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[return to "Twitter Is DDOSing Itself"]
1. aeyes+KF[view] [source] 2023-07-01 22:09:35
>>ZacnyL+(OP)
This bug is very unlikely to be the reason. The rate limiter on the server side is cheap and the frontend bug only gets triggered with the rate limit active.

I have seen similar bugs in the systems I oversee because network libraries love to retry requests without sane limitations by default. But I never saw them make our rate limiters sweat. It's slightly more annoying when they hit an API which actually does some expensive work before returning an error but that's why we have rate limits on all public endpoints.

I also guess that the webapp is the least of Twitters traffic and the native apps probably don't have this problem.

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2. evan_+jK[view] [source] 2023-07-01 22:43:31
>>aeyes+KF
I don’t think it’s necessarily saying the self-inflicted DDoS has caused a technical issue that’s forced them to shut down access. I think it’s possible that shutting down anonymous access caused the DDoS, which led to giant spikes in some metric, which led them (Elon) to conclude that there was an uptick in scraping, so they imposed the 600/tweet/day limit to punish scrapers.

Seems like either my quota reset or they changed the policy because I’m able to access the site again.

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3. pschue+q31[view] [source] 2023-07-02 01:36:15
>>evan_+jK
This. I'd bet substantial amounts of money that the evil scraper idea is the result of a) another issue + b) paranoia + c) Musk thinking he understands better than anybody else.
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4. berkle+v91[view] [source] 2023-07-02 02:42:35
>>pschue+q31
This is a really ignorant take to dismiss scrapers. LLMs operate by having petabytes of conversational training data. Scraping is how OpenAI trained GPT. It’s how all their copycats are trying to do the same.

Elon can be a monumental asshat, and he can be self-DDOS’ing, and can be accurate about scraping at the same time. It’s why every single social media platform is heading toward becoming a walled garden.

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5. gmerc+Sf1[view] [source] 2023-07-02 03:53:41
>>berkle+v91
It’s quite ignorant to assume petabytes of garbage have any value at this point. See Chinchilla
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6. berkle+Js1[view] [source] 2023-07-02 06:36:13
>>gmerc+Sf1
I agree, but there are hundreds if not thousands of AI startups trying to make their own relevant LLM, and they're going to be scraping Twitter. The Onion called it many years ago [1]: "400 billion tweets and not one useful bit of data was ever transmitted".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqggW08BWO0&t=138s

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