern usage. 🤓
It does if people use it correctly
Found the language prescriptivist! Linguists, let’s all point and laugh at them!
Hah hah! Oh wait…
You’ve fallen victim to one of the classic blunders
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You do realize that there are multiple definitions for the word “decimate”, yes?
Except when that word still has a literal meaning which is used by people to represent the original idea.
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Your first paragraph illustrates the point you were making very well. The last paragraph was absolutely not necessary.
Calm down
proscriptivists btfo lmao
Good goob, booby froob.
Um ackshually, decimating only means removing 1/10th, so what happened is actually many times worse than a decimation.
Well that’s what happens when you don’t want to pay the bills.
Mind you this is not Google doing it on purpose. This is just Musk’s genius idea of blocking tweets without being logged in. Others will drop as well, they just need some time to expire. Also, if you are wondering if they can show tweets to crawler but not show it to others Google doesn’t look favorably on that. Content must appear the same to crawler as well as humans.
Note that Google allows plenty of login gated content which is actually against their indexing terms.
The key is not to force it for every viewer or give a few view credits. The fact that Mollusk gang doesn’t know this is very reflective of their current capabilities. There’s no real talent left at Twitter.
Broken people breaking things.
Throw money around recklessly, regard your broken self as some great lord of a realm, treat people as your slaves, then fiddle with little pet peeves in utter ignorance of how and why they work, watch a cascade effect spiral out of control, blame anyone and everyone but yourself.
This is a right-wing pattern. Look at the orange cock holster and the bullshit he was fixated on while squatting in the White House. The mind of a petulant child.
Could also be realted to not paying the bills google sent him.
people really need to get over this nonsense. yeah, twitter wasn’t paying their bills. but now they have paid it. it was just for some internal analytics services, not the main site, and had nothing to do with twitter’s recent downtime.
google’s not going to retaliate against them after they paid.
I really hope google spammed musk’s phone with calls about the outstanding balance.
The reality is that this guy leading the company is refusing to pays bills for other services like he is on a bankruptcy spree. So not surprising that people don’t get over his ‘he paid it on this one item, so stop’.
Just because he orderer a massive dinner, and finally paid for the drinks, does not make that guy a person of illl repute.
In general: cloud provider’s marginal costs for continue to host something while a customer doesn’t pay is negligible. Keeping it running while incurring more receivables, or blocking access while making it clear there is an easy way to reclaim data and functionality, are immensely more profitable. Nothing to “retaliate” really.
I honestly doubt it is that, but it might affect things in the long run. Musk could be trying to cut costs, but that’s no less worse than trying to force people to pay.
Ahh the genius that is Elon Musk, I’m sure we’re all cowering at his superior intellect.
Tesla and SpaceX must be full of smart people if they can succeed despite Elon Musk shenanigans.
That is literally the complaint from ex-employees of his companies. He is Tony Stark meets Michael Scott. So much money it compensates for sheer stupidity.
I have never heard a more perfect description of Elon Musk.
Michael Scott’s heart can be in the right place, Musk is straight cruel.
Did we see the same show? Micheal Scott is incredibly cruel all the time and his heart is rarely in the right place lol
“Can be”, not “always is”
SpaceX has a lot to benefit from the fact that a lot of people love the idea of working with rockets but the actual job market was very limited with places like NASA only taking the best of the best. Which doesn’t mean SpaceX has subpar engineers and scientists, humanity just has a lot more to offer than NASA and other smaller space agencies could afford to employ.
Literally all you need is enough money and you can pay smart people to do impressive things, while taking all the credit.
This. This baffles me. How he was able to run a company which makes rockets which shuttles between earth and outerspace?
I read a quote somewhere from a former Space X engineer that they basically had to create a system to manage Musk and his fragile ego so that they can function normally without Musk getting in the way.
So basically, Gwynne Shotwell is the one actually calling the day-to-day shots, and happens to be a good Elon-whisperer.
I wonder if other companies, particularly VC-funded ones, have staff dedicated to “managing” the crazy person with the checkbook…
So it takes rocket scientists to manage this guy in such a way to keep him from burning everything down around him?
You’re probably right. And it’s wild to think that safely flying astronauts to the ISS probably wasn’t the hardest part of their day that day.
Short answer: he didn’t.
He didn’t create SpaceX, he bought it.
It’s absolutely beyond me why these idiots don’t pay people to think of clever things and discourage dumb things.
Imagine having your own “think tank”, it works be like living life on cheat mode.
Smart rich people have advisors they listen to.
Rich people who are too “smart” to listen to advice have sycophants.
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It’s part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism’s status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we’re in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn’t be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
I like this take, but this is a conspiracy theory take. Change a few words and this would be something regurgitated by Q fanatics.
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This is such a good way to word this kind of phenominon. Conspiracies as distraction.
Its also funny, because its a conspiracy about conspiracies lol
I think it’s far more simple that humans have a tendency to fractionalize everything they’re apart of than it is a projection global conspiracy.
Some animal rights activists believe humans can have beneficial, symbiotic relationships with animals, like working dogs/horses, free range chickens that are well cared for, stuff like that.
Some animal rights activists think the concept of a working dog/horse as abhorrent because animals can’t actually consent to that, the power dynamic makes it unethical, and utilizing the labor of an animal for personal gain is basically just slavery for a creature with less intelligence.
These two groups are closer to each other than they are to any right person that doesn’t care at all for animals, but are still so dynamically opposed that they simply couldn’t operate together because their end goals are dramatically different.
I’m a hardcore progressive. I will work with a capitalist democrat to get my goals met, but I wouldn’t associate with them if I had a better option.
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Well said, thanks for doing the good work of pointing this out.
See other “grassroots” movements such as the Tea Party, Moms for Liberty, TPUSA, etc for the other side of this. These groups have clear and documented funding from billionaire interest groups and conveniently allow corporate media to conflate such far right groups with progressive movements as the same level of extremism.
astroturfed strawmanned groups such as extinction rebellion
What’s wrong with XR?
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People who aren’t going to do anything either way like to blame XR’s protests for their own inaction.
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Saudi Arabia murdered Khashoggi because he was defying their army of Twitter trolls with a network of volonteers he bankrolled.
While I like both takes, I don’t think even the dumbest billionaire or government wouldn’t recognize the value one centralized tool has. It would have been sufficient to control both Twitter and Reddit, moderate the hell out of topics they don’t like and put them offline in crucial moments. Destroying them without a clear, centralized alternative isn’t really sensible.
I personally expected the Reddit IPO to be the end of any “subversive investment advice”, that might have been on Reddit.
This sounds a lot like Hanlon’s razor. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Do you really believe that people like spez, Zuckerberg, Musk behave like they do because they want to do favors for other billionaires? Isn’t it much more likely that they’re just … disturbed? That they are narcissistic, megalomaniac, maybe idealistic in their own believe. And in being that, they make stupid decisions because they literally work differently than regular folks.
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Well said. Razors are guides in developing theories, not evidence. To present them as evidence is a fallacy. The above conjecture isn’t better explained by stupidity, thats the whole point.
Thank you. I think this is an important nit to pick in the context of this particular discussion.
Ignoring the evidence of Musk’s Twitter nonsense benefiting the same people who helped fund his Twitter buy out is something you could attribute Hanlon’s razor to.
The only person in the world you can ever truly know is yourself.
So when I ask myself “If I were spez/zuck/musk why would I do this?”
The answer is usually “because someone gave me a lot of money”
I don’t know about Spez but I don’t think that’s how Musk and Zuck are motivated. The money is a secondary effect of their goal of being “Great Men” in history. Seen through that lens, taking control of the main public square, changing the nature of discussion there (and taking as much credit for it as possible) is an end unto itself for Musk. Especially when you consider that, if he is able to both control and maintain Twitter as the main locus of online discussion, it allows him to try to reshape the wider narrative about the value and importance of his work in general.
I’m not so sure Musk is actually motivated by his own hype, I think that’s part of his professional self branding that he relies on to juice the valuation of his companies. Seen through that lens, taking control of the main public square is a way to juice his rep further and make even more money.
I’m skeptical of ascribing immaterial motives to billionaires.
EDIT Oh! Also, I think the reason enshitification has accelerated so much recently is because of high interest rates. It’s why Silicon Valley Bank imploded, after all. Companies are scrambling to be profitable after the free investor cash has dried up. It’s not good enough to be maybe profitable in an undefined future, they need to be profitable now so they can justify investment. The bubble is deflating - though fortunately, it seems like it’s going to be a soft landing instead of a pop.
Yeah, I also seriously doubt there’s a big conspiracy happening where ultra rich people are helping each other. Have you looked at those people? Most don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves.
Musk bought Twitter around the time he was fighting with this guy that had the private jet tracker. I think it’s more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it’s a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively. And once Twitter is dead, he’ll discard it and move on to the next thing. Like a cat playing with its prey.
Normally I would tend to agree with you, but look where Musk got his “loans” to buy out Twitter. Saudi Arabia and Russia where big “lenders”.
I think it’s more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it’s a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively.
That’s definitely true. I think it’s also true that the people who financed it were doing so to take advantage of that to their own ends.
Agreed. It’s no coincidence that both Twitter and Reddit are shitting the bed at the same time.
Elon is pretty clearly an actual idiot, and has managed to get by thus far by just having a seemingly endless supply of fuck you money, but this is just capitalism doing the Predator bicep meme with foreign oligarchs to consolidate power.
I mean, it sort of is. Unless the fed is involved in this billionaire conspiracy also (which the nature of conspiracy theories will undoubtedly have someone saying of course the fed is in on it with the billionaires).
The simple answer really does make the most sense here. Interest rates are on the rise, and platforms like twitter and reddit have been around for a very long time and none of the venture capital backing them has ever turned a real profit despite the money being pumped into them. Investors will pull out money from the riskiest items first when interest rates rise, and the riskiest items are social media platforms that haven’t demonstrated monetization potential even after a decade of use and monolithic control within their spaces. If a link aggregator like Reddit, which is really the only major player in its brand of social media can’t turn a profit with basically no competition why would you continue supporting it?
Great point, and I do think you’re right because that is the most sensible answer to what the motives behind these recent decisions are. There has been a nonstop flow of cheap debt for years that the fed is just now tightening up on.
But these business decisions also happen to align with the interests of deep pocketed bad actors. The why’s of that are conspiracy theories.
I’m glad I’m not the only person thinking about this. I had no idea about the Saudis owning Twitter like that. All decisions made by the rich are for MoneyTM. Usually it’s MoneyTM in either the form of growth (profit, short term) or investment (power, stability, long term). Some of spezs actions are easily explained by MoneyTM when you take into account LLMs mining reddit. But that does not explain being so insanely hardline with their API. There was absolutely a resolution to that that was profitable and didn’t continue giving away “their” information for free. This is where I think a 3rd MoneyTM comes into play: existential investments. These are actions they take to ensure the other two forms of MoneyTM continue to function the way they want them to. Such as tanking the two most significant online tools for organizing collective action against them.
Decisions at that level are made for power. Sometimes money is part of that
I mean, yes, but I think “sometimes” really underestimates role money plays in a capitalist world. Money is power. People who tell you otherwise are trying to sell you something.
I am genuinely curious. What’s the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?
Musk is moving on to the FO part of FAFO.
Can someone please ELI5 what his end game is? I refuse to pay attention to twitter, but Elon, he’s crazy.
I saw the result with 227 million earlier, but I just checked again and now it’s 648 million. Odd.
It might be catching and data mirrioring. When you run something as large as google there are hundreds of servers that need to be synced. Deleting large chunks of data can take an extremely long time to propagate.
Pretty sure that number doesn’t mean shit anyway.
I’m currently seeing 287 million and 0.4 seconds.
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I’m seeing 229M. It seems to be cache at the moment causing discrepancies.
I don’t think it’s BS necessarily - I saw the exact same number they reported earlier in the day. I just don’t think that number is as consistent or meaningful as the author thinks it is.
And that, good folks, is how you run a service into ground.
