Twitter Twitches

The situation is evolving rapidly. Here’s where we stand as of the morning of July 4th.

Well You See What Happened Was…

Oh no! To be clear, by twitches, I mean ‘Elon refused to pay the cloud bill.’

EDIT: Or, alternatively, if the timing on that is somehow a coincidence, some mix of ‘Elon started charging a ton for API access, people responded by using scrapers, and this is a reason to try and force people to pay the $8.’

As a result, Twitter has been forced to rate limit users.

1. This started out as 600 posts per day for most accounts, 300 posts per day for new accounts and 6,000 posts per day for those who pay.

2. This is now up to 1k/500/10k according to one Musk tweet.

3. If you are not logged in, you get nothing. Even direct links will break.

4. Tweetdeck has been forced into a new worse version, but now works again. In 30 days, this will be for paid accounts only, which seems fair.

That fourth one hurts my process. Navigation is somewhat slower and more annoying. In particular, forced threading breaks chronological order assumptions and one’s ability to use duplication to locate one’s place, and zooming in to move around twisting Twitter threads is so bad you need to jump to Twitter itself. Navigation to zoom back requires clicking in annoying places. I was unable to configure the column order without deleting them all and then creating them again, although this was quick. Column width and monitor real estate use is screwed up in subtle ways. Oh, and now its settings are linked to Twitter’s even though I want them to be different. Sheesh.

Another little thing is that the tab icon is now identical to Twitter’s. So annoying.

This is still vastly better than the period where Tweetdeck stopped working.

The third is brutal for some of my readers. Many report they can’t view any links.

What to do, if this doesn’t end soon?

The Plan

Three parts: How I will deal with processing info, how I will change how I present info, and how you can adjust to the new situation.

1. The efficiency hit on my end is unavoidable. I’ll make three adjustments.

   1. I’ll check Twitter less often, rely more on other sources.

   2. I’ll raise the bar somewhat for what is worth including or investigating.

   3. I’ll shift some people from lists to follows and eliminate duplicates.

2. The inability for viewers to see Twitter links means moving away from them.

   1. I’ll more often quote more of the relevant Twitter threads.

   2. I’ll link directly to the primary source first whenever possible.

3. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you have a choice to make.

   1. Having an account with zero connections fixes links. Consider that.

   2. If you simply can’t do that responsibly, so be it, and I’ll write the posts such that this does not cause any showstopper issues.

   3. Most of you almost never clicked the links anyway.

4. What I will not do is join BlueSky or another Twitter alternative. We are still far from where that would make sense.

Also, clarifying some policies on how Twitter threads work here.

1. I will silently correct capitalization and spelling and other obvious errors.

2. I will reformat as makes sense for the new context, again silently. If the words themselves need to change I will use [brackets].

3. I use your real name if I know it, your handle if that’s all I have.

4. I will use judgment on ordering and when to provide detail on structure.

   1. For a quote tweet, I use the order that seems right to me - sometimes the intention is that the reader will see the quoted tweet only after, despite it happening earlier in time.

   2. For multiple different replies, I will make that clear if it is ambiguous.

   3. A link generally indicates a new thread of some kind.

Oh No, That’s Not the Reason, Except It Is

This Maggie Johnson-Pint thread offers a cool explanation of what else might have caused this situation, written before we knew the answer.

Twitter owner Musk explains, with a different justification than the real one:

Twitter Daily News: NEWS: Twitter's web version no longer allows users to browse without logging in. All urls redirect to the signup page.

This is believed to be a measure to make it harder for scrapers to take Twitter's data, like ChatGPT's web browsing plugin has been doing.

Elon Musk: Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!

Three obvious responses.

1. No, it wasn’t.

2. There are many much better solutions to that problem.

3. This happened exactly one day after failing to pay your cloud computing bill.

   1. Also shortly after you started charging quite a lot for API access and people moved to scraping in response.

   2. Also seems designed to force people to subscribe.

   3. So might or might not be exactly Google here, but it’s the compute, stupid.

[EDIT: Added a/b/c above since I agree we don’t know that the link to Google isn’t a coincidence, even if it would be quite the coincidence, and I want to be careful.]

Some people pointing out the obvious, links signify distinct threads:

Paul Graham, who may or may not have thought through the implications: Surely someone who can figure out how to build spaceships can figure out how to distinguish scrapers from legit users. The patterns must be so different.

Richard Nixon: Yes, well.

Kilgore Trout (blue social): What an incredible coincidence that your website broke exactly one day after refusing to pay the billion dollar bill you owed.

[He quotes source]: More platform instability could be in Twitter's near future. In 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion contract with Google to host some of its services on the company's Google Cloud servers. Platformer reports Twitter recently refused to pay the search giant ahead of the contract's June 30th renewal date. Twitter is reportedly rushing to move as many services off of Google's infrastructure [first].

Kareem Carr: Rate limiting starts the day their cloud contract (that they were having trouble paying) ends. That can’t be a coincidence right? Twitter might be much closer to dying than most of us realize.

Robin Safaya: Ok so I'm a Data Analytics Manager. Our tech stack is on an AWS S3 cluster. Let me explain in plain English for y'all how absofuckinglutely b.s. Elon's claim is. First, you don't prevent scraping by cutting off your own app's access to its OWN database.

However... Let's say you are a huge platform on AWS, like Twitter is, and you aren't paying your bill. The first thing they're going to do is meter your usage, then they're going to throttle your usage. So, what Elon is really admitting is that he DIDN'T PAY HIS F--KING AMAZON BILL.

One more thing... you can get around some of the problem by sending yourself direct links to tweets so they load individually instead of your entire timeline. Like this:

Will Eden: We are learning so much from the Twitter experiment. For example, a company can survive not paying for employees, but it cannot survive not paying for cloud servers.

People Dealing With It

There is no way to see how close you are to the rate limit.

Jennifer RM: I logged in because I heard Twitter had collapsed, and I'm on a "use it until the quota runs out" spree. When will I hit the limits? It is a mystery!! Weeee!

bmt: I don’t know either, it’s all quite exciting.

wife_geist: [blinking and crying in the sun] yeah the cave guys only let me see 600 flickering shadows a day now. There’s another cave but it kind of sucks. I’m going to go back down again tomorrow.

A strange dynamic is how many people complained about the rate limit being too low for them, yet did not think getting around this was worth $8.

Geoffrey Miller: So many guys spending 3 hours a day on Twitter but aren't willing to pay 8 bucks a month for a checkmark. Dude that's less than 10 cents an hour. Get over yourself. Act like you're employed & pay up.

Max: the humiliation of considering paying for Twitter to scroll my addiction is giving me a smidge of empathy for the bros who pay for sex.

There are also other benefits to paying, which now include Tweetdeck. That can now be used as a justification, avoiding stigma or looking silly. Which is a dumb worry. If people are going to treat you badly because you are paying a reasonable price to improve your experience of a valuable product you are both using a lot? Screw ‘em.

Alexander Hayne: If you’ve found yourself unfollowed or blocked, I’m sorry but when I could read any number of tweets I could handle your nonsense, but now I have to ration my tweet viewing and you didn’t make the cut.

Tom Martell: If I survived the cut after my last week of tweeting, you must have had some LOOSE follows.

Cutting out low quality follows, blocking or muting people you don’t want around and otherwise improving the quality of your feed is always a great idea. Most Twitter users need to do a lot more of this, so using this moment for ‘spring cleaning’ seems great.

I still am baffled by the degree of refusal to pay. I share the instinct to avoid subscriptions. This still seems like a clear case where heavy users should make an exception.

Other Twitter News

Twitter owner Elon Musk continues to be surprised by how Twitter works. Last week he learned that their code ‘shadowbanned’ any account with low reputation score, preventing them from trending, and the calculation was based on ‘how many times were you reported’ so every big account got shadowbanned.

When I insist that the algorithms used in large companies are counterproductive, stupid and ill-considered, trying to solve the wrong problems using the wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world and all their mistakes have failed to cancel out, I mostly didn’t mean this stupid. A counting statistic on reports to designate low quality? How did anyone think that was a good idea? Did anyone think about it for a minute, let alone test it?

Every time someone says ‘no one would be so stupid as to tell an AI system to…’ remember that no, someone will totally be exactly that stupid.

General Twitter Outlook Going Forward

Until now, none of the changes to Twitter substantially impacted my experience, utility or workflow. If there was one main downside, it was listening to people complain about Twitter.

This time is different. My experience and workflow got worse, as did the experience of many of my best readers. I don’t see the importance of avoiding having a Twitter account at all, but others do, and I respect people who know themselves in such ways.

None of that is especially scary in and of itself. If the new situation proves stable, I am confident it will be fine.

The danger is that the new situation is not obviously stable. Musk has altered the deal, pray that he does not alter it any further. Twitter depends on its network effects. So far, those network effects have held firm, and almost all talk of abandonment has been exactly that, talk. Things now seem much closer to potential tipping points, where the core network effects could become endangered.

If that did happen, it would be extremely bad if it didn’t rapidly result in another site with similar functionality quickly reassembling those network effects and providing a place to make sense of the world in real time and generate a customized information flow. At best, converging on a new location and reestablishing the social graphs there would take years.

A plausible new alternative is about to launch, called Threads, which is closely connected to Instagram. It would be extremely bad if this resulted in Twitter effectively becoming part of the Meta empire, and Meta then had root control of all of that data and its thumb on all the various scales.

Their privacy policies do not seem great, as one would expect, although I’d be more worried about the training data being used for Meta’s LLMs.

Thus, I will continue to rely on and support Twitter in these trying times. There are problems, but all the alternatives are clearly far worse.