Re:Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains
by cornel_io on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @01:15AM
(#37130452)
Actually, re: my edit - I think it really is worth considering whether there might be an accidental delay here that's on the NYT side. It's totally possible that Twitter is hitting the sites it redirects people to before it actually sends them there, for either analytics purposes or otherwise, and I'd trust the NYT devops less than Twitter's w.r.t. making sure things were fast.
Incompetence before malice, etc...
Re:Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains
by thereare5lights on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @01:27AM
(#37130521)
It's not.
If you use wget, you see that the delay happens during the first hop with t.co
It also happens with threads.net, instagram, facebook, blueskyweb.xyz
I also tried 5 NYT links. All had a very consistent 5 second delay through wget.
I could do more, but I don't care to. Everyone knows Elon has gone redpill, so it wouldn't surprise me if he's "owning the libs", but there also could be a dozen other reasons Twitter might do something like this (including plenty that are not nefarious). I just don't care to dig more...
Edit: I suppose I could have given the specific URLs, but I don't know if/how much t.co links leak info, so I'm not keen to do that. But the delay is absolutely on t.co and not the destination sites, at least as far as external users are concerned. It's possible that t.co queries the sites first before redirecting, and if e.g. the NYT is throttling their traffic that's what's delaying things. I don't know how to disambiguate that, but it's definitely a theory worth considering...