It’s possible that the enforcement of a rate limit isn’t because of AI scraping, but rather because they failed to migrate before the June 30th deadline.

  • BornVolcano@lemmy.world
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    Image Transcription: News Article Screenshot:


    [A screenshot of a section of an article by the news outlet “Engadget”. Text reads as follows.]

    More platform instability could be in Twitter’s near future. In 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion contract with Google to host some of its services on the company’s Google Cloud servers. [Hyperlink begins] Platformer reports [Hyperlink ends] Twitter recently refused to pay the search giant ahead of the contract’s [Highlighted in yellow] June 30th renewal date. [Highlighting ends] Twitter is reportedly rushing to move as many services off of Google’s infrastructure before the contract expires, but the effort is “running behind schedule,” putting some tools, including Smyte, a platform the company [Hyperlink begins] acquired in 2018 [Hyperlink ends] to bolster its moderation capabilities, in danger of going offline.


    ^I’m a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^

    • Teriser@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      You’re doing important work! Just wanted to drop a small correction, the news outlet is actually called “engadget” Cheers!

      • BornVolcano@lemmy.world
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        Autocorrect I swear to God…

        Sorry about that! I was doing some quickly this morning while on hold calling the doctor’s office so I guess I didn’t proofread it great. Thank you!

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.

    Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.

    Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It’s part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism’s status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.

    The specific moment we’re in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn’t be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.

    Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.

    • Myro@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      That’s a bit too much conspiracy for my taste, but for sure, billionaires don’t do anything for our good.

      • rbhfd@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Exactly. Billionairs look out for themselves first and foremost. They try to maximise their profit.

        Musk wants to push more people to pay for verified. The reddit board (not only Spez) wants people to download their app to make it seem like their growing right before their IPO, while simultaneously forcing more ad views. Probably downloading the app also lets them track a lot of extra data about you as well.

        No conspiracy needed to explain all this.

    • MercuryUprising@lemmy.world
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      The more I’ve been watching this whole thing play out, the more I’m inclined to believe that something like this is possible.

      Unfortunately for these dipshits masquerading as geniuses, the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no way he’s getting corked back in. The internet is really all we need, and in the event of the mass coordination required to organize a protest or anything of the sort, the first best option will win. Whether that’s Signal, or Lemmy, or Facebook, or whatever. Necessity is the mother of invention and the amount of resources that a pissed off population has will always win out in the long-term. Hell, we’ll pull a fucking sneaker net if we really have to.

      Reddit has already been compromised for a few years now anyways. I noticed when they started banning people for not subscribing to group think or the more recent examples of permabanning users for anti-Russian rhetoric. There are only a few vestiges of Aaron’s original dream of Reddit, found in places like Antiwork or WSB, but they’re a drop in a bucket full of site-wide dogshit.

    • senkora@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      End-of-quarter. Companies often make decisions quarter by quarter and 6/30 was the last day of Q2.

    • reverendz@lemmy.ml
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      Not to sound paranoid, but it’s kind of worrying.

      In recent years, these sites have been used to pass information quickly during crisis. This can be anything like natural disaster, or uprising and protests.

      These big aggregators being incompetently, mismanaged and taken down from public use at the same time, makes me wonder if it’s an attempt to quash communication that’s not coming from a government or mega-corp.

      The revolution will not be televised… by the people.

      • Gray@lemmy.ca
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        Yeahhhh, I’ve been getting less news information since moving to Lemmy. The communities are here, but they have some growing to do.

        And then there’s the issue of them growing into the correct servers. For example, my first day here I caught a mod on lemmy.ml banning a user for posting an Axios article about China on World News because “Orientalism”. The article was a pretty common western take on the Xi Xinping succession plan. Really nothing uniquely anti-China. That especially raises eyebrows given the many conversations had about Lemmy’s communist roots from its devs.

        Which isn’t to say Lemmy as a whole is tainted - just the dev community, lemmy.ml. So I ethically feel the need to avoid their World News community and only use lemmy.world’s World News community, but that places me into an even smaller and more split community, giving me even less information. All I can think is that I need to be the change I want to see and intentionally post to/comment on the lemmy.world World News community.

      • jarfil@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Depends on where you go.

        Subs like r/worldnews and r/tech have bottom of the barrel comments, but still manage to get some posts.

        r/IAmA had many of the mods leave, so the remaining ones are stopping all “out of Reddit” activities, like recruiting celebrities, verifying identities, and so on. It’s pretty much worthless now.

        Small niche subs are still working, but the equivalent communities on Lemmy are getting better quality right now.

        • OctopusKurwa @lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Worldnews has always skewed a little to the right but the comments I read on a post about the immigrants drowning absolutely disgusted me

          • jarfil@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            There have been some posts where the comments have been 100% memes and off-topic.

            IMHO the strongest point of news aggregators like Reddit, is the extra information that isn’t in the linked article, otherwise there is no benefit over an RSS feed reader.

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              There are also probably many bot answers now at the top.

          • Clbull@lemmy.world
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            I was wrongly banned from that place three years ago for posting a comment that was critical of how Saudi Arabia and other conservative Middle Eastern nations treat women. I’d say they’re far from a right-wing place.

        • clicky@lemm.ee
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          Most of my favorite smaller communities on Reddit (50-500k members) are gone permanently. A couple of them were basically forums run by a niche YouTuber with a couple of helper mods, to talk about topics related to their channel. Those people didn’t want to deal with trying to use Reddit anymore, so they just closed down. It’s basically impossible to bring a community like that back, when the person it exists around is gone.

          I don’t see Reddit stepping in for all of those smaller communities, so they’re just gone entirely. And that was where most of the value was for me. So yeah, its completely worthless to me at this point to even use Reddit.

        • Clbull@lemmy.world
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          A few subs like r/news, r/leagueoflegends and r/worldnews crossed the picket line without so much as acknowledging the blackout.

      • Obinice@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ve been wondering. I’m not giving them the satisfaction of getting the traffic so I can check, but who knows, really.

        • b3nsn0w@pricefield.org
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          for me it’s been a slow process to transfer my reddit addiction to lemmy, so i’m still somewhat on there, but it’s nowhere close to what it has been like before the protests. a lot of my communities are still closed, others have reopened but there’s a noticeably lower volume.

          reopen/stay closed discussions also show an interesting pattern of skewing more and more towards reopen the longer they go on, suggesting that the people who want reddit to stay closed have left, which is consistent with how the rest of the platform feels.

          i doubt that many lurkers have seen the same effect yet (in fact, i noticed a pattern with the people expressing support for reopen, that they rarely comment at all, so my guess is the lurkers heavily favor reopening) but we’ll likely see a delayed effect in their numbers and/or engagement as well, as the content they’re supplied gets fewer and lower quality.

    • TheHog@lemmy.world
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      I, and many others, truly believe it is deliberate and orchestrated, primeraly to shut down the likes of r/superstonk and other subs that are fighting wall street corruption.

        • TheHog@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          This is not “Another theory”. This is a great discription of what wall street are doing. It has the added bonus of keeping even you, someone with there eyes open, distracted and not seeing how the Banks, hedge funds and “market makers” are running the show.

          They have built a system to take all the money from the people and provide nothing in return.

          They control majority shares in all the major news outlets and control the narrative.

          If one person’s looks at this and checks our DRSGME.COM it will be worth it. (or read the endless DD in r/superstonk but as I’m here I don’t really wanna encourage anyone to go to reddit, fuck spez)

          Buy DRS & Book GME then HODL (repeat where possible 😁, see you on the moon)

            • TheHog@lemmy.world
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              100%. If they are not in your name your broker can and do lend them (to short against us) also more importantly they can and will sell them whenever they want for any price. Then claim it was for your own safety due to it being a volatile stock. If it’s not in your name (DRS’d) then you do not own it.

              • PinkPanther@sh.itjust.works
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                Just checked, and it’ll cost me about 3 times the worth of the 4 stocks I have. Not exactly a sound investment when I’m not looking to get more.

  • Khrounose@lemmy.world
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    I see that a lot of people complain about reddit, twitter, and whatever mainstream website completely fuck the consumer, but fail to realize one crucial thing. The only time change happens in mob settings is when the pain of no change is greater than the pain of change. I applaud Elon, spez, and who ever else wishes to put there services behind their paywall whether it’s an API or just simply viewing tweets. Anyone in the know knows that it’s a crock of shit and anyone who isn’t is annoyed to the point where change is preferable. The sooner people figure out posting information, entertainment, and other forms of media/knowledge to the benefit of a company is horrendous the better. Now we have the opportunity to get rid of the corporate greed and basically open-source peoples knowledge from around the globe. Although like with reddit, mob mentality poses a real threat to communities like this one, I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother (as corny as that sounds). I much prefer it over giving more information to companies who use it to profit off of my content, while I receive nothing.

    *Edit: Thank you kind stranger for the reddit gold! Glad you spent real hard cash so I can have reddit premium and reddit coins! The lovely people at reddit will be spending your money sitting on a yacht eating grapes in one hand and lobster in the other. I’m sure they are real thankful too! :) *

  • WorldWideLem@lemmy.world
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    I don’t know what will happen with Twitter. Maybe it succeeds, maybe it fails, maybe it just keeps humming along in mediocrity. But what I do know is that wherever it ends up, there was surely a much simpler way to get there.

    • Prior_Industry@lemmy.world
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      Well he did try pulling out the cables going into the server clusters. Maybe he got tired and bored before he could pull them all out

  • markon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is hilarious. Elon musk has shown he’s a moron. He’s a serial lier. Elon Musk has once again proven himself to be a foolish and dishonest individual.

    • makabayan@lemmy.world
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      and yet there are people who vehemently defend him. they scare me tbh, makes one wonder if they are paid shills or just voluntary ass-kissers.

      • MercuryUprising@lemmy.world
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        Well, something like 82% of people in Russia support Putin. A bunch of other countries, like China, which had 75% of people polled stating that the Russia/Ukraine conflict was good for China. Bush 2 had overwhelming support during the early-mid 2000s. Hitler still has fanatics and followers. There will always be a segment of the population willing to straight up murder others, in order to make their own lives more comfortable, no matter how misguided their ideology is.

        • queermunist@lemmy.world
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          A bunch of other countries, like China, which had 75% of people polled stating that the Russia/Ukraine conflict was good for China.

          It kinda is in some ways because it’s basically left China as Russia’s only option for a lot of import/export, so China gets a ton of leverage in determining prices. It’s also solidifying China as a regional hegemon and opens up a lot of opportunities for China diplomatically.

          I wouldn’t go as far as to say the conflict is good, but there are benefits and it’s not as simple as “people are brainwashed”

          • MercuryUprising@lemmy.world
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            Okay then, when surveyed in 2022, 40% of Chinese residents polled said that they support the Russian invasion, and another 30% said the actions weren’t necessarily right, but should be considered. Sounds pretty fucking brainwashed to me.

            • queermunist@lemmy.world
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              Count me in that 30%

              Russia’s invasion was wrong, but it goes back to the Euromaiden government upheaval and that should be considered. Russia isn’t just a crazy warband of orcs that wanted to restart the Tsar’s empire for no reason. What’s brainwashed about that?

  • Tandybaum@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I used to work for a local company that sold parts to Tesla. They were a huge nightmare and wouldn’t pay us. I think that is their whole deal. Not paying the small companies.

    FUCK them

    • MerfMerf@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Unfortunately that sort of behaviour is common in many sectors where large companies subcontract with smaller companies.

      The tactic basically created the whole factoring concept (buying invoices, or using invoices as security for a “loan”/credit).

      Over here in Sweden it was construction companies that initially fuelled the development, and the large companies basically required very long payment terms (60+ days) from their subcontractors and then waited to the very last day to dispute the invoice by complaining on some part of the work, further delaying payment. A small subcontractor could often not front being out that much money (2+ months of salaries, materials and other operating costs, cost of fighting the dispute etc) and ended up going bust. Enter financial institutions buying (or “lending” with the invoice as security) the invoice, letting the subcontractor get paid immediately, but of course not the full amount since the factoring company wants to profit from the deal. The factoring companies being backed by large financial institutions (banks typically) have enough money that they can sit out those long payment terms and other “bullshit” since they know those large construction companies ARE good for the money they are owed EVENTUALLY.

      Still carves into the margins for the small actors.

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        Wow such a toxic mechanism should be banned, if I was the small company i would literally perma-call their offices and spam emails all day until payment is sent

        I would argue 50% payment upfront and 50% on delivery could be somewhat of a solution, worst case scenario they don’t pay on delivery and you wait for half payment

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        And that’s especially a thing in specialized industries. If you manufacture e.g. car parts then there only is a handful of companies possibly buying your products at all, and that one product you specifically designed for one particular car manufacturer you naturally can only sell to that one company anyway. So you simply cannot afford to decide not to do business with one of your customers just because they play dirty games when it comes to paying the bills.

    • OasissisaO@lemmy.world
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      I especially enjoy that, no matter how much he drives the value down, he’s always going to owe the full value of the loans.

      • Apenas um Gaucho @lemmy.eco.br
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        Yeah and he used tesla actions as a collateral. So if he is not able to make money to pay for the loans, he will lose control of Tesla. I´m savoring every moment that things are blowing up in his face. After this venture fails, he will probably still be rich, but surely not a billionaire anymore and i will vicariously enjoy his fall from billionaire extraordinaire to just a legacy common stock millionaire.

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    I think it’s probably a combination of self-DDOSing and not paying providers. Which any intelligent experienced dev could’ve told him, but they all got fired months ago.

    • sadreality@kbin.social
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      AnD TwaTTEr JusT ruNnInG FiNe DaWG

      Other companies should follow the lead and fire all this dead weight 🙄

      Imagine all the profit!

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    i wonder if we will end using personal webpages with FOSS/affordable domains and integration to forums and video platforms, just to avoid some crazy CEO screwing our content again.

    i think social media was good, but we gave the CEOs too much power over our content and accounts.

    so… we went from “social media is where society creates media” to “social media is where tech CEO’s control and keep society’s media hostage”.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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      i wonder if we will end using personal webpages with FOSS/affordable domains and integration to forums and video platforms, just to avoid some crazy CEO screwing our content again.

      That’s what we had before. And it never stopped to exist, it just dwindled out for convenience.

      • no more personal website but just a “facebook page”, for convenience
      • no integration between sites, just a few huge ones, for convenience
      • no customisation and personal expression but large, uniformised experience, for convenience
      • no small hosting and individual presence online, just a few massive (corporate) infrastructures graciously given to us, for convenience
      • no control over policies and content, just be happy with what our generous overlord allows us to do, for convenience

      The “fediverse” is a step in the good direction, but as long as the general user don’t care, these huge services will keep being the “main” internet for the forseeable future. Even abusing the userbase and getting batshit crazy with rules and restrictions isn’t stopping them.

      Meanwhile, some of us are happy on out littler corner of the internet, using RSS to see what’s new on individual websites, and depending on services that are either sanely hosted or even self-hosted and interoperable. But that’s not for everyone.

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        thank you for your reply. yes, i agree with your comment.

        it’s like internet freedom is a forever refugee in constant diaspora, as it is always forced to exile itself from the places conquered by economic and sociopolitic warmongers who only seek profit and population control.

        all the time, over and over. one jump every few years.

        but we will make it! ^^

  • renrenPDX@lemmy.world
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    It’s ok guys, Elon told his engineers to just rewrite the stack, so all problems will go away!

    • Skaryon@lemmy.world
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      It’s probably the Tesla engineers he brought in who are doing that so it should go great. If you can build the best, self driving car in the world, building a little social network is easy peasy.

  • BoomBoomLemon@lemmy.world
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    Twitter isn’t paying any bills. They have a contract with us as well and haven’t been paying anything for months.

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    To be fair, Google Cloud is an overpriced and unreliable dumpster fire of a service. I’m surprised Twitter was using them at all. Although, I guess when you’re paying billions of dollars, the service you get is different.

    • many_bees@lemmy.world
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      Doesn’t change the fact that if you agree to pay someone for their service, you must pay someone for their service. I guess being a deadbeat is different when you’re purportedly worth billions of dollars.