Remember when Twitter used to give archives of tweets to the Library of Congress? And had a firehose for folks to consume as many tweets as they could?
It's a shame that he's not able to escape his pathological belief that his product approach is the right approach, regardless of the grotesque impact he's making on what was a good thing for all of us.
Ironically, my initial reaction was “Oh crap. Public saftey orgs use this to broadcast alerts.”
My second reaction was “I wonder how hard it would be to take a list of twitter handles and scrape their feeds into an S3 bucket that’s fronted with a CDN.”
It went from $0/mo (as it had been for a long time) to $5000/mo overnight with no middle ground (for access to streaming data, no matter how small the volume).
Like anyone believes for a second anything that comes out of this guy's mouth. Even if true, who cares Elon? You're so good at shooting yourself in the foot, you might consider being a professional Russian Roulette player.
Haven’t we been predicting twitter’s degradation for some time? When Musk removed half of his employees many of us realised systems would remain running for some time, but at a certain point they would start degrading without intervention.
The more Musk makes changes, the faster it degrades.
How much time is it that the systems will remain running? Because it's been 9 months now and Twitter is still running fine. Time to admit that theory has been disproven.
I wonder what percentage of legitimate traffic is blocked by this. I would imagine that the majority of users don't have an account, by a large margin, correct?
I would not assume that, no. Following accounts is fundamental to using Twitter; I absolutely think the majority of people using Twitter are logged-in.
There are tons of usages of Twitter which don't need an account. All those Twitter links on this site for isntance. Some of them provide interesting input, however the urge to participate in those threads is low, as the need to follow those authors. The browser I use for HN is not signed in to twitter. Neither is my phone, where I sometimes get Twitter links in messages from friends.
Maybe to using Twitter on a sustained basis, sure. However I imagine there’s a decent-if-not-majority chunk that accesses tweets via Google/friends/news articles/etc
I ha[d] a bookmark folder with about a dozen twitstreams — no login/acct. I'm not signing up. Too bad nitter is broken, as well.
With all the public officials on Twitter (and FaceBook) publishing "public-facing" information, I'm surprised both are allowed to be/remain walled gardens.
To do my business taxes this year I had to DEMAND paper form acceptance, which was begrudgingly accepted once I went, in person, to the tax authorities [they want you to provide all sorts of tracking JUST TO FILE STATE TAXES, under the auspices of "two factor authentication"].
As a technosophisticate that intentionally avoids email and doesn't carry a cellphone... I weep for what my public-interfacing world will yet become.
Tons of people I share news with don't have Twitter - now I just wont bother, and I'm assuming it's the same for many others who used Twitter as some sort of middle man for that.
Unless someone was pulling in everything to build a new AI dataset or something like that then I'm filing this in the "bots bots bots" stuff from the takeover - a real problem that is completely blown out of proportion.
Easy solution: Regularly upload dumps of public tweets to the internet archive, like how stackoverflow used to do. Twitter's value is in live engagement, not in stale tweets.
I'd like to know how relevant search engine traffic is for Twitter. I was always under the impression that embed tweets and link shares would be way more important than search.
They’ve done fine with these employees for the last while. Trimming the fat is healthy, especially when Twitter has historically over-hired hard for no reason other than “growth for growth’s sake”.
There’s lots of legitimate reasons to criticize, but making a more efficient company and firing valueless employees is not one of them.
What makes you think all of those employees were useful? An employee does not have inherent value. It’s not as though Twitter never had problems before the acquisition.
"Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.
What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas."
2. The scraping orgs dgaf & mask their IPs through proxy servers or through orgs that appear legit. For example, a recent massive scraping operation originating from Oracle IP addresses was just using their servers as a laundromat.
3. We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now."
> 3. We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data…
What does “our” refer to here? Does Twitter (i.e. musk) own the data in any sense? Or does he mean it as “we the people’s data”?
Very off-putting to read that sentence. Obviously he’s trying to monetize the user generated data in this LLM rush as other avenues to monetizations have flopped.
This also really sounds like he's trying to pretend his data is some kind of rare commodity, when the reality is that it's bottom of the barrel trash as far as text data for LLMs goes.
Unless I misunderstood, he might actually have a case.
> In a second ruling in April 2022 the Ninth Circuit affirmed its decision.[5][6] In a November 2022 ruling the Ninth Circuit ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's User Agreement and a settlement agreement was reached between the two parties. [7]
Yes, it was definitely the "data pillaging" that was degrading service, and not the fact that Twitter is now hosted on a Mac Mini under somebody's desk...
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I'm not saying you owe CEO billionaires or billionaire CEOs better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here. If you'd please review and follow the site guidelines, we'd appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I'm a little surprised at this response, dang. I could understand if I was being hostile to the poster, but my sarcasm was directed at Musk (who they're quoting), whose comment about data pillaging I find highly dubious.
As far as snark, I see several other examples of that—also intended for Musk—in this thread. They don't strike me as either offensive or particularly constructive, so it's not clear to me why my comment was called out here. (Especially considering that there are a few other comments that definitely go beyond the acceptable levels of user-to-user snark as I understand them.)
I can avoid sarcastic comments about billionaires in the future, if that's a problem. If the issue was snark directed at another user, that wasn't my intention.
I'll also say that the "snark" rule you cited, while well-intentioned, seems very broad and selectively applied here.
It does not say “don’t be snarky unless scarasm is directed at a billionaire because then it’s ok because they have a lot of money and power, so we will allow it”.
You would then need to define some amount of money that would put someone in then “can be flamed” category.
The rule is not applied selectively here; it is applied to everyone, Musk included.
I mean—your response just now was snarky also. I don't think you were responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of what I said, either.
I'd say what's not clear to me is what to avoid in the future. I'm not trying to be difficult here—and dang is one guy dealing with the internet version of a city, to be sure—but I see sarcasm all the time on HN. The really toxic, demeaning stuff, sure, that has to go. In this case, it never even crossed my mind that what I said would be interpreted as targeting the person I was replying to. (While I wouldn't have flagged it, your snarky response, by contrast, was pretty clearly targeting me.)
Looking over the thread—and HN in general—there are no end of snarky posts, including yours, and especially in regards to wealthy tech guys like Musk. The vast majority of them are permitted. That's what I mean by "selectively." Going by your interpretation, no snark would be welcome at all; if that isn't the case, which I didn't have the impression it was, then what was it about my post that warranted a response more than the others?
Genuine question. I can observe consistent rules, but I'm not seeing consistent application of this one.
Moderation is dominated by randomness - we don't come close to seeing all the comments on HN or even all the comments in any large thread. That's 90% of the answer to "why did my comment get moderated and not those other ones". (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)
The reason I saw your comment rather than the other ones is that it was heavily upvoted and right near the top of the page—and that's just the problem: snarky, shallow comments attract upvotes, which causes them to occupy prime real estate, crowding out better discussion, and that distorts the character of the thread and ultimately of the site itself. This is one of the biggest problems HN faces, if not the biggest.
You can say that this problem is caused more by upvotes than by comments, and I agree - but we can't address the problem at the upvote level (at least not publicly), and anyway if the flypaper weren't hung in the first place, the flies wouldn't have thronged to it.
It's impossible not to "selectively apply" the rules, the same way that not every speeder gets a speeding ticket, and of course when you've seen other people speeding worse than you (which they invariably do), it feels unfair that you're the one who gets the ticket. The main things to realize are (1) it's nothing personal; (2) the randomness evens out in the long run; and (3) the only way to keep HN going in a good way is for enough commenters to understand this and take up the work of following the site guidelines (or really, the intended spirit of the site) even when they see others not doing it. I hope this helps explain things a bit...
"Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"