WaPo article: https://archive.is/wip/sgViP
Company owner Elon Musk tweeted that the change was a “temporary emergency measure” to deter third-party scraping of data from the social media platform. “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk wrote.
User "elonmusk" not found
There is a part of me that respects and appreciates how Elon will unilaterally and with zero notice fundamentally change how a site as large as twitter operates.
They may be stupid unilateral decisions, but you at least know they weren't focus-grouped and signed-off on in meetings with dozens of middle managers where pastries were served.
Part of the reason I'm personally sympathetic to Elon is that he comes off as this highly opinionated nerd. And being a highly opinionated nerd myself I can't help but sympathize with one of my kind.
Except I don't have like $100 Billion and he does, so as a general rule I'm incapable of putting my money where my mouth is nearly to the same extent as Elon can.
And you're right: these giant online forums like twitter and reddit are never meant to be profitable as forums because that makes no sense. They're meant to shape opinion and are valuable on that basis alone. And if you're trying to run one of these things as an honest-to-god public forum where people can give their honest opinion, that's going to conflict with the goals of a site trying to shape public opinion.
I don't have 100 billion dollars, but I'm still right all the time. If people don't want to use that, and who could blame them, be my guest. It's occasionally frustrating but mainly no skin off my back.
He is the essence of the self-actualized Prince, exploiting natural human hierarchy vs. the Borg collective System that liberal orthodoxy has imposed on us through The Managerial Class. Neither is wholly positive. One path can seem beholden to the whims of inconsistent, amoral dictators, while the other acts like a chicken with its head cut off at times, yet somehow always inches towards the proverbial cliff of absolute degeneracy, directed by human vice and cowardliness.
These are two distinct paths that humanity can take and neither one will compromise with the other. I - and I think most of the dissident Right - prefer the former, while the Left is obviously under the spell of the latter.
It may just be as you said that he's a vocal nerd but I think that speaks to naturally appealing aspirations in all of us, which collectivism stamps out in the cradle.
I've simply come around to the "pitchfork solution" hypothesis which states that any socio-political problem ought to be solvable by a pitchfork waving mob congregating in front of your house.
We are unaccustomed to that being a solution to our problems because we have resolved that power must be so diffuse that it cannot be. Yet the drive to send a pitchfork waving mob to someone's home remains, waiting for someone to pick up that crown currently lying in the mud.
That only works when the regime is on your side.
What you're describing is more or less the appeal and the pitfall of monarchy.
This had better be a very temporary measure or Twitter is screwed. Universal visibility is pretty much the most important thing they offer their users.
One issue I can see, the local bus company puts all of their last minute service updates for cancelled buses on Twitter and only Twitter. So today, if you need to know if your bus has been cancelled before travel, you must have a Twitter account to view them.
Another issue is that the local news groups now only put their news on social media and the social media firms have put them behind a log in wall. No social media accounts, no local news unless you wait up to a week to pay for the newspaper and that's on borrowed time already.
And many companies, even my electric and gas company, now only do timely customer service via Twitter. So if you don't have a Twitter account, you're stuffed and at best stuck waiting weeks for service.
Good god! Where is this happening?
Worldwide. Twitter has replaced a whole load of services that companies would have to host themselves and pay the bandwidth and storage costs for. Instead, Twitter pays for it. Now Elon's had enough of their freeloading and so if you don't have a Twitter account, you can't get news, service updates or timely customer services from these companies.
He should reverse this & just block the 3rd party scrapers IPs or something.
Surely anyone scraping data would be using the API, which is not blocked.
You'd think. In one of the replies @elonmusk expresses shock/surprise that OpenAI (which he is currently suing) has twitter data in its models. I suspect that much of the current star "AI" platforms are built on illegitimately acquired datasets (gettyimages™) which explains why they are now so adamant about building regulatory frameworks to stifle their competition.
On the other hand, as someone who was using the net since before it became corporatized and sanitized, I think free access to data and protocols is part of the unspoken agreement. Scraping (until it becomes a burden on bandwidth) is no different than browsing. Once you put something online it's public and should free for anyone to use as they see fit within the law.
Log In, or Else: Elon Musk’s Twitter Blocks Unregistered Users from Viewing Posts - https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2023/06/30/log-in-or-else-elon-musks-twitter-blocks-unregistered-users-from-viewing-posts/
He made a thread on 4chan about it last night. It was unmistakably him. His tweets and twitters actions afterward match up https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/432782493/#432782493
Temporary as in the "special military operation" in Ukraine to misquote someone in one of the bug reports. Or temporary as in the UK's Income Tax. There is nothing more permanent than a temporary measure.
A lot of accounts were unbanned. Unfortunately, there was a threshold in numbers of followers - because it wasn't realistic to go through the millions upon millions of accounts banned by the ancien regime (some of them for good reasons).
They dodn't need to go thru them- just unban everyone banned for "harassment", "hate speech" and the other standard BS excuses they used.
Or just unban everyone but CP or spambots and say "everybody now gets a 2nd chance"
You can just register a fake email
Nope, I'm IP banned or something from creating new accounts
my phone number is banned as is my actual email, but my alt email was fine. if you're IP banned unplug your router for a minute (unless you're paying for Static IP of course)
You have a static IP?
What message do you get when making an account?
Maybe it's by MAC address or whatever but if I create an account it instantly gets banned
That would be great, because you can easily spoof your MAC address.
I assume you do wipe your cookies, use different browsers, don't use the same phone for authentication, etc.?
Quote: "Doing it hours before the end of the month after Musk has had a history of not paying contractors/suppliers screams that a major host for twitter is shutting them off at the start of July and "oh shit we have to turn stuff off or we'll not be able to keep the site up""
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/919#issuecomment-1615881365 (https://archive.is/RN3mr)
There are also claims that web Twitter and the iOS app has also stopped working, despite the website being accessible (but only if you allow cookies).
You could just make a new Twitter account, they're not actively hunting for banned people unless you're really doing something stupid.
Still, try to hide that it's you. Use a new browser for Twitter, wipe all cookies in other browers, and try to get a new IP address by reconnecting your modem.