My completely unfounded and speculative pet theory is that when casual punters tried to read Reddit using their favourite 3rd Party app, and couldn’t, they went to use Twitter instead.
Since Twitter has been haemorrhaging regular users all year, and trying to cut costs, their diminished infrastructure couldn’t handle it, causing Elon to panic and release his policy change.
From what I understand (though I could be wrong), Twitter’s Google Cloud Platform contract expired on June 30th. Twitter was behind schedule on changing over to another platform. So the rate limit was a poor attempt to try to keep Twitter “working”.
Clearly, it wasn’t thought through very well. It’s a holiday weekend in the US. Many people won’t be back on a normal work schedule until Wednesday (US Independence Day is on Tuesday). And people have already found ways to bypass the rate limit. And Elon had to keep raising the rate limit throughout the day. It went from 6,000 verified/ 600 unverified/ 300 new unverified to 8,000/ 800/ 400 to (last I checked) 10,000/ 1,000/ 500.
no he simply just hasn’t been paying bills, now google cloud is kicking twitter off it’s infrastructure because musk won’t pay, they even got kicked out of a bunch of their offices due to unpaid rent
I hope we come to a better solution than upvoting things to mark them read and make them go away. That generates a lot of noise in the voting data. Say what you want about whether votes are useful for sorting content, but flooding them with garbage data can only make them worse.
Well you can just click on the post too. The upvote would be like, you’ve seen a meme, you don’t care to click into the post but you like it and don’t need to see it again.
Yeah, if there was a “confirm seen” button between up and down voting that’d be good for this. You don’t want to register positive or negative for it, just mark it as read. Maybe this should be (optionally maybe) automatic for any post scrolled past?
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.
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.
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.
lemmy.world
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