pull down to refresh

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

This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping.

Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data.

It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.
write
preview
1 sat \ 0 replies \ @cointastical 1 Jul 2023

What will cost Twitter more, some servers, or the decrease in network effect, resulting in fewer eyeballs.

reply
0 sats \ 1 reply \ @franzap 1 Jul 2023

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.

reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @petertodd 1 Jul 2023

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.

reply
0 sats \ 1 reply \ @faithandcredit 1 Jul 2023

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?

reply
3 sats \ 0 replies \ @petertodd 1 Jul 2023

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.

reply