Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#301

Post by foldr » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:05 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #281

sumedh wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should Twitter give a world shakingly powerful lier an unfiltered platform to the public? All Politicians lie. Twitter is not in the business of being a fact checker.

Not all politicians retweet white supremacists, though.

To the downvoters: this is directly relevant, as hate speech violates twitter's rules, and they have indicated that they will apply these rules to Trump's account just like anyone else's:

> Asked whether Twitter would ever consider banning key government officials or even the president himself, a company spokesperson responded via email: “The Twitter Rules prohibit violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct, and multiple account abuse, and we will take action on accounts violating those policies.” Pressed on whether that meant that, hypothetically, Trump himself could be suspended were he to violate those policies, a spokesperson confirmed: “The Twitter Rules apply to all accounts, including verified accounts.”

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

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Post by inimino » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:06 PM UTC

achievingApathy wrote: post #278

inimino wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't. And I imagine that discussing the details in public would just create more work for the admins and limit their options for tweaking it; probably more trouble than it would be worth to make it transparent. Totally anecdotal, it's just my perception that a few downvotes are enough to grey something out, a few more and it gets killed and people stop seeing it. The first-order effect is that the worst con…

If you are interested, the Reddit admins discuss this at length and were planning to do this when /r/the_donald took over the entire front page. There are logs of their conversation that goes into the math.

Was the discussion public? Sounds interesting. I wouldn't know where to find that discussion as I don't follow Reddit at all.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

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Post by wattt » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:07 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #291

ci5er wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $2B/year, I can only hope to be that irrelevant. Now, if you want to talk about the $2.5B expense line....

$2.5B!! What are they blowing that kind of cash on?

It took them 6 weeks to change the star button into a heart, which nobody wanted because we don't "like" all the things we save for later. Twitter has been going in the wrong direction all year.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

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Post by wattt » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:10 PM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #23

johns wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope using a tweetstorm to announce his departure was a subtle shot at the company's inability to ship a product the way people want to use it.

I know I might sound like a vim user, but tweetstorms are honestly one of my favourite parts of twitter. Maybe there could be a better UI for authoring and displaying them, but there's something I really enjoy about reading a story 140 characters at a time.

I personally really hate these. There is always one or two good posts that hook me in but then the bias/politics/etc gets revealed when you read the rest. My friends retweet them but in the end I just think the author (and my duped friend) are idiots. Maybe it is just who I follow...

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

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Post by inimino » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:11 PM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #270

hyperdunc wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might have the courage, but do they have the judgement to decide who's an actual neo-nazi? Twitter has a history of political partisanship. They'll ban "racist" conservatives but allow minority "terrorist" organizations.

There's a Pacific Ocean-sized gulf between the current policy and your nightmare scenario. Slippery slope and all that, but they un-suspended Richard Spencer for "reasons".

After the neo-nazis, who's next? As soon as they "take sides" they are now directly putting a finger on the scale of national and international politics. That's a rathole they absolutely do not want to go down and would very likely be totally unsustainable.

On the other hand, it works pretty well for the Chinese social media.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

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Post by inimino » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:17 PM UTC

SapphireSun wrote: post #62

narrator wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's just bizarre is that they were seriously considering censoring Donald Trump's account at one point and even announced it. From a purely business standpoint, that was a dumb idea even to propose. It makes you wonder about the rationality of management and if they view the company as some sort of hipster San Francisco hobby paid for by VCs and not as a profit making enterprise.

It's amazing from a business perspective, but at a certain point ethical questions arise. Should Twitter give a world shakingly powerful lier an unfiltered platform to the public? If he had to go through the press, everything he said would be filtered by editors and fact checkers. Incredible business opportunity, but frankly, the fate of the world is in part being determined by Twitter's granting him a platform. I ca…

> If he had to go through the press, everything he said would be filtered by editors and fact checkers.

Are you joking? The press would say "'...', Donald Trump said on Monday".

Anyone who can't infer the "Donald Trump said" part from the Twitter UI shouldn't be unsupervised near a computer or a newspaper.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

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Post by angry-hacker » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:23 PM UTC

makomk wrote: post #155

angry-hacker wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the platform just the best medium for harassing and trolling? What else can you do with 140 chars? Have you ever heard about good tweets? It's always negativity.

Twitter's popular with journalists for some reason, most likely because it's an easy way to find potential stories and promote their work. This is probably part of the problem - it means that when ordinary users are nasty to them or their friends it's personal, and the same when they or their friends get their accounts suspended.

Because only celebrities and journalists benefit from Twitter. It's boring for regular joe's, unless you like to only consume. Or troll :)

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

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Post by pron » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:24 PM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #263

makomk wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's problem isn't just that they have to fix harassment, it's that they have to do it without touching social justice activism that sure looks similar to it from the outside, right down to the doxing, threats, and smears. Oh, and they'll get no sympathy for getting this wrong as the difference is apparently obvious... except that everyone defines it differently (usually based on who their friends are) and simpl…

> harassment I do wonder if this word is even appropriate to the situation. Using twitter seems akin to stepping on a soap box on the town square and shouting every single word you say. Maybe nobody will pay attention to you. Or maybe you'll get a crowd of people who think favorably of you. Maybe someone else will step on his own box and have a conversation with you, but still there for everyone to hear. And it goes…

> I do wonder if this word is even appropriate to the situation.

It's the word appropriate for the actual rampant harassment on Twitter: the threats, threats, verbal abuse etc.; that's literally what harassment means. It may not be appropriate for everything on Twitter. When people talk about harassment on Twitter, they don't mean the hissing and booing, but more the "we're gonna rape you", which is harassment on any other public forum as well, even if directed at someone on a soapbox.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

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Post by criddell » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:33 PM UTC

basch wrote: post #145

josh_carterPDX wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you're right. However, aside from having ad revenue I don't see anything they can do to accelerate their revenue growth. But yeah, cut spending, get employee count way down, and they could break even sooner than later.

bull. twitters growth stalled because its way to hard to join and sort through. look how long you can be part of reddit before you make an account. you can even bookmark http://reddit.com/r/tech+askhistorians+bestof+askscience and have a custom mix without having an account. their logged out front page is a pile of shit. imgur.com is better at what twitter is trying to be, twitter should chase digg/medium not lowest…

> twitters growth stalled

I think maybe Twitter's growth stalled because it's mostly done growing. Do they need more users? They can already generate billions of dollars every year and maybe that's enough.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

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Post by sulam » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

vdnkh wrote: post #70

blackaspen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's Github: https://github.com/twitter Apache Aurora, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, just to name a few.

Your post implies they made the libraries you listed, but they certainly didn't make Mesos or most of those things.

In fact they did purely make most of those things. Also they took Mesos from a barely working prototype to a system that scales to 100K+ nodes running many thousands of different workloads in production. They did that not only by hiring Benjamin and paying him to work on it but also by surrounding him with two of the strongest engineers I've ever worked with (John Sirois and Bill Farner) as well as 3 or 4 more I didn't work with as much so I can't say how much they added but it was clearly a large investment. Effectively they seed funded it for almost 4 years. Other people worked on it too, but they were the lion's share of the commits and did almost all of Aurora too.