This is fundamentally a self-inflicted wound because twitter’s chief source of revenue is advertisement. Limiting the number of tweets its userbase may view, severely restricts Twitter from precious revenue accrual. And Elon Musk was somebody that used to be heralded as an intelligent and savvy person!? It turns out he accorded a lot of deferential respect solely based on his net worth.
It’s alleged that the reason why is that Twitter decided not to pay their Google Cloud bill.
I was assuming that the reason was that Twitter fired all their system administrators so the services are basically held together with bubble gum and string. If too many people use the services, it’ll crash so they need to limit usage.
They can’t admit that the rate limits are due to unmaintained servers, though, so they trotted out the “people are scraping Twitter” excuse.
Come to think of it, didn’t Reddit use something like that as an excuse for the huge API pricing? Are they coordinating on how to ruin their services? If so, they’re doing a great job!
When Elon fired all of its staff there was talk about it starting to accumulate tech debt and getting less stable over time. This is the logical conclusion.
Musk doesn’t realise that as a result of this rate limiting, the site is actually DDoSing itself, the fool.
I thought it was the other way around: They had made changes that had the site DDOS’ing itself & Mollusk publicly said that because of extreme levels of data scraping, rate limits were being implemented.
Not quite. It appears to be self inflicted.
