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Twitter API Page

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Re: Twitter API Page

#51

Post by matwood »

mrzool wrote: post #20
jimmySixDOF wrote: post #15

So many minor flags already that the problem could be completely accidental. For example people search in android client no longer checks my following&followers. Odd audio behavior in Spaces. More than a few scattered bits of broken micro features work and then don't again. Meanwhile press coverage is look how they only needed half the people on staff so let's do this everywhere asap and recapture value for the poor…

> So many minor flags already that the problem could be completely accidental. I hope you're right, but honestly there are also legit reasons to think otherwise. It could be a fuck up due to staff shortage and knowledge loss crisis, but it could also be an impromptu, poorly implemented and communicated decision. Both scenarios would not be surprising at this point.

The longer it goes on, I'm thinking it's both. The initial down was an accident/breakage, but the people who could fix it were fired. Obviously this situation is embarrassing for Musk so no communication. But, now that's it's down there are probably discussions about leaving it down with no decision made yet.

Re: Twitter API Page

#52

Post by hairofadog »

matwood wrote: post #51
mrzool wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So many minor flags already that the problem could be completely accidental. I hope you're right, but honestly there are also legit reasons to think otherwise. It could be a fuck up due to staff shortage and knowledge loss crisis, but it could also be an impromptu, poorly implemented and communicated decision. Both scenarios would not be surprising at this point.

The longer it goes on, I'm thinking it's both. The initial down was an accident/breakage, but the people who could fix it were fired. Obviously this situation is embarrassing for Musk so no communication. But, now that's it's down there are probably discussions about leaving it down with no decision made yet.

Hasn’t it been established that it’s intentional?

I can only speculate as to whether it’s embarrassing for Musk, but my assumption is that he enjoys flaunting his power to cause wreckage without justification rather than being embarrassed by it.

Re: Twitter API Page

#53

Post by andy_ppp »

rchaud wrote: post #48
andy_ppp wrote: post #16

Twitter has started showing me soft pornography and other teams football fans that I don’t follow in my main feed. Either is a step too far for me, I’ve logged out on all devices (web, I’ve never had the app) and I’m going to see how many days I can go before logging back in. Elon Musk is not a product person he’s building something nobody wants in my opinion and I’m happier without it. API being turned off is just a…

I use the web app too, and it's incredible how laggy it is compared to accessing it via API-driven 3rd party apps.

Absolute joke isn’t it, going back if you have typed something freezes the tab for 3-5 seconds while it decides if it should warn you about losing your edits…

Re: Twitter API Page

#54

Post by smcl »

I don't know whether killing Tweetbot was intentional or deliberate. However I was a pretty heavy user of Twitter - scrolling through my timeline on the tram, in cafes, on the toilet or whenever I had a spare moment. I assumed that the API outage was temporary so I didn't download the "official" app, and figured I'd just wait a day or so for Tweetbot to be fixed. It's now been ~3 days, I don't miss not having Twitter, I don't check it at all. I'm maybe missing a couple of @dril posts, podcast recommendations or funny images I could've shared with friends but that's nothing.

So intentional or not, I'm effectively lost as a Twitter user. I'm not claiming to be particularly high value, but I don't imagine my experience is unique. I'm quite far from a fan of Musk but I enjoyed my Twitter experience enough that his meddling was just an amusing side-show until now. It's not a dramatic rage quit, just a sort of accidental "oh I guess I didn't need that" realisation that I didn't plan on having at all. Weird.

Interestingly if Twitter had said "We are killing off Tweetbot, you have to use our app" I probably would have just begrudgingly downloaded the Twitter app. But because they didn't say anything, I just waited and went through the "cold turkey" period, where every now and then I'd instinctively tap the Tweetbot icon before thinking "ah yeah it's down, oh well" - before completely losing that habit. What an own goal.

Re: Twitter API Page

#55

Post by andy_ppp »

Shank wrote: post #45
sintaxi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "For You" & "Following" tabs are exactly what I have wanted for ages. Even still, I'm pleased to see that people are exploring other options or logging out altogether.

> The "For You" & "Following" tabs are exactly what I have wanted for ages. Just so we’re all on the same page, these options always existed behind the sparkle menu. The sparkle menu has been removed in favor of tabs but the content has always been there. FYP was the default unless you hit sparkle -> latest tweets.

No this isn’t the same thing, I am convinced I largely used to only see things from followers and certainly never and big breasted random women. And Chelsea, Man United and Sp*rs fans - no thanks!

The sparkle used to be about chronological feed ordering vs hate/AI based tweet ordering.

Re: Twitter API Page

#56

Post by matwood »

hairofadog wrote: post #52
matwood wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The longer it goes on, I'm thinking it's both. The initial down was an accident/breakage, but the people who could fix it were fired. Obviously this situation is embarrassing for Musk so no communication. But, now that's it's down there are probably discussions about leaving it down with no decision made yet.

Hasn’t it been established that it’s intentional? I can only speculate as to whether it’s embarrassing for Musk, but my assumption is that he enjoys flaunting his power to cause wreckage without justification rather than being embarrassed by it.

Everything I’ve seen is unconfirmed hearsay. /shrug

Re: Twitter API Page

#57

Post by [deleted] »

mrzool wrote: post #40
pavlov wrote: post #32

The Information reports that the suspension of third-party Twitter clients is intentional, and they haven’t worked out the comms strategy yet. TI has a very good track record on this kind of reporting, so I’m inclined to believe the internal messages they’ve seen are real. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-intent...

Paywalled, sadly.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter API Page

#58

Post by slantedview »

pavlov wrote: post #32

The Information reports that the suspension of third-party Twitter clients is intentional, and they haven’t worked out the comms strategy yet. TI has a very good track record on this kind of reporting, so I’m inclined to believe the internal messages they’ve seen are real. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-intent...

There’a no comms because Twitter no longer has a comms department.

Re: Twitter API Page

#59

Post by a4isms »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #46
quitit wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much the kind of decay that people were expecting. Twitter's decline will be a "death by a thousand bites." I don't think anyone reasonable was suggesting that the site would just disappear overnight after such a large loss of staff. (Despite even chieftwit claiming this as evidence for business as usual.)

There was, unfortunately, a lot of nonsensical claims by people with no technical knowledge that Twitter would go down overnight. But anyone with a modicum of experience would know that makes no sense. Websites of all sizes are designed to largely self operate with no manual intervention for decent periods of time. Otherwise all large websites would be down during holidays, etc.

PagerDuty engineer here. There is much to discuss with respect to "Websites of all sizes are designed to largely self operate with no manual intervention for decent periods of time." The phrase "decent periods of time" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

You also said "Otherwise all large websites would be down during holidays, etc." What makes you think large websites don't go down in some fashion or another during Holidays? Are you thinking that there would be nobody to handle incidents over a holiday?

Because every large website has people on call over holidays, and they handle incidents that would become extended outages if left unattended. Many large companies publish incident reports, and if you care to review them, you may find that indeed, their sites do experience partial outages all the time, with no exceptions for holidays (full outages are rare, of course).

Many companies do have "skeleton staffing" during major holidays, so they try to mitigate the risk of a major outage by instituting "code freezes" and not shipping new features.

That doesn't speak to how resilient those sites are, it speaks to the fact that yes, it's a normal things for sites to go down, and yes, humans are needed to keep them up. This whole thing speaks to the difference between "robust" and "resilient."

Robust: The site doesn't go down.

Resilient: When the site goes down, it comes back up with no or little impact on the user/customer experience.

Robust is an architectural property. Resilient is both an architectural and organizational property. Cutting staff impacts resilience, but not robustness. But for most users, the difference between them is invisible. If you see a site that appears to remain up over a holiday, it may be resilient rather than robust.

Re: Twitter API Page

#60

Post by bfeynman »

smcl wrote: post #54

I don't know whether killing Tweetbot was intentional or deliberate. However I was a pretty heavy user of Twitter - scrolling through my timeline on the tram, in cafes, on the toilet or whenever I had a spare moment. I assumed that the API outage was temporary so I didn't download the "official" app, and figured I'd just wait a day or so for Tweetbot to be fixed. It's now been ~3 days, I don't miss not having Twitter…

I deactivated my twitter, after constantly checking it for updates and the like all the time. I don't miss it at all, don't even have urge to find it again. Think that might speak a lot to the attention economy and how fragile it can be for free apps. Twitter is doomed, the experience is broken, the recommendations were all trash and seeing promoted comments from people who paid to have a checkmark was like the most idiotic move I've seen in an app.
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