Mildly Infuriating

Almost certainly this isn't anything to do with scraping. Like with Reddit, those with a stake in Twitter stand to benefit from AI and, as far as I know, there's no mass reposting (retweeting?) effort to something like Mastodon.

That would be trivial to block anyway, since it would be easy to identity the service accounts and source IP's of the requests. No need to impact average users.

What's more likely is he hasn't paid the bill for his cloud infrastructure and no longer has the capacity to serve so many users.

IMO, that's what you get when you fire half of your staff.

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.

It must be nice to be able to waste 44 billion dollars and not miss it.

I could live comfortably for the rest of my life on 1/10,000th of what Elon spent.

Hopefully this leads to Twitter not being the public square of the internet anymore at least mainstream wise. The man is doing everything to make the site worse.

At the risk of sounding tin-foily...

Twitter's financials for server costs have never made sense - the amount of money required to serve the sheer volume of engagement can't possibly have been resolved by ads that Elon is somehow refusing to keep tapping into.

I'd wager that some other interested party engaged in some type of private-public partnership was floating costs for (let's call it "privileged") access to the backend of Twitter -- granting a bottomless pit of funding to keep the platform running no matter the cost.

Once Twitter left the hands of someone deemed trustworthy, that life support doesn't stick around -- leaving Twitter facing complete insolvency by October of this year unless Musk literally does whatever he can to reduce engagement to save on costs.

Twitter loses more money when it has more engagement. If you have 100k users and add a new one, every interaction that additional user makes with tweets viewed by those 100k existing users requires 100k updates pushed to those 100k users' pages. Every like sends a ln update of +1 like on the tweet to every one of the 100k users. It becomes significantly more expensive per user engagement.

The ads being seen by additional users don't cover that constantly-compounding cost to keep engagements up to date across the platform. Musk isn't being honest about the reasoning (web scraping issues my ass) and is scrambling to buy desperately-needed to keep the platform up past October.

I think this goes to show just how impossible a business model like Twitter's was from the jump and shines a light on the absurdity of it being self-sustaining without a massive source of reliable external funding.

This feels like the shit reddit pulled today

Well it worked for me, deactivated today. First RIF now twitter, what a day.

And twitter blue dumbasses eat it up. Legit one of them said “he created a problem, and now he’s created a solution”. No, he didn’t say that as a criticism. He was telling people to buy twitter blue.

Lemmy, KBin and Mastodon fullfil all the needs for online news outside of dedicated news sites for me by now, Twitter is something I haven't used directly for months now.

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He'll probably get some total write-off when it fails and get $44B returned to him (from the tax payers, of course)

He fired the worlds biggest experts on the technology at Twitter and thought he could do it better with a skeleton staff. Now the dead body rots. The skeleton is there. It smells musky, and the site has died.

I admire the pettiness to buy the platform that is bullying you then running it into the ground lmao

My pet theory...... Though I don't believe it.

Musk and u/spez are playing 4-dimensional chess. The end goal is to increase freedom and user choice. By slowly destroying their respective platforms, people are driven to the fediverse, the idea of centralised platforms is tainted, power is shifted back to the user and long term everyone is better off.

It is a nice thought experiment.....

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

That just makes people want to use Twitter less, won't it? Unless there's some grand strategist-levels Masterplan behind this that I'm simply too stupid to fathom? I already use less of Twitter since he owned it, and I may even just cut it off now. It's such a shame too because it's one way for content creators to reach out to their community aside from Discord... I personally use Twitter a lot to notify people when I'm going live, etc. but with this change there might not even be a point anymore because I absolutely refuse to sign up for Twitter Blue.