Elon Musk, the latest billionaire owner of the online screaming match known as Twitter, sat slumped at his desk, staring at a wall of monitors blinking with a technicolor smorgasbord of error messages. The reason? He’d just let Twitter’s hosting contract with Google lapse because he thought it’d be fun to see if he could migrate it somewhere else. The results? Not so fun.
A comment on Reddit had caught his eye, and he couldn’t shake it. “Every now and then Elon must have a moment of clarity. Where it occurs to him ‘Maybe I am just stupid?’ But then he violently buries the thought.”
“Stupid?” he scoffed aloud to his empty office, sending a mini landslide of Mars Rover prototypes tumbling off his desk. “I’m a genius.”
He remembered how smart he’d felt when he decided to axe the account verification system, only to reinstate it after a week of high-profile mix-ups that included the Dalai Lama being mistaken for a llama enthusiast.
And the content moderation! Who needs it? Well, as it turned out, everyone. Without it, Twitter had turned into a feral wilderness of conspiracy theories, insult slinging, and more unsolicited pictures of eggplants than a greengrocer’s catalog.
And then there was Kanye. “Free Kanye!” he’d declared one afternoon after one too many rocket fuel coffees. But after the notorious rapper had declared war on flannel shirts and clogged up the site with CAPS LOCK tweets, the ban was back on faster than you can say “Kim Kardashian for president.”
“Stupid?” he muttered again, watching as Twitter spontaneously DDOS’d itself like a robotic bull in a digital china shop.
There was a pause. Then a grin spread slowly across Elon’s face, as if he’d just understood the punchline to a particularly tricky joke. “Naaaah,” he laughed, slapping the desk.
He looked at the chaos on the screens, the digital calamity his decisions had wrought, and couldn’t help but chuckle. There was something amusing about being this absurdly, cosmically, hilariously brilliant.
“Back to the drawing board,” he chuckled, picking up a Mars Rover and making it do little jumps across his desk.
Remember elon musk isn’t smart
We shouldn’t credit him for Tesla, spacex, etc because it’s the employees that actually put in the effort and contribute
Elon is just a Mr moneybags that thinks he smart because the things he funded have been good ideas when he actually never contributed anything to those ideas
I can’t wait until the companies he’s finding push him out completely
People call him an inventor. He’s not an inventor, he’s an investor. He’s not an engineer. He doesn’t know how to make cars or rockets. He didn’t invent the Tesla and he just plowed money into SpaceX. His brilliant ideas are things like having the Tesla make a fart noise. His experience is in coding and, based on comments of former Twitter engineers, he’s not even very good at that.
He doesn’t even have experience in coding either. He always pretends to but the only degree he has is in business or something.
Honestly this is probably more close to reality than anyone wants to admit.
Is the Dalai Lama bit true?
This is art!
More please!
This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.
The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.
These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.
Therefore any company that puts out notices or alerts via Twitter should immediately exit the platform. Running their own server on mastodon would be a better bet
Typically, automating or paying someone to manually push out updates to as many channels as possible is the most advantageous option. Realistically, having a website, an associated RSS feed option, Twitter, something like a Mastodon account somewhere, and a text update option would probably cover most of the bases.
You can follow any Mastodon account as an RSS feed so that would be two in one.
Separate question, but can’t you follow Mastodon profiles on Lemmy?
In theory yes (or at least, it works the other way), in practice seems janky. Fediverse has seen some insane expansion recently and I’d hope there’s some talented devs in amongst the influx, so they should get it working at some point.
Not that I know of. Lemmy is part of the fediverse and you can follow/post to Lemmy communities on Mastodon but AFAIK Lemmy doesn’t have a system to follow other users. I think Kbin does.
I find this more mildlyhumorous than infuriating. I’m looking forward to a new era where every news article no longer includes a string of embedded tweets. :) As a non-twitter user, this certainly doesn’t encourage me to bother making an account.
Transcription for the blind: Screenshot of a Twitter post from Elon Musk, Twitter handle @elonmusk, that says:
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
1:01 PM Jul 1, 2023 3.6M Views
-Transcription from a human volunteer. Let me know how I can do better.
I bet the throtteling is not caused by data scraping but by Twitter not paying their Google Cloud bills and therefore now with the new month they got services suspended.
Why are so many people suddenly against Twatter burning? I thought we all wanted that?
Twitter and Reddit both dying at the same time was not what I expected in 2023
Image Transcription: Twitter Post:
Elon Musk, @elonmusk
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits
- Verified accounts are limited to reaching 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
^I’m a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
I am amazed that this transcribing thing went from Reddit to the Fediverse. Good work 👍
Well, that transcribing thing is volunteers, and I brought it with me haha
And thanks!
It seems to be a heavily enforced thing on Mastodon to provide alternate text for images for the same reason, although I’m admittedly bad about it myself. I wonder how well some of those AIs could do, they create pictures from text, so why not the other way around?
Good human
This post has over 600 comments atm. Imagine if this comment thread was all you got out of lemmy in a day lol.
I’m a bit confused what you mean by this
If you were to apply Twitter’s new throttling limits to lemmy you wouldn’t be able to view this entire thread (each comment = 1 post in twitter terms).
Lmao wait you’re right
Thank you for this!
If you’d install the “show karma” user script, you might cause an integer overflow. Immensely good work that you are doing.
Haha, back on reddit I got to about 90k, and a good portion of that was transcribing.
I’m actually kind of glad it doesn’t show it here. I get to be judged by the content of my post, not by my accumulation of upvote points.
The Future
I see that a lot of people complain about reddit, twitter, and whatever mainstream website completely fuck the consumer, but fail to realize one crucial thing. The only time change happens in mob settings is when the pain of no change is greater than the pain of change. I applaud Elon, spez, and who ever else wishes to put there services behind their paywall whether it’s an API or just simply viewing tweets. Anyone in the know knows that it’s a crock of shit and anyone who isn’t is annoyed to the point where change is preferable. The sooner people figure out posting information, entertainment, and other forms of media/knowledge to the benefit of a company is horrendous the better. Now we have the opportunity to get rid of the corporate greed and basically open-source peoples knowledge from around the globe. Although like with reddit, mob mentality poses a real threat to communities like this one, I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother (as corny as that sounds). I much prefer it over giving more information to companies who use it to profit off of my content, while I receive nothing.
*Edit: Thank you kind stranger for the reddit gold! Glad you spent real hard cash so I can have reddit premium and reddit coins! The lovely people at reddit will be spending your money sitting on a yacht eating grapes in one hand and lobster in the other. I’m sure they are real thankful too! :) *
As a former individual who understands the underlying systems, it seems like they botched deployment of a new feature causing issues and cannot figure out how to solve them.
Most of Twitter is and has been in maintenance mode since acquisition (think of 10 man engineering team and 1 left to handle maintenance).
This is why it cracks me up every time when someone is praising Elon for “cutting slack” when firing all those twitter employees. Yes, twitter did not implode immediately. Turns out, people can build software that is stable enough to run in maintenance mode. But good luck dealing with new issues cropping up.
People too far removed from IT/Dev team can become disillusioned as to what they do.
If you have a good dev team, you won’t hear about them doing anything until shit hits the fan. If you haven’t heard from them?… They’re doing their job. Leave them alone.
deleted by creator
I don’t think I’ve ever met a former individual. What happened? Was it like a Frankenstein thing?
Former individual is just the politically correct way to say dead guy.
Finally the people witty people came from Reddit
Actually, he pissed of Captain Janeway and was erased from the timeline.
Used to be a nice guy before he became a former individual.
Or he got assimilated by the Borg. No longer an individual lol
presumably they joined a hive mind
Nah, cloning gone wrong.
They federated with others.
From what I read they refused to pay Google for hosting services when the contract was up for renewal…which was June 30th.
A day that will live in Internet infamy.
Last day of the fiscal quarter. Changes tend to happen.
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I’ve heard.
I’ve noticed that my batch image downloader works on maybe 40% of all twitter posts, and only 40% of the time (It used to work 100% of the time before Musk arrived). It’s fucking annoying. I think they’re having major API and CDN issues.
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I’ve heard.
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I’ve heard.
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I’ve heard.
I’ve heard this multiple times from the same person even
wow me too, what are the odds
That’s just what I’ve heard!
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I’ve heard.
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I’ve heard.
It’s not a result of Google storage. Google served only for data analysis and batch jobs. These would not be sufficient enough to cause service degradation. Just a bad launch of a feature (via server side) that had unintended consequences.
That man has got to legitimately be one of the stupidest motherfuckers to ever luck his ass into a pile of money.
He’s impulsive and doesn’t know when to shut up. I got the distinct impression that, initially, he was absolutely not serious about buying Twitter. It was a joke/jest. BUT, because his antics affected their stock price he actually got forced into the purchase and now he’s desperately trying to figure out how to make the purchase worth what he actually paid, which is fine and all, except he seems to be leading by impulse, not by consensus or logic. He wakes up in the morning, has some random ass idea and implements it without any oversight. Even his new CEO straight up admitted that she is basically a straw man CEO who will offer no friction to anything Elon wants to do.
This isn’t mildly infuriating, Musk is being the biggest fedi advocate out there! He’s selflessly nuking his own site so he can drive traffic to decentralized alternatives. This is a good thing lol, and should be an important lesson on link rot, and that social media should never be the primary method of communication.
