Twitter Limits Resource Use

I read today that Twitter is now only going to let people read 400, 800, or 8000 tweets per day depending on what level you are like how World of Warcraft had levels & stuff. And that's neat. I bet if you hit Level 80 you unlock "Satan Suit" and get to have Elong Moosk's profile picture as your own. Or maybe as an NFT. One never knows.

But here's the thing, see: When a "business" is no longer funded by taxpayer dollars, that "business" now has to:

1. Control cost (see also rate limiters and layoffs of unnecessary employees); and
2. Generate revenue somehow.

And rate limiters are a tool platform operators do use (Shing/DTP as well) to prevent abuse and over-use while also controlling cost. Twitter's chosen values are a little...um...odd. But that's fine. I'm sure Elon will iterate on them a bit and find a good starting balance in there somewhere. It's best to base your initial guesses on analytics and I'm certain he has them. I'm not saying he considered them, I'm just saying he probably has them. He could consider that data set while making his next guesses. That'd be fine, too.

Shing Community, for example, implements rate limiters and constraints - such as not permitting media attachment uploads to free-tier member posts. They can see all the posts and follow all the people. They just can't upload pictures or videos in their Community posts. And this constraint ensures that storage and bandwidth are usable by paying members. This isn't just rate-limiting, it is a hard constraint. Even paying members are still working with a rate limiter. They just don't notice on Shing Community. And there is a reason for that.

The various route- and service-specific limiters in place around Shing are there to primarily prevent a variety of abusive attacks including:

• Chat messages;
• The various uploads;
• Post creation as well as Chat room creation;
• How often a call can be made;
• How long a meeting or call can be;
• Voting on posts and content; and
• Yeah, basically all the rates...everywhere. You have to.

Again, they are primarily there to prevent abuse of the system by your enemies, allow normal use by you, and ensure we don't exceed the platform's budget. We've had to tighten them strictly during various forms of attack to preserve the platform and your ability to view streams. These are important tools used to help manage the health of a platform and the business that operates it.

Twitter is just new to being a business, that's all. The freaks who use that hellhole of a website are getting used to being customers. It's a process. They'll get through it.

They'll learn to keep an eye on the statistics of how people use the platform and adjust their constraints and limits accordingly. Here, for example, we even have the ability to turn new account creation off. That's another constraint we have. A safety brake. And, we do use that constraint. While under attack.

Generally, it wouldn't be news for Twitter to add "rate limiters" (constraints, rules) if they hadn't previously been a tax-funded operation that could afford unlimited content distribution to unlimited robots and freaks. But that's what they were. In Elon's own words, "Twitter is a social media website and a crime scene," and that is what he meant.

Our Philosophy

Limits and constraints should be explained and invisible as much as possible. The vast majority of you don't know that we have rate limiters and constraints. The people who hate you are absolutely aware that we have them and also the ones who complain about them. Limits and constraints (rules) makes your enemy very angry by preventing them from succeeding in their endeavors while enabling you to be successful in yours. Whole story.

A part of Twitter's communication while implementing the new limits was that it's being done to combat scrapers and the cost they represent to the platform. I can vouch for that. Enemies of an online platform will abuse any resource provided. This is again why Shing/DTP has had rate limiters on nearly every provided since day one, and one of the least-tolerant Terms of Service anyone has ever seen.

These rate limiters and that digital wall we've built together are how we manage cost vs. the budget and survive. And resource use limits based on payment for service provided is quite literally step one for an online business. Anything giving away free shit...especially if it's also big...should be considered suspect. Because taking convenience candy from strangers is how you fall into scams, government traps, jewish tricks, and rug pulls (among other disasters) in today's digital world. Whole story. The end.