Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter's API is down?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 431 posts

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#161

Post by kalleboo »

natch wrote: post #92
sho wrote: post #18

This might be the last straw. I flat out refuse to use their horrible app with its nonsense algorithmic timeline. Give it a few hours to see if it's permanent but if it is, I expect a huge wave of new mastodon users..

Elon is a fan of the chronological timeline, so I would take a pause there and consider. He even tweeted out instructions on how to switch to it and away from algorithmic.

I remember him saying that, but I'm pretty sure that was way back before he completed the purchase and the site was still perpetuating what he calls "the woke mind virus". Now that's he's fixed the algorithm so that it is instead pushing right-wing ideology he may have changed his mind.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#162

Post by manholio »

invalidname wrote: post #82
manholio wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business? After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it. The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to sc…

At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple. Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff. But the current staff needs to maintain code from a MUCH larger staff. That's hard. Especially with microservices where every team did "their own thing" and some teams just vanished completely. You have "dark areas" where no one knows how stuff works and what's going on. Norma…

> Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff.

So you are essentially saying Twitter has an over-complicated architecture with regards to its real technical needs, so Musk was right to axe the microservice zealots. Good we can agree on that.

The next step is to acknowledge that code and data-centers continue to work long after their original designers have left the company, that's what computers are, tools for automation. Keeping the lights on and services in a roughly functional state is an activity that requires much less people of relatively lower qualification, even if they couldn't have engineered it themselves.

Yes, there is a long term risk of code rot and entropy if Musk does not plan for a gradual transition to a better engineered architecture with competent maintainers. But we are not there yet, far from it.

Meanwhile, schadenfreude people have rooted for a twittocaplipse from day one, nay, predicted it as inevitable. There is absolutely no sign it's going to happen, and Twitter turned out sufficiently simple after all on the technical side.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#163

Post by rcarmo »

mg wrote: post #159

I wished everyone who Tweets would also post to the Fediverse. Because fediverse nodes like Mastodon support RSS out of the box. Twitter is my only news source that I cannot consume via RSS. So if you publish something on Twitter, you miss most of my attention and only catch it if I log into Twitter that day. Or post to your personal website and have it support RSS or Atom. It is super easy to implement. Or if you us…

I do the reverse. My primary is now Mastodon, and I use a relay. I do have to pop into the birdsite to check replies, though. That's about all I do with it now.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#164

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

wpietri wrote: post #143
dmitriid wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tragedy of Twitter is that: - they were absolutely undoubtedly overstaffed - Musk's approach was absolutely undoubtedly insane shenanigans of a stupid rich cry-baby Both are true at the same time

> they were absolutely undoubtedly overstaffed Oh? What's your evidence here?

Look at FB's staff from back when they had comparable revenue and way more users.

I believe that 2013-14 FB was comparable in terms of revenue and users, and they had approximately half the staff.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#165

Post by manholio »

raspberry1337 wrote: post #138
manholio wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business? After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it. The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to sc…

[flagged]

They don't have the scale to sway large parts of the public opinion, so they are irrelevant. Also, what you call "left" might simply be the truth, and it's very hard to fight against that.

For an example of toxic ideological delusion in the left camp you can see the harm done to adolescents by the gender nuts, it's absolutely out of control on Reddit and there will be reckoning day with its many victims.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#166

Post by abdulhaq »

esperent wrote: post #105
sho wrote: post #18

This might be the last straw. I flat out refuse to use their horrible app with its nonsense algorithmic timeline. Give it a few hours to see if it's permanent but if it is, I expect a huge wave of new mastodon users..

Let's be real, if your "last straw" moment wasn't several weeks ago it's unlikely this is gonna be it. But if it is, shame on you. All the silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying "mastodon", or saying anything negative about Tesla, or criticizing Musk in any way, that didn't do it. But now you have been mildly inconvenienced and it's the last straw. Really?

The thing about last straws is they're usually just a small bit of straw

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#167

Post by black_puppydog »

mrtksn wrote: post #155
samwillis wrote: post #67

It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients and the new owner has removed access. Very disappointing if he has, particularly if he's done it with zero notice too. He has been making significant noise of feature changes in the official client coming in the next couple of weeks. Removing the third party client access would align with that, along with removing the little "posted by ..." note on ea…

Does anything stops devs from using the Web interface instead of the API? Sure it makes it a bit more challenging because parsing is involved but AFAIK it is completely legal to parse and display HTML output however you want. It's essentially like a browser add-on. I wonder if Twitter can be killed by the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy? So: 1. Make a client that combines Mastadon/Others and Twitter feeds, mak…

you get into an armsrace where twitter will obfuscate the markup to just wear out the scraper devs. which they can, because $$$

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#168

Post by mrtksn »

black_puppydog wrote: post #167
mrtksn wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anything stops devs from using the Web interface instead of the API? Sure it makes it a bit more challenging because parsing is involved but AFAIK it is completely legal to parse and display HTML output however you want. It's essentially like a browser add-on. I wonder if Twitter can be killed by the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy? So: 1. Make a client that combines Mastadon/Others and Twitter feeds, mak…

you get into an armsrace where twitter will obfuscate the markup to just wear out the scraper devs. which they can, because $$$

Then just OCR the rendered output. It's cheap and easy these days.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#169

Post by 185504a9 »

mg wrote: post #159

I wished everyone who Tweets would also post to the Fediverse. Because fediverse nodes like Mastodon support RSS out of the box. Twitter is my only news source that I cannot consume via RSS. So if you publish something on Twitter, you miss most of my attention and only catch it if I log into Twitter that day. Or post to your personal website and have it support RSS or Atom. It is super easy to implement. Or if you us…

just a tip, if you really need it for some interesting accounts, you can consume twitter feeds as RSS by using nitter, eg: https://nitter.net/dril/rss

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#170

Post by wpietri »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #164
wpietri wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they were absolutely undoubtedly overstaffed Oh? What's your evidence here?

Look at FB's staff from back when they had comparable revenue and way more users. I believe that 2013-14 FB was comparable in terms of revenue and users, and they had approximately half the staff.

So? WhatsApp had 35 developers and 350 million users. By that measure, every other company is grossly overstaffed.

Personally, I could argue that every social network is grossly understaffed by the measure of how lax they are about what they are supporting. E.g., in 2017, that company you say is more appropriately staffed contributed to a genocide that left tens of thousands dead: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

Post reply on HN