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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

sfba.social

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#261

Also, taking Elon's word at face value for a second... is Twitter really worth scraping for AI training or whatever? Its a hive of misinformation, disinformation and toxicity. Its succinct I guess, but nothing is eloquent or descriptive because of the character limit. And its full of repetitive "filler" information. Who wants that in a foundational LLM dataset? Maybe its OK for finding labeled images... But that stil…

While there may be huge sections of Twitter content that are like what you describe, I haven't encountered that. Instead I see tons of hyper-focused discussion from very specialized scientists that I wouldn't see otherwise. I see lots of discussion if obscure housing policy, that I wouldn't see otherwise. Now, this has been severely degraded by the changes that Musk has made. The spam in direct messages is off the ch…

Can you share some profiles/contents like this? I've been searching for it and failing miserably

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#262
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We may be at peak consumer tolerance for anti-pattern, in-app purchase, subscription-model, ad-packed, data-siphoning, dopamine driven, gated experiences. As much as I want this to be true, I think this sentiment is really only popular on tech-savvy forums like HN. Most people don't use ad blockers, and I've had people get mad at me when I suggest that they do (directly in response to something where they are compl…

> and I've had people get mad at me when I suggest that they do. lol that's a new one, why?

I’ve had someone say they want to support the content, which I understand. If only they knew how their data was being abused.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25 years of products being honed for shareholder value, instead of customer or user value. We may be at peak consumer tolerance for anti-pattern, in-app purchase, subscription-model, ad-packed, data-siphoning, dopamine driven, gated experiences.

This is a perfect example of how "shareholder value" is a thought-terminating cliche. Twitter was previously a public company, which was beholden to shareholders, and aimed to try and increase its stock price (as far as "shareholder value" actually means anything, this is basically it). I wouldn't praise previous management (the company wasn't profitable), but they were not a complete dumpster fire. Then Twitter was…

> Then Twitter was bought out, and taken private, removing the obligation to "shareholder value."

Does it really though? Private shareholders are still shareholders. It replaces a diffuse duty to keep a bunch of public-shareholders happen with a possibly-more-direct "do what I say or be replaced tomorrow."

> "shareholder value" is a thought-terminating cliche

I think when people use it dismissively, it's not really about shareholders per se, but about one that are focused on short-term growth at the expense of long-term growth or a sustainable business model.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#264
post #246

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 was a very old, very large startup [...]

Can we start to call companies with almost 18 years old just "companies" and not startup anymore?

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#265
post #246

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…

> Regarding any downtime, everyone has downtime. Google, Amazon, Meta… the best of the best still have it regardless of money or manpower.

I mean, I would expect Microsoft to do a much better job than Twitter to keep GitHub from going down every single month after acquiring it. The frequency of GitHub going down with 100M+ users using it is much worse than Twitter.

It turns out that GitHub's constant downtime for years is all fine (especially tech folks) here despite the monthly complaints anyway. The latest one here [0] But only with Twitter, the speed-bumps are exaggerated and magnified.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36523843

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#266

Not as people imagine , the selfDDOS bug that occurs does not burden requests to the Twitter system, but becomes a loop for users requesting access.

So this "unforeseen" loop now eats in the users 600 tweets per whatever, so now when you land and Twitter's homepage you are pass this measly limit with 5 rotations of your scroll wheel.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#267
post #225

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 am not disagreeing with you but self-ddos is not entirely uncommon. When I worked at Amazon this would happen a few times a year. Not on the main amazon.com website but on supporting services often initiated by but not limited to kindle devices. Having something like this slip through the cracks of even experienced engineers isn't uncommon.

But in such cases surely there's some kind of rate limiter in place?

I mean, if I'm reading that screenshot correctly this is 700+ requests a minute.

I've tripped the rate limiter with less on other sites.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25 years of products being honed for shareholder value, instead of customer or user value. We may be at peak consumer tolerance for anti-pattern, in-app purchase, subscription-model, ad-packed, data-siphoning, dopamine driven, gated experiences.

This is a perfect example of how "shareholder value" is a thought-terminating cliche. Twitter was previously a public company, which was beholden to shareholders, and aimed to try and increase its stock price (as far as "shareholder value" actually means anything, this is basically it). I wouldn't praise previous management (the company wasn't profitable), but they were not a complete dumpster fire. Then Twitter was…

> not a complete dumpster fire.

I never liked Twitter, don't have accounts, etc. To me this "dumpster fire" talk sounds like just sour grapes.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#269
Seems like it might not even be a bug. Elon says they limited it to 600 viewed tweets per day which is an insane limit. Most people would go through that in 5 minutes of scrolling

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you think if we fired every civil engineer tomorrow, the bridges and the highways they built would fall apart right afterwards, or even in a few months? Engineering isn't like service positions where the lack of competent personnel is felt immediately; the debt keeps growing until your whole system collapses under it one day, how far the day is in the future depends on what system you're working on.

Did you forget how people were saying that Twitter would stop working within days?
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