It seemed strange that Twitter posted this update on its business blog until the company mentioned that rate limiting has had a “minimal” effect on advertising. Many pointed out that limiting the number of tweets users could read per day would make it harder for advertisers to reach users and for Twitter to make money.
…oh, ok.
And no, I don’t really buy their excuses.
“Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.”
Alternately: Everything we do must be top secret, and it’s definitely not because we’re totally making it up as we go with zero actual planning or testing. We pinky swear.
I guess it’s almost an improvement on their poop emoji default non-reply. It looks like this problem was big enough for them to do active damage control; Musk must have been real pissed off.
Well, of course they couldn’t tell people about it in advance. Then they’d LEAVE in advance.
Elon’s lying. He said advertising was as strong as ever… it’s not. He said user interaction was as strong as ever… it’s not. Honesty isn’t the best policy for a sociopath… it’s an impediment, an obstacle, an annoyance.
Good people tell the truth more often than not, even if it becomes inconvenient to them later. Elon is not a good person.
I believe the reason they couldn’t tell anyone in advance is that it was yet another ludicrously incompetent seat-of-the-pants decision by business genius.
I’m calling bullshit. Most responsible sites let users know in advance if downtime is expected.
What’s that got to do with twitter?
…because they probably didn’t know in advance.
They probably couldn’t because this was a knee-jerk reaction from Elon and wasn’t really planned ahead.
I think the self DDoS theory is probably right, but I also think profitability might come into it. It wouldn’t surprise me if Twitter aren’t pulling enough high quality advertisers to make a profit on user minutes spent on the site. Would explain why twitter blue subs also copped the rate limit despite Musk’s insistence that they can’t be bots. At a certain amount of API calls per day even the Twitter blue subs stop being profitable.
I mean I find it mind boggling that people aren’t noticing yet, that Elon has basically pulled a bait and switch. Especially now that it is becoming even more obvious. Take a product that everyone is using, and degrade the free aspects of it to the point that the only way for people to be able to continue using it - is by paying for it.
His excuses are ludicrous, that he thinks that advance notice would let “bad actors” change the way they operate, as if those bad actors wouldn’t have just changed the way they operate as soon as it started being limited anyway.
Hell there is a thread floating around somewhere which shows that you can just reverse engineer the app and get the API key that way. The bots and “bad actors” will therefore continue, and legitimate users will be the only ones impacted.
Elon’s going to learn the hard way that destroying a free tier that has been available for years is the quickest and most effective way to suicide his product.
It’s not that people aren’t noticing, it’s that for most people Twitter is just not worth paying for. This is not a masterplan, it’s a stupid idea. He’s alienating advertisers and many of the free users whose eyeballs the advertisers were chasing, and he might not even make up for the lost money with that, nevermind pay for the debt he saddled the company with and make it profitable.
Are they still rate limiting?
Good. Elon can eat shit.
