On Saturday, Musk announced that Twitter was limiting the ways all users could access tweets “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”. In other words, Musk was blaming commercial services that might want to scrape tweets and incorporate them into machine-learning models. There is no reason to believe this is actually happening, but Musk’s longtime hostility to artificial intelligence must have led him to deploy such services as likely suspects to blame for Twitter’s fragility.
Musk is a significant investor in AI.
Twatto.
The “news” these days is a suppurating cuntscape of seething librage against any famous, successful person who triggers their retarded political opinions.
An article I read this morning by someone who’s been in the social media business for as long as it’s existed said words to the effect “Everything everywhere gets scraped for all sorts of purposes. The only way to stop it is to make your site virtually inaccessible, in which case why have it. Learn to live with the scraping, assume everything online will be used to try to make a profit, or don’t go public.”
Just lately I’ve noticed I can’t access references to Twitter. No doubt Elon is pleased he’s getting rid of the freeloaders like me.
I recently watched a YouTube video about robots and AI. There were some amazingly lifelike androids and one robot that was amazingly agile. The thing that surprised me was how little they cost. Still hundreds of thousands but not millions as I was expecting.
Indeed, I occasionally browse Twatter, looking for far right conspiracy theories to satisfy my sociopathic belief in lizard people.
Musk stopped all that stuff on 30th June. I have no desire to subscribe and even less now that he prohibits the casual user. Berk.
Scraping (what Twitter quotas defend against) is something any successful website runs into, and most choose to defend against it by initially requiring logins to access any meaningful content. It is blindingly obvious that Twitter is being scraped to within an inch of its life.
Next stage is to limit each account to about one active human’s worth of activity, and then go looking for clusters of accounts that are likely scraper bots.
Disabling scrapers can halve your serving costs – they tend to have a low cache hit rate, so 10% of your users scraping can cost 50% of serving resources. I am flabbergasted that Dorsey’s crew didn’t try to limit it effectively before now.
I am flabbergasted that Dorsey’s crew didn’t try to limit it effectively before now
I am flabbergasted Musk bought Twitter. Shades of Ferranti buying a company that turned out to be an illegal arms dealer for the CIA.
Watching the meltdown from the usual anti Musk crowd was wonderful, no. After what his reasons. Despite their umpteenth threats to go elsewhere, usually Mastadon, they’re still there grumbling and moaning.
Their new hope is Zuckerberg’s new Threads service, but that requires all their followers to follow them and set up accounts in order to massage their egos, but most of those followers are passive. I suppose it will depend on how easy Zuckerberg makes sign up and use but if Faceache is anything to go by I won’t be moving.
Unlike most people, I suspect Musk actually understands what AI is.
Basically this. I was an intermittent browser of Twatter because I enjoy seeing the heart of “Crazy”, but not enough to register as a member of the asylum.
Nothing of value has been lost other than Elon Musk’s $44 billion.
Get a blue tick, get more scam emails.
Actually, Musk pulled a pretty smart move there…
Especially if he’s still actively going through with the ideas he, quite publicly, announced at takeover..
All of which functions would require you to have an account and be logged in to begin with..
As for the rest… d’awwww.. My heart bleeds for the spongers who base their business model off trawling through the interwebs, picking up anything for free, and selling it packaged to punters with less scruples than sense.
Which no doubt the huffy, offended author of the original article has some of in that “Network” he calls “friends”, “researchers”, and “entrepeneurs”..
Remember kids.. Honest pirates have the courtesy to hoist the Jolly Roger first…
You’re right, Grikath. How many careers, recently, have been based on little more than commentary on what’s been posted on Twatter?
Mail does similar. Whole articles around Instagram posts.
And if the server farm savings are anything like
then twatter could even be getting close to profitable with this move.
Disabling scrapers can halve your serving costs – they tend to have a low cache hit rate, so 10% of your users scraping can cost 50% of serving resources.
Plus if the scalability of the system is anything like as bad as Musk commented when he first took over, reducing 50% of serving requirements could reduce 70%+ of overall resources.
Steve,
“I am flabbergasted Musk bought Twitter. Shades of Ferranti buying a company that turned out to be an illegal arms dealer for the CIA.”
It’s bizarre. The way you make money out of social media is setting one up, or backing one as a VC. The fools who buy at or after floatation overwhelmingly lose money. Other than Facebook, I don’t think any of the others make a good, reliable profit.
Musk should have set up Tesla Social. Open it up for Tesla wwners only first.