Oh my god, this is just too funny.

I find it especially bizarre that spez took inspiration and guidance from Musk. I can entertain the possibility of Musk intentionally driving Twitter to the ground (though he sure is taking the scenic route), but Reddit? It just seems like the rich tech bros have collectively lost their minds

It goes deeper than that.

This all started with the API changes. Before they were charging a fair price for the API and companies happily paid it for the convenience. Then Elon got greedy he started charging a ridiculous amount for the API so those companies decided it would be worth it to just deal with the annoyance and switch to scraping the website instead. But when you hit the website it's way less efficient than hitting the API because it's doing a bunch of mixing and ranking which is a lot more complicated and costly than serving static content, which costs a small fraction of real time algorithmic ranking. So now instead of making money off companies that want their data they're losing money on the cloud costs to serve the scrapers.

More recently, they haven't been paying their hosting bills to Google and their service was set to expire at the end of last month. What just happened at the start of this month? They added the limitations. That can't be a coincidence. Now the Google services weren't hosting the site itself, otherwise they'd probably be fully down right now, but it was hosting their trust and safety services for things like fighting spam. That could have also been hosting anti scraper services as well. Since they're so under staffed they probably couldn't swap the services in time, so instead of having anti scraping services like every other big company on the internet, they decided to cut service instead. It's just built up incompetence coming to a head.

Honestly this is probably more close to reality than anyone wants to admit.

This is why it cracks me up every time when someone is praising Elon for "cutting slack" when firing all those twitter employees. Yes, twitter did not implode immediately. Turns out, people can build software that is stable enough to run in maintenance mode. But good luck dealing with new issues cropping up.

I don't think I've ever met a former individual. What happened? Was it like a Frankenstein thing?

I've noticed that my batch image downloader works on maybe 40% of all twitter posts, and only 40% of the time (It used to work 100% of the time before Musk arrived). It's fucking annoying. I think they're having major API and CDN issues.

I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.

This is just what I've heard.

The hilarity is that these moves are the exact opposite of the so called Public Square he claims Twitter is or should be.

Thank you for the transcription, human volunteer :)

The sequence of events from Elon Musk acquiring Twitter to now is an incredible journey.

• Elon Musk bought a social media company for tens of billions, attempted to back out of the deal but couldn't because of his ineptitude by signing away the ability to reneg on the deal.^[1]

• Then there was the freedom of speech advocacy from Musk where he ultimately unbanned racists and then he began sharing bigoted Tweets. But it's only freedom of speech for his bigoted supporters, when authoritarian governments ask Musk to censor people/tweets he abides by their requests.^[2]

• The site becomes inundated with the alt right rife with bigotry.^[3]

• The whole verified blue check mark debacle where verification became something you could pay for, with people making fake "official" accounts. For example a fake account impersonating a pharmaceutical company caused their stock to drop abruptly following a joke tweet.^[4]

• Twitter engages in mass layoffs and multiple things break on the site. There are also reports that they can't pay rent in certain locations. Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisors, as they record a 59% reduction in advertising revenue.^[5]

• Elon Musk posts tweets seemingly apologizing for some of the changes and says he will follow the will of the people by posting polls for users to vote on policy changes. Musk asks if he should step down, to which the majority vote in favour of his removal. He then goes on a tirade about bots after losing in the poll. He goes on to say that only paid subscribers will be permited to vote in future polls. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.^[6]

• The crème de la crème is Elon Musk implementing a new restriction where you have to be logged in to see tweets. Inadvertently DDOSing his own site.

1. New York Times - Why Elon Musk Can’t Back Out of Buying Twitter, According to Twitter

2. Forbes - Twitter Has Complied With Almost Every Government Request For Censorship Since Musk Took Over, Report Finds

3. The Atlantic -Twitter Is a Far-Right Social Network

4. Forbes - Fake Eli Lilly Twitter Account Claims Insulin Is Free, Stock Falls 4.37%

5. New York Times - Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue

6. The Guardian - Elon Musk breaks silence after 10 million Twitter users vote for him to step down

Yeah Occam's Razor and all that, he's probably just a fucking idiot.

im pretty certain he is being paid by the saudis to destroy twitter. it's way too powerful a vehicle to be in the hands of the proletariat.

this might sound crazy but ..... this is why kbin/lemmy etc is so important. in about 2 years+ time, there will be a gigantic global civil war as the masses rise up and seek to annihilate the billionaires. the billionaires will hide behind the use of nukes by russia, then china invades taiwan, then WW3, then Biden is cloned, Covid26 arrives, global tsunamis and geostorms, and then the aliens invade. It's all pretty much clear. we need to organise now, to just give 0.5% of our kids a miniscule chance to survive the coming extinction of humanity.