“HUSKY” shirono @crane_t3@fedibird.com

Twitter障害はスクレイピングではなく“自己DDoS”が原因？ - ITmedia NEWS
https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/2307/02/news036.html

Dispatches from the #Twitter war:
• The bots have won
• Elon has lost
• Now is the time to encourage defection
• No, NOT to BlueSky

I can elaborate:

The Bots have Won
================

Back in early 2022, #ElonMusk promised to purchase Twitter and wage war on bots, presumably the ones that were peddling cryptocurrency #scams, romance scams, and all sorts of other scams.

There is a good chance that Elon only said this to try to weasel his way out of purchasing Twitter; basically, if he could claim that the product he was promised didn't resemble what was available in reality, he could undo his promise to purchase the corporation. By claiming Twitter was rife with bots, this was his attempt to do so. But whether it was dishonest or not, Elon stuck to his pledge to try to rid the platform of #bots, in ways that are alternatingly incompetent, silly, and ineffective.

Long story short, Elon never saw his "eliminate all bots" promise through to completion. The ultimate concession to failure was when he changed the Twitter algorithm to favor paying users over regular ones, meaning the best way to be heard on the platform was to give him $8 and say your piece. But that $8 surcharge came at a steep cost: no longer were tweets being amplified based on the content of their quality, but on whether the user had extra money to waste or not.

Initially, maybe this was good for the paying users too. After all, someone with $8 who follows Elon might consider themselves very smart, and those people think they have some very smart things to say. To the average onlooker, though, their "very smart musings" look like complete and utter crap: unfunny jokes, stale memes, cold takes.

It turns out that having money doesn't equal intelligence, and Twitter was providing us evidence at a rapid pace.

Elon has Lost
===========

Let's get the obvious things out first: Elon overpaid for Twitter. That much we know. And the value of Twitter has tanked since then, because even the free market won't continue to honor foolish business decisions.

But today, Elon has started limiting the posts that various users are even allowed to see, as low as 300 posts per day for new users, 600 for normal users, and 6000 for the fools who pay $8 to him.

As I understand it, 300 to 600 posts is not a lot. For comparison, when you click Show More in Mastodon, you're probably loading 20 posts at a minimum. Click Show More 30 times, and you've already seen 600. Depending on your usage habits (maybe you just like to skim!) you can easily breeze through these limits in a fraction of an hour.

And that's just not good for user retention. If somebody is locked out of a website after spending a certain amount of time there, I don't think they're going to cough up a couple extra dollars to keep browsing. When the Bezos-owned Washington Post begs me to subscribe to their newspaper, I turn 180° and look for a different source. And the Post actually has valuable information, it's not a cesspit riddled with self-important idiots who pay money to get their unfunny jokes stuck to the top of comment threads.

Now is the Time to Encourage Defection
=================================

Imagine you love Elon Musk, you think he can do nothing wrong, and you even join Twitter just to see how much better it can become under his new leadership. And you get hit with a 300 post maximum before the site stops working and/or begs you to cough up your hard-earned cash, to the guy you're pretty sure is already a billionaire.

Isn't it just disheartening?

Here's a more reasonable scenario: You're a Twitter addict. We've all been there, after all. The conversations suck you in, and they're almost always negative conversations too. Twitter drives its engagement based on negative interactions, using #addiction forming patterns that resemble the casino slot machine more than a public square.

Then, one day, whatever #argument you are watching or participating in, suddenly gets replaced with a "insert $8 to continue" screen. It's straight out of a #MontyPython sketch. For the displeasure of raising your stress levels and your blood pressure, you must now spend money.

This is horrible. All of it is absolutely, totally horrible. Anyone who was lulled into complacency by Twitter should now have their way of life shaken to the point of reconsidering why they use the platform. I used to be among them, and I cannot stress how much I regret giving Twitter my time. There are good people on Twitter, but there is no good Twitter to be had.

Stay Away from BlueSky
====================

Never choose the lesser of two evils, when there are more than two viable choices. It has been a trend, recently, for large influencers to hope to recreate Twitter, verbatim, somewhere or anywhere else. The November 2022 #TwitterMigration seemed to be equal parts #TwitterRefugee and hapless influencer who was simply looking for the most interaction.

Never mind the complexities of Mastodon, most influencers were disappointed by how it was difficult to reassemble the same audience as they had on Twitter. The network effect was in full swing on Twitter: you joined Twitter because people were there, and people were there because you joined Twitter, so not joining Twitter became simply unfeasible for most people.

Influencers do understand one thing: hero worship. And if you were complacent during earlier Twitter, perhaps the easiest hero to worship is #JackDorsey. He created Twitter, after all. And sure, Twitter itself was always toxic ever since it started encouraging arguments. Maybe a lot of people have succumbed to addiction to Twitter, and have decided that Twitter is now only bad because of Elon Musk, and not because it was always bad.

The people in this mindset are more than happy to follow Jack Dorsey to his next terrible creation, which appears to be BlueSky. Right now, the website is simply a Twitter clone, and it's begging influencers to come to it because soon, it infers, it will be the Twitter for people who aren't quite as extreme as Elon Musk.

I hate to use the term, and I do not use it lightly, but #BlueSky is "virtue signaling" about being #federated. Right now, there is only one BlueSky server, and it is invite only. Something cannot be federated if there's nothing to federate with, especially if it's closed off from the world to begin with.

But do you know why BlueSky is #VirtueSignalling? Quite simply: it has nothing else to offer. Mastodon is, as most foundational level, a federated Twitter clone. BlueSky is, at ITS most foundational level, a Twitter clone with nothing to separate it from Twitter. But being federated is what all the cool kids want, so Jack Dorsey weaseled the word into its description to make people think it might be like Mastodon, if not compatible with it.

Jack Dorsey has always been a fundamentally bad person, a #libertarian #techbro who has no qualms about supporting the far right when it helps him.

Dorsey is friends with #Jan6 promoter, #StopTheSteal believer, and all-around right wing disinfo peddler #AliAlexander, for example. He has always had constant, open dialogues with conservatives who want to accuse him of being too biased against them, and he is often stooped to appease them without questioning whether they were lying to him the entire time.

But don't take my word for it, here is an excellent article about it:
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/07/07/we-make-mistakes-twitters-embrace-extreme-far-right

Dorsey has also become more obsessed with #cryptocurrency in recent years, with a huge donation to the Twitter-like #Nostr social network, a place where almost all conversations are one-sided cryptocurrency plugs, and sending cryptocurrency over it was one of the defining features.

And Nostr wants to be #PayToWin too, the same way Twitter currently is.

Final thoughts
============

Succinctly: Mastodon is good, actually. It has a lot of flaws, it has a lot of user experience issues to work out, but I am incredibly thankful it is not being driven into the ground by venture capitalists hell-bent on extracting as much time, money, and attention out of the average human being as possible.

Now all #twitter t.co links are blocked by twitter login. All #links we ever shared via twitter can not be followed anymore without signing in to twitter, no matter where in the #WWW they point to. Twitter put a gate in front of our links by "shortening" them and now they locked the gate. We never should have given them such power. #gatedcommunities #fediverse #web

これ取り消し。金払わないと１日600投稿まで読み込んでアウト。blue登録してカネ払えば6000投稿まで。

カネの問題でした。

今度こそアウトかも。

Twitterに厳しい一時制限　未認証アカの閲覧件数は「1日600件まで」──　「Twitter終わり」「API規制」トレンドに https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/2307/02/news034.html#utm_term=share_sp

もうすぐblue8000、無課金800までは引き上げるからさって。。これで固定化する気だなこれは。

原因はこれか

未認証アカウントは600投稿までしか見えない。それでAPIオーバー

It’s an entirely predictable cycle; scraping Twitter was way more of a hassle than using its API… when the API was low-cost.

And every action Musk takes to lock out “freeloaders” reduces the incremental value of access to the service at all — making the ROI of those insane API costs for devs and businesses built on Twitter even worse.

Which incentivizes finding ways around the API, which restarts the loop.

Even funnier that the current weirdness is an obvious result of the batshit API pricing.

Anyone interested in low end tinkering wa suddenly incentivized to sidestep the API and just scrape the oEmbed or web endpoints, and they did. So he locked out unregistered visitors and killed embedding, which broke every citation of a tweet on the Internet.

Then people start using logged in sessions to get that data. So he limits *actual logged in users* to only viewing 600 tweets per day.

The sudden chaos as Twitter — a service built on the idea of shouting your shower thoughts to the world — locks everything behind a registration wall, jacks up prices, AND gets demonstrably less stable for the PAYING customers is a hilarious demonstration off the fact that Musk isn’t actually good at business, just at being a rich guy.

Twitterから来た方へ。誰をフォローしていいか迷うと思いますが、ハッシュタグのフォローも楽しいですよ。おすすめは　
#catsofmastodon です。

This is hilarious. Twitter appears to be DDOSing itself.

Something's wrong with Twitter so feeds aren't loading. Nothing loads, but my Twitter feed is still trying to load, but it doesn't stop trying after so many attempts.

Notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. I haven't done anything more than attempt to view my home feed. Now notice the bouncing scrollbar.

I'm gonna guess there was an bug introduced that was resulting in an endless loop of trying to fetch results, but with no results available, Twitter would have basically been DDOSing itself.

#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #Tech #DevLife

Twitterの捌くアクセスは秒間8億リクエスト。Webからのアクセスが半分という話をだいぶ前に聞いたことがあるが、その数のブラウザーかにF5アタックを仕掛けさせたのだから無事では済まない。
レスボンのないサーバーが溜め込むエラーのキューは、データセンターのある地域のインターネット網の基地局を破壊しかねない。

ログイン規制を仕掛けたTwitter WebのトップペーシがTwitterをリロードし続けている。
なんのことはない、今の「API規制」はイーロンマスクが自分のサーバーに仕掛けたDDOS攻撃なんだよ。
素人、よく頑張った。