Twitter rate limits even dumber than we thought; Reddit winning continues

When your business model is selling eyeballs to advertisers, it’s hard to imagine anything dumber than blocking access to your own site and telling users to go outside instead, yet somehow Twitter rate limits are a real thing.

But analysis suggests that this may be even dumber than we thought, as it appears to be a Twitter bug that created the “emergency” that saw the rate limits introduced in the first place …

Twitter rate limits

If you’re not up to speed with the whole Twitter rate limits fiasco, that’s not surprising. Musk initially decided not to tell anyone about it, and once he did, many couldn’t actually see the explanation because those same Twitter rate limits meant their Twitter feeds were blocked.

The exec summary is that Musk claimed too many bots were scraping Twitter content, and this was putting an unacceptable load on the servers. Rather than take action to block the bots specifically, Musk decided to limit everyone’s access to Twitter.

First, he made it impossible to read Twitter without being logged in. That, of course, broke embedded tweets for many people.

Second, he limited the number of tweets you can read – or, more accurately, scroll past:

6,000 posts per day for verified accounts

600 posts per day for unverified accounts

300 posts per day for new unverified accounts

So when he tweeted to tell us about it, many couldn’t read that tweet (and we’re including it as a screenshot instead of a Twitter embed because – yeah).

Musk’s degree of “Couldn’t give a fig about user reactions” to this was confirmed when he actually retweeted a parody account.

But it gets dumber

The idea that there was a sudden, massive increase in Twitter scraping seemed odd – and developer Sheldon Chang thinks he worked out what’s going on. He said that effectively Twitter has launched a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack on itself.

A DDOS attack is when someone deliberately sends so many bot requests to a server that it cannot cope, and starts failing to serve content to real users.

This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself […]

Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.

Product reliability expert Maggie Johnson-Pint said she wasn’t sure about this, but does agree it is likely self-inflicted, and related to a Twitter bug.

My hypothesis – Twitter lost a big part of a critical back end system – maybe they stopped paying their GCP bill, maybe they lost a critical cache and everything was reading other data, I truly do not know.

At this point, their probably very good adaptive rate limiter said ‘ohshit’ and brought the number of requests WAY WAY down throughout the system.

The infinite loop screenshot floating around? Front end code sees the 429 and retries, but without exponential backoff.

“Exponential backoff” is code designed to stop a system being hammered over and over again.

First you retry in 1 second, then wait 2 seconds, then 4 seconds, then 8, 16, 32, 64 and so on (I used base 2 there but however you like) This gives the servers a ‘breather’ if something really bad is going on.

Reddit got itself into a similar mess when it decided to charge unrealistic amounts for access to the API that powered third-party (former) apps like Apollo. That resulted in wide-scale protests by moderators and users alike, with the company threatening them in response.

The Verge spotted the latest protest move, by moderators of the IAmA subreddit, which hosts Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions by celebrities and public figures, like Bill Gates.

The moderators said that not only would they cease all the incredible coordination work needed to make AMAs happen, but they would cease to verify the identities of those offering them.

The moderators of Reddit’s IAmA community will no longer solicit and coordinate ask me anything (AMA) conversations with celebrities and high-profile individuals […]

r/IAmA has more than 22 million subscribers, so the subreddit offers a potentially big audience for anyone thinking about promoting what they’re working on or just looking to chat with the Reddit hivemind. But now that the community’s moderators will no longer be actively working with notable people and their teams, it will be that much more difficult to trust that the person doing an AMA is the real deal.

They essentially said that if Reddit is all about making money at the expense of users and moderators, it can do this work itself.

Moving forward, we’ll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn’t mean we’re allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you’ll need to pay more attention.

Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.