One gets the feeling that all these limits Musk is suddenly throwing on #Twitter have a lot less to do with data scraping per se and much more to do with trying to run the entire operation on a dozen Raspberry Pis to save money.
@lauren If the real goal was to get rid of these bots (it's not), rate-limiting is a well-known method. Musk is known to have been a massive user of bots for many years.
@lauren@ianbetteridge I think he saw the mess over at Reddit and felt that his “King of Crazy Techbros” crown was under threat, so he had to move the needle
@lauren listening to the Behind the Bastards episode on his shenanigans, I'm just completely and fully convinced that he bought Twitter specifically so that he can destroy it, causing as much collateral damage as he can in the process.
@lauren I suspect he’s seeing the huge amount of traffic hitting Twitter and badly misdiagnosing what’s going on. (They have apparently rolled out a very bad release and are DDOSing themselves, according to some folks who are watching their browser devtools and laughing)
@wordshaper Oh, I'm not kidding about it being an excuse. I don't for a minute buy his "hundreds of AI companies are suddenly scraping us blind!" claim. On the other hand, as you know, I am very concerned about the unfettered use of website data for GAI without much or anything being given in return.
@wordshaper @lauren
From what I've read, the rate limit is actually causing the self-DDoS.
Even if you just keep the home page open, it keeps requesting new tweets, which are never send because you're rate limited, so the website tries again… and again… and again…
Also, he apparently didn't renew a contract with Google for cloud servers for July, so that was probably the original reason for the rate limits - no Google cloud backend to carry the load any more.
@Cheshire@lauren I think Twitter self-hosts, so not paying their Google cloud bill is unlikely to take the site down. Though Elon is a Galaxy Brain so who knows?
@wordshaper@Cheshire My understanding is that several years ago significant portions of the Twitter infrastructure were moved to GCP, and that indeed the bill was unpaid, was recently paid, and that after that it's been claimed that G and Twitter were in "discussions" of more joint activities.
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