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Twitter and the Internet War

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Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#11

Post by aptwebapps »

danso wrote: post #2

This 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…

The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that this is a distortion of someone claiming that they couldn't build better anti-harassment tools because of excessive technical debt and maybe a lack technical acumen or focus.

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#12

Post by dawhizkid »

danso wrote: post #2

This 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 assume this "executive" was a non-technical mid-level manager. I don't think either the author of this story or her source has any idea what they're talking about w.r.t web frameworks.

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#13

Post by anonytrary »

This smells like boring FUD. Twitter is an incredible tool for real-time information, and everyone already uses it. Twitters content problems are great problems to have, similar to the problems Facebook faces. I think Twitter has a very bright future.

Using Facebook, I have always felt that the website tried to "force" me into where it thought I belonged in the social graph. Twitter has a much lower barrier to entry. I prefer the lurker-first philosophy. Facebook tries way too hard to engineer interactions (so does Twitter, but I think it's not as bad).

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#14

Post by mark242 »

Part of the problem is that Twitter encouraged automated signups in the early days, blazing the trail for gigantic bot-farms that we all talk about today. They pushed popular rss-to-tweet gateways, wordpress plugins for auto-tweeting blog posts, etc. There should have been gigantic red flags waving when the hypergrowth of Twitter really started, because you knew these weren't all people signing up for one account.

I'm not sure if Twitter can ever put pandora back in the box, but at the very least, requiring a mobile number is a start. It's hard(-ish) to generate thousands of bots if you have to have a unique phone number with multifactor for each signup.

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#15

Post by itronitron »

iisbum wrote: post #9

What 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.

This article is an interesting variant on the 'we're trying but it's a really hard problem' puff PR piece.

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#16

Post by oceanghost »

icelancer wrote: post #6

Lost? 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 somethi…

You're going to think I'm trolling, but I'm not--

What value does Twitter provide to ordinary people? I have friends who are celebrities in their industries or trying to market themselves-- but other than that it seems like the most hostile place imaginable. Why would I want to participate in that?

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#17

Post by akhilcacharya »

booleandilemma wrote: post #10
danso wrote: post #2

This 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.

Bloomberg?

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#19

Post by flashman »

> There are two main components to Harvey’s job, this person told me: to formulate a clear set of rules for what constitutes abusive speech, and to be consistent in enforcing them.

The odds are against Harvey being the first person in human history to solve this problem without false positives and negatives.

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#20

Post by pg_bot »

Well at least we now know the solution to all of society's problems is making Ruby on Rails fast. Perhaps one day we can let out a collective sigh of relief once we remove the global interpreter lock.
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