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Rate Limit Exceeded
Jul. 2nd, 2023 07:41 amYesterday, Elon Musk rolled out a new policy for Twitter. There are now "daily reading limits" for different tiers of accounts. This policy was implemented without much thought. For example, opening a tweet thread counts as "reading" all of the comments on all of the tweets in the thread, meaning that it's possible to the exceed your daily limit with just one tweet. Given the giant protests in France and Israel, and well as the recent Supreme Count decisions and mass shootings in the United States, this isn't as unlikely as you might think.
Because Twitter had to send out so many error messages to users, it has essentially staged a DDS attack on itself, causing several service outages yesterday afternoon.
Based on reporting by NPR and the Washington Post, a probable cause for what's going on is: (a) Musk fired roughly half the staff at Twitter, and the team is suffering from a severe labor shortage, and (b) Twitter has lost so much money during the past year that they can no longer afford to pay their server costs.
This is obviously frustrating, but Twitter has been in severe decline since last November. Everyone threatened to move to Mastodon, but all of the accounts I've seen there are lonely and sad and have no engagement. Instagram is becoming more hostile with each passing week as it tries to mimic the endless scroll of videos on TikTok, and many creatives have abandoned the platform entirely over the past few months. TikTok continues to be the death of culture.
Meanwhile, Reddit is even more of a trashfire than usual, with the "Reddit blackout" protest against API changes going on for almost a month now. Half of the boards are dark, and the other half are unmoderated. As a result, a lot of Reddit users have migrated to Tumblr (which means that I now have all sorts of people jumping onto my posts to try to explain Legend of Zelda to me). All the while, Tumblr continues to roll out site updates that make its user interface even more difficult to navigate.
The internet continues to burn. What a great time to be an emerging creative. 🙃
Because Twitter had to send out so many error messages to users, it has essentially staged a DDS attack on itself, causing several service outages yesterday afternoon.
Based on reporting by NPR and the Washington Post, a probable cause for what's going on is: (a) Musk fired roughly half the staff at Twitter, and the team is suffering from a severe labor shortage, and (b) Twitter has lost so much money during the past year that they can no longer afford to pay their server costs.
This is obviously frustrating, but Twitter has been in severe decline since last November. Everyone threatened to move to Mastodon, but all of the accounts I've seen there are lonely and sad and have no engagement. Instagram is becoming more hostile with each passing week as it tries to mimic the endless scroll of videos on TikTok, and many creatives have abandoned the platform entirely over the past few months. TikTok continues to be the death of culture.
Meanwhile, Reddit is even more of a trashfire than usual, with the "Reddit blackout" protest against API changes going on for almost a month now. Half of the boards are dark, and the other half are unmoderated. As a result, a lot of Reddit users have migrated to Tumblr (which means that I now have all sorts of people jumping onto my posts to try to explain Legend of Zelda to me). All the while, Tumblr continues to roll out site updates that make its user interface even more difficult to navigate.
The internet continues to burn. What a great time to be an emerging creative. 🙃
