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"@" on Twitter

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31–40 of 143 posts

Re: "@" on Twitter

#31
post #29

Is product quality degrading on the internet over time? It used to be that once a week or longer I would find some amusing bug. But now it's not uncommon for that I encounter dozens of bugs daily on various popular services that are worth $millions or $billions, which is just obnoxious. Not only that, but usually the services have no way of filing a bug report or getting in touch with support. It seems like internet…

You encounter dozens of bugs daily? That doesn’t really pass the smell test.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#32
post #31
post #29

Is product quality degrading on the internet over time? It used to be that once a week or longer I would find some amusing bug. But now it's not uncommon for that I encounter dozens of bugs daily on various popular services that are worth $millions or $billions, which is just obnoxious. Not only that, but usually the services have no way of filing a bug report or getting in touch with support. It seems like internet…

You encounter dozens of bugs daily? That doesn’t really pass the smell test.

Across multiple services 5hat seems right. So much stuff has broken or buggy UI it's not funny.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#33
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could such an account have been created?

Possibly a difference in implementation of unicode between validation and persistence/use. Validates successfully due to one or more "valid" unicode characters -> translated to zero characters due to stripping of invalid unicode character at some point after validation.

Maybe related to MySQL's 3-byte "utf8" charset which doesn't actually support unicode properly? (you are supposed to use "utf8mb4" nowadays though a lot of material still refers to "utf8")

Re: "@" on Twitter

#34
post #30
post #29

Is product quality degrading on the internet over time? It used to be that once a week or longer I would find some amusing bug. But now it's not uncommon for that I encounter dozens of bugs daily on various popular services that are worth $millions or $billions, which is just obnoxious. Not only that, but usually the services have no way of filing a bug report or getting in touch with support. It seems like internet…

Nothing. It seems the secret to success in software is shipping as fast as possible, and so far the market has proven that users are extremely forgiving of bad quality. And bad security. And hostile privacy practices. Users suck.

Exactly, you could be killing a baby for each HTTP request and they wouldn't care, as long as its useful and don't costs them a dollar.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#35
post #29

Is product quality degrading on the internet over time? It used to be that once a week or longer I would find some amusing bug. But now it's not uncommon for that I encounter dozens of bugs daily on various popular services that are worth $millions or $billions, which is just obnoxious. Not only that, but usually the services have no way of filing a bug report or getting in touch with support. It seems like internet…

Nobody can write perfect software yet, as far as I know. And popular software has a bunch of engineers that need something to do so they often change/add features for no great reason. In the process they add/change/remove bugs.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#36

Reminds me on the old Commodore 64 Quantum-Link service (former version of AOL), there was a hack called 'Q-Armor' where you could get a username of all spaces, and no sysops or any chat room managers could kick you, or do anything to your account.

Q-Link was great for its time.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#37

Reminds me on the old Commodore 64 Quantum-Link service (former version of AOL), there was a hack called 'Q-Armor' where you could get a username of all spaces, and no sysops or any chat room managers could kick you, or do anything to your account.

people griefing in online games (hacks/aimbots) often run with nicks like ||||||||||II||I|||||||||||||II1111|||||||IIIIIIIIII||||||||||||

Re: "@" on Twitter

#38

Slightly related but very interesting: the 2010 Twitter bug where simply tweeting "Accept [username]" would automatically force them to follow you. My understanding is that for the sake of simpler interfaces such as SMS, which they let hold the whole service back for a long long time, they had a "follow [username]" feature - and if the person had to approve follow requests, it would send one to them. To accept the re…

A similarly lulzy but much more sinister-looking bug happened at Facebook, where an index into an array of users was mistakenly treated as a user id, so the message intended for user 4 in the array ended up going to the user with ID 4, aka zuck.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#39

Slightly related but very interesting: the 2010 Twitter bug where simply tweeting "Accept [username]" would automatically force them to follow you. My understanding is that for the sake of simpler interfaces such as SMS, which they let hold the whole service back for a long long time, they had a "follow [username]" feature - and if the person had to approve follow requests, it would send one to them. To accept the re…

I first started using Twitter in the late 2000s and got my friends using it with SMS. We used it similar to a group chat/hangouts.

..it did get annoying after a while.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#40
post #2

At least two usernameless Twitter profiles exist: https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=34313404 https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=71996998 (credit: https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/989868697660477440 ) It is possible to retweet-with-quote the tweets, but not to retweet directly or (as far as I can tell) to link to individual tweets directly. EDIT: It is possible to link to individual tweets. Added link…

How could such an account have been created?

I asked somebody who used to work there, and the answer I got was that there are a bunch of accounts from back before validation was as tight as it is now.

Which seems reasonable to me. At-replies were not something that Twitter started with, but instead were community-driven with software support added later:

https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2008/how-replies-w...

It's a good reminder that it's always easier to relax restrictions than to tighten them.

But then again, if Twitter early on were run by the sort of people who were inclined to lock down everything, it might not have evolved enough to be really useful to people. I hazily remember the Friendster guy getting really mad that people were creating accounts for non-human things that they loved, like cities and bars and companies. I think he went on a banning spree. Instead of saying, "Look how much people love my platform! Let me support them in their efforts."

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