Things at OnlyKlans are worse than I thought. Sheldon Chang posted the following on Mastodon:
If you can’t see his post, he writes:
This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.
The Twitter home feed’s been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.
In the first video, notice the error message that I’m being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.
The second video shows why it’s jiggling. 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.
Unbelievable. It’s amateur hour.
At least I’ve been consistent pointing out how Big Tech has been failing us for over a decade—and now it seems hell-bent on self-destruction. Also today, Reddit effectively shut off API access.
Twitter probably won’t admit there’s a problem and that the user numbers remain high. I had a look at who the new users are on a visit last week.
No prizes for guessing what the first censored word is. I’ve also censored the website links as I’m not in the business of promoting spammers. They were all identical.
I doubt anyone’s there to see to these problems any more, and bots can, as I found with Facebook and the 2006–9 Vox, overwhelm a site.
Bots, fascists, rate-limiting, and their own content-fetching—they all make for a site that no one will want to be on. And thanks to its new walled-garden approach, a site that no one outside will see, either.
You may also like
