Elon going to complain about another conspiracy going on while in reality it's just that when crawlers are not able to open a certain URL they simply assume that the page doesn't exist anymore. Google certainly didn't "retaliate", bots simply couldn't find those pages anymore.
The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.
The latest in a seemingly never-ending series of self-owns. Apart from the stress it must put on their devs, it's been entertaining
They have more than one dev left?
No it's just one guy called Dev.
And he's on a H1B visa and can't leave.
Crawl issues I am sure but also user experience issues. Google is sensitive to sending visitors to sites where metrics indicate users do not, like bounce rates etc. I don't use twt but if it is the case you have the be logged in to see anything now, a non-logged in user will click a link from Google hit a login page, and use the back button. I would assume Google will see that as a bad search result and use it less.
Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.
Spez is already doing his best work to fuck over the platform. Are you certain Elon could do any better?
Spez already said he admires how Elon is running Twitter.
The best part is that Elon is proving to be a pro at losing money left and right while simultaneously inventing new ways to make a social media platform suck to use.
Doesn’t sound like retaliation to me, it sounds like their scheduled web crawlers are finding that content they used to index is now no longer viewable and this removed from search results. Pretty standard. My guess is that there were 400 million URLs listed and as the crawler uncovers that they are no longer available, that number will keep dropping to reflect only content publicly viewable. If only 500 URLs are now publicly viewable (without logins) then that’s what they will index. Google isn’t a search engine for private companies (unless you pay for the service) they are a public search engine so they make an effort to ensure that only public information is indexed. Some folk game the system (like the old expertsexchange.com) but sooner or later google drops the hammer.
God, I hated expert sexchange so much. It was a blessing when stack overflow started.
Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they'reat it.
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.
I like this take, but this is a conspiracy theory take. Change a few words and this would be something regurgitated by Q fanatics.
This sounds a lot like Hanlon's razor. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Do you really believe that people like spez, Zuckerberg, Musk behave like they do because they want to do favors for other billionaires? Isn't it much more likely that they're just ... disturbed? That they are narcissistic, megalomaniac, maybe idealistic in their own believe. And in being that, they make stupid decisions because they literally work differently than regular folks.
It's funny how Spez idolizes a guy who doesn't pay his bills. It's also funny watching the hate pplatform Twitter get absolutely destroyed by its owner. The internet in 2023 is a wild and crazily changing place.
At this point I’m half convinced spez was such an asshole to Reddits users because of how the community turned on his idol elon. I remember not longer than two years ago Reddit was basically musk circlejerk but this genius fucked up even that.
I am genuinely curious. What's the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?
She straight up admitted that she was essentially a sock puppet CEO and would offer no friction to anything Musk wanted.
Musk is a manchild who can't handle being told "no", so that's a given.
But it's smart of her to put that out in advance. It informs Musk that she will stay out of his way, and she doesn't have to take the blame for idiotic decisions made by him.
You've heard of a "walled garden".
But this... this has become a "walled right-wing dumpster".
Blocking users who are not logged in has farther reaching consequences that aren't readily apparent. For example, there was an AMBER Alert a few days ago with a short link to see more info. The link goes back to a Twitter account/tweet. All that time sensitive, useful information was behind a wall where you can't see it unless you log in. Most people aren't going to create an account just to do that.
This is such an incredible and incompetent failure for the amber alert system too though to be fair
Ahh the genius that is Elon Musk, I'm sure we're all cowering at his superior intellect.
Tesla and SpaceX must be full of smart people if they can succeed despite Elon Musk shenanigans.
Now do Quora.
Quora has to be one of the most useless, misdirecting "resources" out there. No idea how much of this changes once you make an account, but every single question is filled up with ads and other people's responses to other questions. It looks so confusing and messy. Who would want to sign up for a site that seems so disjointed?
For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
But on the other hand, this is really starting to look like the death knell of Twitter. It's quickly becoming extremely inconvenient to see any tweets on Twitter now.
I feel like Google is going to have to find a way to effectively index federated content at some point. The only way to really get human information is from sites like Reddit and Twitter. And both of those platforms seem to be dedicated to completely imploding at the moment.
Fuck Google, if Lemmy continues to take off we can just develop better search tools within the fediverse. The wider internet has been colonized, the path forward cannot rely on big tech corporations.
I'm not a programmer/developer so I don't even understand the scale of the work that has yet to be done. But I am deeply committed to upsetting the status quo, and this platform feels distinctly revolutionary. Can't wait to see what the future holds for Lemmy.
And this is interesting..
https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110657916419002616
"rodhilton Rod Hilton @rodhilton@mastodon.social I have some insider knowledge here that I wanted to share.
This is not happening because Google scrapes Twitter and is now unable to. Google has been a paying customer (with a special negotiated rate) of the Firehose API for nearly a decade. Presumably, that deal was still in effect, barring API rate changes having an impact.
So this decision is solely because the results can no longer be viewed by non-logged-in users.
decimates
Twitter absolutely DESTROYED by RATE LIMITING and ELON
Um actually 🤓 decimating it would be 47 million links 🤓 not 227 million
Musk is moving on to the FO part of FAFO.
Very good. An evil corporation doing evil things to an evil agenda.
I mean, is it evil? Seems like removing results that can't be seen without a login might make sense. Google has plenty of faults but I don't know if this is one of them
Ah, that's gonna sting. Google is still most people's gateway to finding stuff.
Between the garbage fire that is Twitter and the soulless corporate greed of Reddit, there couldn't be a better time for people to explore federated alternatives. These social media giants think they're going to generate more profit by these moves, but they're setting themselves up to go the way of MySpace.
That post image.
Is it just me, or is Elon looking more and more like a movie villain as time goes by?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
