Twitter and the Internet War
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Twitter and the Internet War
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Re: Twitter and the Internet War
#2This is the excerpt I've seen being tweeted about this piece:
At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would become, a third former executive told me, “you never would have built it on a Fisher-Price infrastructure.” Instead of building a product that could scale alongside the platform, former employees say, Twitter papered over its problems by hiring more moderators. “Because this is just an ass-backward tech company, let’s throw non-scalable, low-tech solutions on top of this low-tech, non-scalable problem.”
Setting aside the whole "Ruby/Rails is slow" discussion, I would've loved to see more elaboration by these sources about how a web framework makes moderation and policing "nearly impossible". Compared to what? The PHP scripts that became Facebook?
Re: Twitter and the Internet War
#3This is the excerpt I've seen being tweeted about this piece: At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would becom…
Yeah, that doesn't make any sense to me either. I think it sounds like the complaint is actually that they failed to build out features that enabled easier moderation and better verification (mentioned a paragraph later).
My understanding is that Twitter moved away from Ruby/Rails back in 2010-2012 anyway, making the comparison more confusing.
Re: Twitter and the Internet War
#4This is the excerpt I've seen being tweeted about this piece: At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would becom…
That's bizarre. They have a social policy problem, not a technical problem. Short of building a general human-level AI, it's not clear how their tech stack has any bearing on the issue.
Re: Twitter and the Internet War
#5This is the excerpt I've seen being tweeted about this piece: At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would becom…
Yeah, that doesn't make any sense to me either. I think it sounds like the complaint is actually that they failed to build out features that enabled easier moderation and better verification (mentioned a paragraph later). My understanding is that Twitter moved away from Ruby/Rails back in 2010-2012 anyway, making the comparison more confusing.
More info on this here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Twitter-move-away-from-Ruby-on...
Re: Twitter and the Internet War
#6Lost? How is Twitter losing the Internet War? Their platform is more influential than ever and helped to seriously impact a presidential election (the results of which not too many people in media are happy with, fair enough).
Yes, the platform is a failure in so many ways - failure to protect the identity and safety of the people on it. (Though as someone who has served a subpoena to Twitter, let me tell you something - the legal team isn't exactly handing over data easily. It was a huge pain in the ass with tons of individual privacy concerns the whole way.)
And the platform is failing revenue-wise, yes.
But if it's about the Internet War, so to speak? Twitter is at the top of it all. No one has to like the externalities - I sure don't - but their influence is undeniable.
Re: Twitter and the Internet War
#7This is the excerpt I've seen being tweeted about this piece: At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would becom…
I followed this story back in 2006 to 2008. I’m sorry I don’t have time to write a real comment with the crucial details. The basic plot is that Twitter initially set out to be a CMS sort of like WordPress, but then they realized they had actually built a messaging platform, which needed a different architecture. You can catch a glimpse of the issues in “Amateur hour is over at Twitter” from 2008.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2008/04/23/amate...
Of course, it is a stretch to suggest that in ten years they couldn’t reinvent the architecture.
It took them many years to get beyond the “fail whale”. And it is surprising who they thought of as experts at scaling:
“And this week they hired two scaling experts – John Kalucki and Steve Jenson (“known for his work scaling Blogger and Blogspot”).”
No offense to those guys, but Blogger and Blogspot were also notorious failures at scaling. Bloggers problems were not fixed till a year or two after they were bought by Google.
Re: Twitter and the Internet War
#8I lurved the hate they had on ruby. I've never used ruby but strikes me as childish to blame all your ills on software that they developed to run their whole company on. I mean they could have used PHP, a real professional language! Just like what Facebook used :D
Re: Twitter and the Internet War
#9What a cop out.
If they really wanted to solve the problem all it takes it consuming their own firehose API and writing back to delete flagged content.
You really don't need to insert the moderation into the "backend", you just have to want to solve the problem, instead of accepting the problem because it fuels your growth.
Re: Twitter and the Internet War
#10This is the excerpt I've seen being tweeted about this piece: At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would becom…
I’m a .NET developer, not a ruby apologist, but fisher-price infrastructure? Gimme a break. Someone go tell GitHub, AirBnb, Hulu, and Bloomberg.