41–50 of 59 posts
> 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. This is probably a new low in journalism.
> 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. This is probably a new low in journalism.
> 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.”
It sounds like the original people who spoke to the journalist left the impression that there were deficiencies in the base technology which may have led to the current circumstances.
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?
And lots of people tweet when they're pissed about things, so Twitter search is the first place I check to see if a major service is down, and why.
A lot of information security folks tweet as they working or to release information. Heck, just following the Google Zero folks on Twitter had given me early hints of major security issues.
There are some hilarious folks on Twitter, many who are just random folks. Especially if you like absurdist humor, or dumb jokes (or both), it's amazing.
There are people of deep expertise posting and conversing on their subjects. Early on in the DNC hack saga, @pwnallthethings described in great detail the public evidence that it was Russia.
Finally there is local stuff like, will any of my favorite food trucks will be near my office today? What are the custom flavors at the gelatto shoppe today? When exactly is likely to start raining in my area?
There's a lot more. But to get a lot of value out of Twitter, each person needs to be following the accounts that are best for their interests, or know how to use the search well, or both. Either way, there is a learning curve.
The fast way up that learning curve is to experiment--be quick to follow folks who look interesting, but also be quick to unfollow the ones you don't like.
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…
Hi, early Twitter employee here. The reliability team called the infrastructure Fisher-Price internally so this wasn't just one random executive coming up with a term on his/her own. The problem wasn't ruby. The problem was the way that Twitter used Ruby. We had one big mono repo with every single function and every form of business logic baked into a single place. That logic relied on monkey patching and all sorts o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, early Twitter employee here. The reliability team called the infrastructure Fisher-Price internally so this wasn't just one random executive coming up with a term on his/her own. The problem wasn't ruby. The problem was the way that Twitter used Ruby. We had one big mono repo with every single function and every form of business logic baked into a single place. That logic relied on monkey patching and all sorts o…
I don't know nearly enough about large scale projects or the startup world maybe this is a silly question but when it became apparent that it was blowing up far beyond what you were expecting, was it not an option to have another team (hire or split existing) in parallel, to start writing a re-implmentation in another language or system that would work better for your new quickly expanding needs? Was that just not fe…
Every so often a person would have a brilliant idea on how to solve our scaling issues. They would then disappear into a corner to invent yet-another-bird-themed-datastore. After a few weeks/months they would appear with a magical new thing that would fix all our problems and would make everybody happy. Every single time it would fail.
Having a team that is not the main team design something means that they likely didn't understand the state of the thing that they were replacing. The thing they were replacing was a bucket of edge cases non of which they knew about. The scale never looked like what they expected because in the meantime the load had changed. This was compounded by the constant desire to hire somebody external that could solve the problem for us. They would come in with ego and a feeling that they had a mandate to replace it all. Eventually they would learn just how fragile and complicated the system was, only to then be considered old guard enough to be replaced by the next wave of experts. =/
But the number one killer was that every single thing was baked into the mono repo so it wasn't like they could have just easily shimmed in something to replace the old thing. All the while that they are building in a change to the data store another dev has added 15 new features that they now have to port over. In the time it took to port those over another 20 had been added.. etc.
Just getting the okay to pause feature development was like pulling teeth and it only bought you a few weeks at best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate? I don't know much about ror and would like to know more.
The web framework (Ruby on Rails) has nothing to do with the ability to build anti-harassment tech.
> 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.
To be fair to Twitter they are consistent here. What looks like false results to an outsider is clearly policy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know nearly enough about large scale projects or the startup world maybe this is a silly question but when it became apparent that it was blowing up far beyond what you were expecting, was it not an option to have another team (hire or split existing) in parallel, to start writing a re-implmentation in another language or system that would work better for your new quickly expanding needs? Was that just not fe…
Thats what kept happening and it was an abysmal failure. Every so often a person would have a brilliant idea on how to solve our scaling issues. They would then disappear into a corner to invent yet-another-bird-themed-datastore. After a few weeks/months they would appear with a magical new thing that would fix all our problems and would make everybody happy. Every single time it would fail. Having a team that is not…
Can I get this on a T-shirt?
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?