this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Elon Musk said verified accounts would be limited to reading 6,000 posts per day while unverified users will be limited to 600.

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[–] [email protected] 145 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Never had Twitter to begin with but it was useful for seeing current events and comments. But ngl, kinda love watching it and musk go down in flames

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's very useful for sports and breaking news. Can see a normal (unverified) user burning through those limits quick. Great user engagement!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve traded sports and breaking news commentary in Twitter in for Reddit about 10 years ago.

Not sure where to go now. Lemmy doesn’t have the volumes (yet at least) for the same amount of user engagement with these events. Perhaps it’s better like this anyway, no use being that engaged all the time.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I'm in a similar position when it comes to sports, football (soccer) in particular. The instances are still new, so I've been trying to engage in the comments and upvoting all the posts. It oddly reminds me of early Reddit when there were far fewer users and it felt more intimate, like you'd know everyone on the sports subreddit lol. I think instance on the Fediverse/Lemmy will continue to grow over time, just keep engaging :)

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I started a Twitter account to follow the war in Ukraine at its very beginning. I was skeptical, but it won me over. Real time updates, easy to find expert takes, etc. Then Musk bought it, so I deleted my account the same day. No point sticking around on the titanic after the iceberg.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Warmapper is on mastodon by the way.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

I got twitter during the arab spring to keep up with what happened. I used it mainly for things like that ever since. But it got bad during Trump's reign in America and worse even after Musk, so I used it mainly for porn lately and deleted my account yesterday together with my Reddit account. Not sure yet if this place will be a viable replacement, but willing to give it a chance and see what happens. Like you, hope to see both Musk and Spez go up in flames and live their lives out under some bridge (well, I am using a hyperbole here, they are (supposedly) human after all, so I hope they have a good life, regardless)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Same but for porn and art. Mostly porn.

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I didn't read the article. But could it be that every platform is trying to limit LLMs to be trained on their data?

[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Definitely one reason, but this is also to push premium

[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Seems like the free internet as we knew it is dead. Any site with free, user-generated content to monetize Is about to try and suck every last dime from it.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago

The internet as we knew it wasn’t free. We were the product. Here’s hoping their drive to force payment sends us on to decentralized, open source infrastructure.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

Fortunately, we have the user-owned distributed internet to move to.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yep, capitalist greed ruins everything. Which is why distributed networks run by the community are our best hope for the future.

Those fuckers would try to ruin this too, by bot attacks, by trying to cut deals with some of the admins or by running their own versions of Lemmy/Mastadon.

We as a community will have to handle whatever comes next.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

Also they haven't paid Google for using their Cloud so they are moving their data.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No you misunderstand they desperately want them to be trained with their data. They just want them to pay hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to do so. Twitter is not buckling under the weight of data scraping, Elon is just pissed that companies are data scraping instead paying his exorbitant API fees.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They just want them to pay hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to do so.

This is the hilarious part to me: some companies might pay these fees, but there will be many more who won’t and will instead use actual web scrapers to get their data anyways. As the number of individuals training LLM models increases in the next couple of years, this will create a much more significant traffic load compared to API calls.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm. Sounds a lot like something /u/spez said. I wouldn’t expect Twitter to be a good LLM source with its current state anyway…Reddit would be a lot better contextually. The reality is Reddit and Twitter are bleeding cash and they’ve got brain-rotted CEOs that don’t pay their bills or have unrealistic plans and timelines for profitability.

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Don't forget: new unverified accounts are capped at just 300 posts. Once someone hits the limit, there's also no way for them to see Elon's announcement of the change. Great design.

Sadly, I'm sure spez is taking notes.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Who the FUCK is spez? Sounds like the name of some mentally deranged, wholly incompetent groomer. The only name I can think of that’s stupider is, idk, something like “Steve Huffman.”

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He is really trying to kill the platform at this point.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I can't even think of a financial or business reason for him to do this that makes sense, he must just want to run Twitter into the ground

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Elon claims bots are grossly scraping the platform with logged in accounts. Sure, this harsh limit might reduce scraping, but legitimate users are being blocked

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit was quite abrupt and efficient triggering a migration towards decentralized alternatives (ie: Lemmy). Twitter was taking way too much time to push users to the fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.). Elon doesn't like to be the second, so he's rushing the enshitification of the platform to stay ahead of Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Honestly fucking spez and musk helped social media out a lot

Not their social media platforms, or course, but they helped migrate more people to the fediverse

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Yeah haha, I moved to Lemmy couple of days ago, then saw that Twitter rate limit thing and was like alrighty, Mastodon too, lets go

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Twitter is surviving because of its addicts. Now, it's likely to drop its userbase significantly. Plus, Musk restricting people who aren't logged in from seeing anything makes the website practically irrelevant, and if this is sustained, Twitter will die in a span of months, if not weeks.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That no public viewing is going to really hit them. When I see that page requesting a login, I nope right out of there. Pinterest is that way too.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Holy lol

I bet this wasn’t the start of this fiasco but I bet this article was published before they figured it out for themselves

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There are a lot of theories floating around about his Google cloud bill being due today and not having migrated stuff off of the platform.

So they may have gotten shut down.

There is also evidence that they pushed an update that's basically ddos-ING themselves.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Based on my experience (nearing 30 years of system administration), one thing led to the others. They lost the capacity to handle lots of simultaneous requests when Google cut them off, so they pushed the change to rate limit at API level, but since they don't seem to have QA or testing anymore, this led to the front-end hitting the limit, but the front-end didn't have an error handler for this situation, so it just kept trying.

Tl;Dr, Twitter 2.0 is a shit show.

It's actually bellow amateur hour. The best metaphor I can make for how things are working there right now is a bi-polar Chihuahua on crack having an epileptic seizures.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

For those who are unaware, in summary, the reason why Twitter is limiting access is not for profit, but because the app is making too many requests at once, effectively causing Twitter to DDoS itself.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

I guess he couldn’t stand to see Spez pull ahead in the race to the bottom.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Elon is jelly coz users now coming to mastodon and Lemmy. Lemmy might replace his centralized platform

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know... I'd like to leave Twitter, but then how will I see the next hilarious joke about feces or genitalia that Elon Musk comes up with?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You’ve gotta be infected with the woke mind virus to not find Elon funny. I mean, “69420”. It’s the sex number AND the weed number COMBINED. Or how about the time he said “I’m rich bitch” on stage with Dave Chapelle? His comedy game is strong.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's really a shame, since it was a good platform to keep up to date on certain news events.

Now that it requires login to see, that kills 99% of the stuff I'll be since I can't be assed to log in.

Also sucks for any scrapers, walled gardens hurt us all, limited access to knowledge hurts everyone.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Keep in mind that things, like Amber Alert, are behind a login now

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Gee what a great idea, limiting how much a user can engage with your platform which depends on user engagement. Elon really is a genius.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Some people I know tweet more than that.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

You know what the best way to keep your users on your site and engaged to rack up ad revenue? Rate limiting them. /s

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

What was that thing he said about a public town hall? Doesn't look all that public to me.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Twitter is dead to me. I'm not logging in to view stuff its not worth it. I only looked at twitter with nitter on occasion...

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I love watching the run-over city burn from a small town upwind of the disaster.

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