Originally published at: Twitter blocks people without accounts from seeing tweets; Musk blames AI startups scraping content | Boing Boing
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6 Likes
So how is it going to stop bots? You look like one of the embedders, you’ve got the tweets.
This only stops someone that’s ethical. Not ethical, you’re around in 5 minutes. UA spoofing works just fine, I’ve tested it.
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First off, at the moment Twitter is currently down unless you look at your feed on something like TweetDeck. The only things that can be viewed on the regular twitter page is the trending topics which all of them are complaining about this very problem and individual tweets going out to twitter spaces.
Second, tweet posting in Discord currently effed up unless you add a few extra letters. So that will likely further exaggerate this problem and don’t do shit about the scrapers once the bots figure out how to get around that.
Third, I have an account and it appears that tweets from BB’s very own twitter going all the way back to march have out right disappeared days ago. So that’s not an ‘inactive account’ problem there.
Stop blaming everyone else for your own fuck ups Elno.
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He’s not wrong about AI startups scraping the Internet. I had to block one that was continuously firing requests at my RPi3 server from Amazon’s cloud. (Beside that anti-social behavior, it was badly written junk, reading pages multiple times with irrelevant options.)
Blocking on the bot string got rid of them, although they could easily change that.
This tells me that Musk doesn’t have the people left who could safely add blocks for those crawlers on Twitter without trashing it or blocking search engines too.
He’s also blocking a lot of apps that never used the APIs, which might be his real aim.
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Bad bots are a huge problem. They hit BB all the time. But I, a lone sysadmin, with the help of Cloudflare’s Project Galileo manage to quickly make them a non-issue when they crop up. If they hadn’t fired most of their infra team perhaps they too could learn how to selectively block bad actors instead of taking this action, eh?
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Among the other things that seem absurd about this; it’s not some huge secret that twitter has had a bot problem for years(if memory serves cleaning up that bot problem was one of the ways that Elon was going to galaxy-brain twitter to new heights of value; before he was actually forced to follow through on buying it).
Anyone who is successfully running bots for posting purposes presumably has more or less everything they need to run bots for scraping purposes(a strictly easier task, since both types of bots need to blend in enough to not get banned; but posting bots need to avoid the banhammer while still delivering or amplifying whatever the message is; while scraper bots have the option of posting if their operators believe that it will make them less suspicious; but meet their objectives just by reading).
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But he’s Wile E. “Elon” Musk, Sooper Genius!
Surely at least one of the plans he throws against the Twitter Wall must net him that sweet sweet profitability stolen from him and Twitter by roadrunners on the Internet!
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Make everyone fill in a capcha (and an equivalent for visually impaired users) every 3 months. I’m no programmer, but even I know that will cut the bot population by at least a third. Elon shown everyone that he is a dumbass by not even trying the simple stuff.
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I thought he was all about disrupting industry? Welcome to the “disrupted” side, Melon. 
Also, did he just describe all his companies?
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Maybe they are just concerned about the privacy of their users. /s
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Hey, turning on servers costs money. It’s not like we’re talking about something little like having one of your toddlers run over. You have to think of the future people, who will only prosper if Musk is successful and well-liked.
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UA filtering can easily be done in the lower layer. It is far simpler complexity wise than your suggestion. Better? Absolutely not. But simpler. It’s only going to be a handful lines of code and no storage.
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His latest excuse
The last time they had a crash this terrible was during the Nintendo Direct a week or so ago. I’m seeing speculation from within my circles online it might be in part due to similar traffic surrounding the Hololive Summer stream a few hours and how Twitter is once again unable to deal with nerds losing their minds about something (which in this case is cute anime girls goofing around in 3d) without effing up the site. If this happens again in 2 days from now on July 3rd during the first Hololive concert in the US that’s also being streamed, we would easily know it’s not entirely from bots but from their own inability to handle sharp spikes in traffic on there anymore.
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He can use his left or right hand for that.
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Just amazing. Those tweet views represent eyeballs and time on site, which is what you need to sell ads. So he’s capped user engagement and ad sale potential.
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Yeah, but you just know Cloudflare absolutely will charge Twitter for this, and Elon doesn’t want to pay for services.
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He isn’t that bright i’m afraid.
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Musk won’t be happy until every tweet read is a blockchain micro-transaction. (Same with Jack Dorsey.)
Credit for the people who post those tweets that he’s selling? Hahahaha!
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Considering his tweet about the message limits, they are absolutely not paying cloudflare, and probably a few hosting bills too.
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