Bluesky feels like it’s buckling under the refugee crisis load
I've been on their waiting list for what seems like months at this point. Huge missed opportunity for them, being unable to leverage Twitter's failings.
Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
271–280 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#272This bug is very unlikely to be the reason. The rate limiter on the server side is cheap and the frontend bug only gets triggered with the rate limit active.
I have seen similar bugs in the systems I oversee because network libraries love to retry requests without sane limitations by default. But I never saw them make our rate limiters sweat. It's slightly more annoying when they hit an API which actually does some expensive work before returning an error but that's why we have rate limits on all public endpoints.
I also guess that the webapp is the least of Twitters traffic and the native apps probably don't have this problem.
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#273I 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 it’s intents like yours which is why they’re not allowed. Shame, because there are some genuine value in having it too..
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#274Speaking 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…
Well "forced to execute" is somewhat subjective. If you are convinced leadership is doing the "wrong thing," then best to either leave or accept that you're just collecting your paycheck. In the case of Twitter, the new owner has thoroughly broken the advertising business and is trying to aggressively pursue a new version of the data business Twitter once had-- E.g. Google's Caffeine, which Twitter also eventually lo…
> Well "forced to execute" is somewhat subjective. If you are convinced leadership is doing the "wrong thing," then best to either leave or accept that you're just collecting your paycheck.
Я, Unless your visa is sponsored by your employer.
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If executives are throwing you under a bus, make an exit. There’s no coming back from a clown show like that.
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
After years of losing money, and then not being profitable in 2020+.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time researching this.
This 2019 article says they cut costs/Vine and jumped to video ads which boosted revenue 24% which might explain why they were profitable in 2019.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/07/tech/twitter-earnings-q4/inde...
In 2018 there is mention of a "one-time release of deferred tax asset valuation allowance,” which accounted for $683 million [of income]".
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/25/18018046/twitter-q3-2018-earn...
OP's point stands in my opinion. Twitter was/is a flagging centralized service that may not survive if it doesn't pivot.
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#277Meanwhile, I can see this very Mastadon post with no login just fine. And the interface is not trying to assault me. It loads quick. ...Seems like a better product than Twitter for a public feed.
On Mastodon simply discussing certain topics will get you banned, and instances that don't ban those users get defederated. I prefer Twitter in the sense that it's more laissez faire in terms of what kinds of speech get you banned.
It's a shitty monoculture mostly filled with a particular demographic (like most new and obscure tech things), the people who program computers, and the people who they meet at parties.
This would disappear with more widespread usage. The problem is the software, not the culture. If the software is improved, or the dead ends are pruned and something else is created that learns the lessons from previous tries, the new cultures will bury the old.
If building software required experts on model trains or K-pop, the culture would suck, too. The goal is to make that a stage rather than an endpoint.
edit: I enjoy model trains, but I do not get into political or social discussions with model train guys.
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Totally agree with you. It was only a startup in the sense that it was still struggling to find profitability / solid market fit.
As opposed to something like Amazon which grew and grew for nearly 20 years, always burning more cash than it made to fuel growth, but they understood the business really well and when they decided to optimize for profitability rather than growth, never never gone back.
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#279Also, 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…
I once got paid $20 as an undergrad to go through hundreds of thousands of tweets and convert slang into plain english for training data. The only thing I took away from the experience, aside from finally getting good with vim macros, is the average tweet is really low effort an uninteresting. I don't recall reading a single thing that I would imagine someone retweeting (think that's what it's called). Maybe I was given only replies. Anyway, not sure if there's value there for LLMs, but I'd be skeptical.
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mastodon doesn't have the incentive to go to shit, as there's no company trying to earn as much money as possible behind it.
Apart from Facebook (I mean Meta (I mean Threads)). Let's see how that one plays out, but initially it seems like they'll be blocked by almost every bigger instance anyway.
Even if Facebook starts using ActivityPub in one of their products the protocol will still be just a protocol. And if FB's product goes to shit it won't affect ActivityPub.