153 sats \ 5 replies \ @petertodd 1 Jul 2023 \ on: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets tech
Elon Musk claims this is a temporary measure due to extreme levels of traffic (probably) from companies training AI: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825
What will cost Twitter more, some servers, or the decrease in network effect, resulting in fewer eyeballs.
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Hard to believe.
Throttling would've worked without impacting UX.
Also there are armies of bots with Twitter accounts out there. Those can keep scraping.
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Musk says that the scrapers are using huge swaths of IP address space to bypass rate limiting.
As for scraping with Twitter accounts, obviously accounts can get banned after reading too many tweets.
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Thx for sharing. It would help if they put a banner announcing this temporary measure when ppl visit without an account.
But when you think about it why don't the ai ppl just create an account to continue scraping the data? And what happens when the site "opens up" again? Won't the ai simply start scraping again?
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Creating an account means your traffic is associated with an account, and Twitter can easily ban that account.
Musk says that the scrapers are using huge swaths of IP address space to bypass rate limiting.
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