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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#251

Post by Marazan »

terminatornet wrote: post #237
lamontcg wrote: post #143

I think we're about at the point where the people who predicted chaos at twitter after Elon basically fired most of the experienced engineers have been proven correct. The duct tape is all coming apart at the seams now. It isn't quite as decisive as a submarine imploding, and ceasing to exist, but it has turned into a brightly burning tirefire.

right? it's a shame hacker news doesn't let you reply to old comments, there's a few threads I'd like to follow up on from people who refused to believe Elon was destroying twitter

I think I had someone do the old sarcastic "remind me of this in one year" under one of my posts predicting technical doom for Twitter.

Definitely a good one to revisit.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#252

Post by jtode »

bdw5204 wrote: post #189
Macha wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of it is that it isn't a company but a standard, so if one instance owner goes crazy and patches ads in you can move to another (or your own) and keep your network

The problem there is that there's nothing stopping the crazy instance owner from retaliating by "defederating" your own instance and cutting you off from your network.

He could defederate from you, but one for his instance. If you haven't pissed off the whole federation and you backed up your data (another thing you can do on mastodon) you'll be fine, and keep all your followers too.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#253

Post by hyperpape »

qwerasdf5 wrote: post #234
simonw wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complex systems like Twitter don't break overnight when you lay off the talented engineers. They deteriorate piece-by-piece, potentially over the course of many months, until the compounding effects of these problems and the growing technical debt overwhelms the team that they have left.

Which pieces have deteriorated?

- Spam protection is non-existent. An NFL post showed an explicit sex act as the top response for over two weeks before it was deleted. https://twitter.com/schuh_dan/status/1657777263817940996 this was the tweet, though I don't have an exact record of when it was deleted. You can also look at https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1674876982260273152 for another example, though the porn spam has only been there for 24 hours this time.

- Outages really are common: https://twitter.com/altluu/status/1577806809217503232

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#254

Post by anders_p »

lr4444lr wrote: post #207
lamontcg wrote: post #143

I think we're about at the point where the people who predicted chaos at twitter after Elon basically fired most of the experienced engineers have been proven correct. The duct tape is all coming apart at the seams now. It isn't quite as decisive as a submarine imploding, and ceasing to exist, but it has turned into a brightly burning tirefire.

I dunno. We are several months out after the major layoffs. Maybe some very recent bad decisions were made internally that pared back too far, but I think Musk has long since been proven correct that the core platform could function on a fraction of the workforce it had at the time of takeover.

>I think Musk has long since been proven correct that the core platform could function on a fraction of the workforce it had at the time of takeover.

It REALLY sounds like you don't understand how any of this works.

Tech products don't stop working when you fire most of the staff.

But bugs stop being fixed and problems begin to add up, until a critical point is reached,m where the whole house of cards collapses.

Thinking that "Elon was proven right" simply because Twitter didn't implode the second he announced the layoffs, makes me think you don't understand how tech and software works.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#255

Post by viraptor »

shawnc wrote: post #174

My 14yr old daughter sent me this screenshot the other day with the comment "I think that one sentence sums up twitter pretty well". https://capture.dropbox.com/GqgTAxRimqAXzrdo

Fyi, on mobile the image doesn't load and the download link is broken.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#256

Post by mooreds »

shon wrote: post #246
lamontcg wrote: post #143

I think we're about at the point where the people who predicted chaos at twitter after Elon basically fired most of the experienced engineers have been proven correct. The duct tape is all coming apart at the seams now. It isn't quite as decisive as a submarine imploding, and ceasing to exist, but it has turned into a brightly burning tirefire.

I have to disagree. If you honestly take the emotion and politics out of this and evaluate on merit alone, what do you think? Twitter wasn’t healthy before Musk bought it. It wasn’t a thriving business, it was a very old, very large startup still struggling to find market fit and loosing a lot of money. Also, it wasn’t a thriving product. It was stagnant. Since Twitter was purchased, the amount of features they have…

> It wasn’t a thriving business, it was a very old, very large startup still struggling to find market fit and loosing a lot of money.

Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019.

https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#257

Post by 7thaccount »

Waterluvian wrote: post #178
Topfi wrote: post #126

Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement. Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof. I can of…

At least once have I done a CC blast as a form of insurance when being asked to do something absolutely boneheaded.

You gotta get executives in writing sometimes or they'll throw you under the bus later.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#258

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

dijit wrote: post #231
amelius wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the loads are not comparable.

Honestly. what the fuck is this response? I hear always that centralising everything is great because efficiencies of scale: but then we have something that works as good or better and the response is; “ah yeah, but the load is so high!” Why do I care? I don't honestly give a shit about how much load you have, you could be factoring Pi on every page load; it means -nothing- to me. I kindly invite you to give more of…

Mastodon isn't truly decentralized. Every instance is its own feifdom and you have to communicate directly with them to exchange messages. This is unlike how Usenet, FidoNet, and SMTP work. They are truly decentralized as you can exchange data without directly accessing a peer's host server.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#259

Post by firesteelrain »

simonw wrote: post #224
firesteelrain wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Plus it’s easy to crap on Elon but it’s also the poor Twitter architecture and quality of people they have working for them that caused this despite Elon’s desire to require login to read Twitter. He didn’t write the code.

Elon is responsible for the quality of the people who work for Twitter. That's what a CEO does.

I understand the sentiment. He also has managers who might get fired next

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#260

Post by terminatornet »

qwerasdf5 wrote: post #234
simonw wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complex systems like Twitter don't break overnight when you lay off the talented engineers. They deteriorate piece-by-piece, potentially over the course of many months, until the compounding effects of these problems and the growing technical debt overwhelms the team that they have left.

Which pieces have deteriorated?

I currently can't read any tweets from https://twitter.com/elonmusk because it's just said "something went wrong. try reloading" for the last 8 hours or so.

I'd consider that deteriorated service.

also just out of curiosity while trying to find historical outage data I found this article.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/14/twitter-e...

Last july (before elon took over), the site was apparently down for 45 minutes and "one of the site’s longest outages for years". Today it's been basically barely usable for most of the day.

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