Something notable about the “X/Twitter added a 5 second delay on links to websites Musk doesn’t like” story is that it’s well understood in the tech industry that every second matters for retention.
You lose about half of your would-be traffic if your link doesn’t “load” within 3 seconds.
They’re leveraging a dark pattern to reduce traffic at scale.
That is the kind of thing that should be illegal to do as a massive platform. Twisting the web.
@endeavorance What’s funny, is this plausibly could just be the t dot co link shortener was having some sort of index issue inducing the 5 second delay for domains it had many links for. Either way it’s Elon’s fault for cutting staff or just being idiotic with petty behavior.
@mdb@endeavorance Considering twitter archives contains t dot co links instead of an actual URLs everyone getting it's dataset back will need to hammer the t dot co api to restore originals URLs... So this might well be it, a way to throttle and make migration even shittier.
Maybe they could resolve that by actually delivering a clean archive with real URLs 🤷♂️
@endeavorance It’s basically the thing that everyone was afraid that the ISPs would do if net neutrality didn’t go through. Turns out we needed to be worried about the platforms.
@ernie@endeavorance My thoughts exactly. There was a lot of concern that ISPs would throttle for profit or ideological reasons. Now it's actually happening (at the platform level) and it's just another datapoint in the continual decline of the web.
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