The Fall of the House of Twitter gets dumb and dumber

Smelling Musky further shoots himself in the foot on the current operations, and future viability of, Twitter. Yeah, data scraping plus AI is a problem for the Net in general and social media in particular. But, because the #BlueCheckMorons there are so gonzo already, data scraping + AI has a field ripe for botting Twitter. And, since Musk is going to limit Twitter views if you're not "verified" (not to say "certified," per the old joke) what this means is that the wingnuts with check marks will be even more the targets of scraping and AI tweets off that. Verge has more on the stupidity. (For Twitter’s self-own DDoS [it is that] when it first implemented the view limits, go here.)

Speculation is that this ties back to Musk missing Google cloud storage bill payments in the past. Under this scenario, with the "scraping" being something Musky just made up, he figures fewer people seeing tweets means fewer retweets and new tweets, ergo less data to be stored.

A couple of problems with that?

First, it assumes a level of intelligence in managing Twitter that Musk hasn't shown since before he bought it.

Second, whether that's the cause or not, this move threatens to further cut ad revenue, and failure to think of that WOULD reflect Musk's actual intelligence in running Twitter.

That's not to mention all the other ancillary issues in the ongoing installments of The Fall of the House of Twitter.

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And, that's setting aside the fact that Twitter, jokes by me and others aside, created a self-inflicted DDoS Saturday, which may well still be happening at the time you read this. (I could use TweetDeck OK, but Twitter itself was out cold.) This post from a site called Waxy has more details, including that Musk-era Twitter has shot itself in the foot before on the rate limiter:

On Bluesky, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth wrote, “For anyone keeping track, this isn’t even the first time they’ve completely broken the site by bumbling around in the rate limiter. There’s a reason the limiter was one of the most locked down internal tools. Futzing around with rate limits is probably the easiest way to break Twitter.”

And there you go. (As of the time of posting this Sunday, I still couldn't use Twitter itself, but could use TweetDeck. And, showing my power over Musk or something, 5 minutes after posting this to Twitter via TweetDeck, Twitter itself came back for me. Well, sort of. I still can't read Tweets off Twitter notification emails. Or use the search window for names and accounts. Or go to other accounts by URL in the URL window. So, really, the only thing is, as of noon Central Sunday, is that I can post using Twitter as well as TweetDeck.)

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As for the initial announcement?

First, this is going to be an incentive for non-bot users to create burners and run them through TweetDeck.

Second, this is going to be an incentive for hacks to hack Twitter's API to make themselves look verified.

Third, given the kill-off of Twitter's tech support, odds of either of the above, even the second, being detected aren't that high.

Fourth, is putting a limit on the "verified" (and "certified") wingnuts a violation of Terms of Service? #AskingForAFriend 

Other possible fallout?

Non-"verified" accounts that are high volume users turning off notifications to keep spam-tagging from busting their limits. Other people then using DMs more for those who have it turned on (unless Musk next does something stupid there, too).

Ergo, per the old roulette phrase? Never bet on emerald. 

Ergo No. 2? Per the artist formerly known as Wint, keep blocking those blue check morons. And, it they are earning the dessert, block some more #BlueAnonCheckMorons, too.