This is beyond speedrunning enshittification now…
I’m eager to see what twitter users think of this - lots of people are watching, and corpos taking notes.
Edit: He’s announced an increased limit but it’s hardly generous IMO.
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Shows how much planning he does to change his mind in two hours flat.
He increased it again lmao
Where’s the rate limit now? Or has he increased it again in the last 30 min?
Most recent tweet from Elon says 10k for verified, 1k for unverified, and 500 for new unverified.
I think this really will be the straw that broke the camels back for a lot of people. I don’t think it will immediately kill twitter but it will have a lasting effect. And if not this I am sure he will come up with an even worse policy change within the next 2 months. Something like limiting it to only 10 tweets per day for unverified users.
Everyone in the world who uses Twitter to broadcast news to the masses now can’t. Every news org, company, and politician now has dramatically reduced incentive to post on Twitter.
Much more importantly, advertisers and marketers have less incentive to invest time and money in the platform if people are being rate limited and forced to make accounts just to see the ads.
Great for the fediverse! I suspect that these changes to twitter and reddit are mainly a response to the growing hunger of generative artificial intelligence companies who are hoovering up data, basically for free. Change is never easy, but i’m optimistic that this is the break open source and federated communities needed to start taking off. I hope people can see the value in decentralizing and help support these open source projects financially so that they can really start to scale. The reality is, scaling is expensive, and we all need to help where we can. These Ai companies will not hesitate to suck up federated data also. If we want to live in an ad free world its gonna cost us.
Question: Can’t AI companies just as easily Hoover up language content from the fediverse? Or is it something that we just kind of accept but don’t care about since it isn’t eating into fediverse finances?
yeah, fediverse platforms not only have no measures against scraping, they willingly send out content in a computer-readable way. kind of the whole point of federation. and we can’t really stop them, even if we clamp down on federation we’d only hurt ourselves.
besides, up until the latest change twitter was still easy to scrape (and now the problem is that even registered users can’t see that much of it), and reddit is trivial to scrape even without the api. yes, that includes new reddit too. there’s very little you can do against scraping in an open space, especially against someone wielding the full power of chatgpt, and even less so if you want to keep your site accessible to blind people.
(and now the problem is that even registered users can’t see that much of it)
People actually already found a way around the rate limit. Opera GX even implemented a fix in their desktop browser.
lmao, you know you fucked up when a browser pushes an update specifically to circumvent your rate limits
but yeah, if opera can do it, i highly doubt that openai can’t easily do it either. the ai concerns are posturing (and probably a personal grudge, given that elon was a founding member of openai until he got kicked out), the real issue is somewhere between incompetence and attempted monetization.
For Reddit API calls are near infinitely less load on the servers than scraping.
i’m actually kinda interested how that could work. a regular user using “near infinitely less” resources than a scraping engine sounds like some absolutely stupid design, either on reddit’s or the scraping engine’s side
When using the API you just request what you’re looking for. With scraping you load everything repeatedly.
I would assume it’s even worse for the fediverse considering the limited resources we have to run the servers. I wonder how the devs/server owners will handle this.
I don’t think (completely wild guess here) AI content crawlers should have any more impact than the dozens and dozens of search spiders that make up must of my own site’s traffic.
The impact was magnified for Twitter because it generates so much new content every second. That wasn’t an issue when Twitter had a nice, properly cached API and it shouldn’t be an issue for fediverse instances going forward because we have RSS and caching and we’re not so stupid as to turn those off. Like, what kind of moron would do that?
I don’t think (completely wild guess here) AI content crawlers should have any more impact than the dozens and dozens of spiders that make up must of my own site’s traffic.
The impact was magnified for Twitter because it generates so much new content every second. That wasn’t an issue when Twitter had a nice, properly cached API and it shouldn’t be an issue for fediverse instances either because we have RSS and caching and we’re not so stupid as to turn those off. Like, what kind of moron would do that?
to be fair, that argument operates under the assumption that elon wasn’t just lying to cover up that he didn’t pay his google cloud bill. the amount of users who view and create that content still create a much higher load on the servers than AI scrapers that want to read it once and save it somewhere for training
The issue comes when those AI bots start commenting and posting here. From what I understand, bots are a large reason why Beehaw keeps defederating from instances with open registration: bots are difficult to moderate without good moderation tools.
I always held out hope that Musk was going to be the one to destroy Twitter. I’m still hoping that’s his ultimate goal.
To buy Twitter just to destroy that cesspool and Musk will always be the hero we needed
I dunno, I think he’s too much of a narcissist to let that happen. Not to mention the stupid money he was compelled to spend on the purchase, despite him playing it off like he’s playing 4D chess.
Spends 44 billion dollars to spread transphobia and make cis a slur
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see that’s the thing, the limit isn’t on tweets u post, it’s on tweets u view, scrolling through ur timeline can hit the limit in seconds, remember everything on twitter is a post, including replies
The limits are so low as well. Imagine paying for Twitter blue and getting rate limited still.
Twitter and Reddit both dying at the same time was not what I expected in 2023
who had two social media companies dying on their bingo board?
Anyone who did should go buy a lotto ticket ASAP
I’m betting on the Trifecta.
We’re still not quite halfway through the year. I just need Zuck to require a VR hat to access facebook and I’ll get a big payout!
Come on Zuck, Metaverse is the future, man! Don’t listen to the naysayers, everyone wants to live in a legless world, you just gotta give them that final push!
I just need Zuck to require a VR hat to access facebook
Didn’t he already require facebook to access VR “hats”? Oh yeah, he did it for occulus headsets.
They have never properly turned a profit - and relied solely on VC money. It was kind of “obvious” from the beginning - this house of cards of completely free services is increasingly unstable.
Both could have been profitable overnight if they wanted to. Reddit doesn’t need 2000+ employees. It’s a simple forum, led by volunteers. It is definitely possible to run it profitably on ads and volunteer premium services.
Spez is simply a moron. Reddit doesn’t need multiple chat/messaging features. It doesn’t need NFTs. It doesn’t need to be tik tok.
They could have even made a profit from third party apps if the pricing wasn’t 100x a reasonable rate.
Oh yeah, I completely agree with that. However, don’t forget that setting up the IT infrastructure for such large sites to be performant and scalable takes a ridiculous amount of resources. And people expect snappy, quick websites with the perfect algorithm for constant dopamine shots.
That’s the reason why I think the Fediverse is the future of social media - but it’s still very young and will take a lot more work to be friendly for the masses.
It is very noticable the snappiness/responsiveness coming to Lemmy.world. My smaller mastodon instance is generally fine but images and stuff are noticably slower.
depends on the hosting setup. my lemmy instance was slow too until i set it up with a cache, now it’s hella snappy
the biggest thing to me, in terms of server load, is that reddit does not need to host videos/images. It’s a link aggregate.
I’m only a layman in this particular field, but I imagine it’s a lot lighter on resources to direct people to sites streaming video than to host and serve it all yourself.
Text and database entries are, indeed, Vastly lighter on resources (compute and bandwidth). Bandwidth cost for text is practically free. Managing voting is surely not easy though; every single vote is an additional database entry which means that they cost money to store. Then the vote sorting algorithm has to run pretty frequently. Comments themselves are probably nothing compared to the votes.
But managing voting and sorting is a one-time-cost. Reddit doesn’t let you vote on old things which means that they can completely discard the votes and keep the totals and never resort ever again. They have no real ongoing costs there.
Definitely not me. Crazy I hear talks of MySpace making a come back. That’s one social media site I enjoyed and would love to visit again.
Or at least that’s what he’ll claim as it comes crashing down around him
Test comment, sorry
hello I’m from the future. Elon musk has fulfilled your prophecy.
Incompetent Narcissism is the term I’ve used for Musk and others who think they are brilliant, but in reality just aren’t. But, they have an insatiable desire to be seen as brilliant and the easiest way to do that is to have crazy ideas that, because they are crazy, others don’t have. Sometimes those ideas pan out and they are seen as brilliant … and that really resonates for them. Most of the time those crazy ideas absolutely fail … they externalize the cause in those cases. The real damage comes when these Incompetent Narcissists have the money and/or power/influence to make it happen. Musk and Trump are prime examples of this.
Who would even read 300 a day?
Nevertheless, Twitter has fucking died. 😆
Hello. I am a moderator of this community. Just commenting here to let you know you can use bad language in a lemmy and in this server. No need to censor yourself. We don’t give a fuck.
Quite curious with the timing of it all, it’s like a period of change where most things turn to the worse for apparently no reason.
Juli 1
I mean I see why Reddit and Twitter are doing it. We’re in a really weird transitional period of the internet right now, for better or for worse. They’re doing it to prevent scraping, because why would you read all these garbage tweets to get to the information you need when an ChatGPT can spit out the exact information without fluff? It’s taking their content without any funding back to them, effectively stealing their revenue.
So what are these companies to do? Honestly I hope this is birth to a new form of social media, and this benefits the fedi greatly. It will be unsustainable to run large social media companies like theirs who profit off of user data and content. Whereas tons of fedi servers ran by hobbiest, effectively ran out of pocket or by donations, is much more sustainable. They’re doing it for community and more pure content that everyone wants without corporate fluff. If ChatGPT scrapes the fedi community, that’s okay because the fedi isn’t designed to make money so nothing is lost.
Question, what happens when ChatGPT comes for the fediverse? Will it kill small instinces?
What would we possibly lose to ChatGPT? We’re here for human discussion, aren’t we? There’s no monetization motivation to write fake ChatGPT comments, and I don’t see anything wrong with scraping our public comments for info, like it’s already doing. Reddit/Twitter don’t like it because it takes clicks and ad revenue from them, we don’t have that issue.
ChatGPT writing is actually pretty obvious to spot. Also, ChatGPT is expensive to run.
At the start of social media, companies ran on investment money and did their best to grow as fast as possible. Now they are trying to start supporting themselves and their efforts are often counter productive. As boomers retire, less and less investment money will be available, so you should expect more of this mess in the future.
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It’s taking their content without any funding back to them, effectively stealing their revenue.
But enough about Reddit.
well Reddit at least links to the original source, which gives them clicks and ad revenue.
with LLMs, who knows where the hell they get their info from
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.
