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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#901

Post by sanderjd »

Topfi wrote: post #833
sanderjd wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about this: When you were experiencing this, why didn't you quit? I truly feel bummed for the people remaining at Twitter who are miserable but for whatever reason feel they can't just quit.

That is a good question, but on the two specific occasions when something of this sort did not make me leave instantly, there were very specific factors at play. I cannot comment on the first situation as that would require an extensive post with an obscene amount of context on my background, politics in my country, the people involved, weighing up the public good, etc. Simply, would go beyond a HN comment and I feel…

That makes sense, thanks for sharing. I definitely get the thing about not wanting to let people down. And I do wonder if that's how a lot of the people remaining at Twitter feel.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#902

Post by unconed »

ineedasername wrote: post #483
unconed wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels. The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everyth…

>has made way for free-speech Here’s just a few of the people (in these cases journalists) that Elon has banned. It’s not hard to find other examples of censorship either. That’s his right, he owns all of it, but he lied about ideals of free speech. If it’s speech he doesn’t like, he kills it: Ryan Mac Drew Harwell Micah Lee Matt Binder Aaron Rupar Donie O’Sullivan Tony Webster EDIT: these bans were related to report…

Elonjet was bait by people with an axe to grind and a chip on their shoulder, and if this isn't blindingly obvious, I have a bridge to sell you.

There is no doubt that, after firing Vijaya Gadde (sp?), the corporate focus has shifted away from censoring every single tweet, and more towards letting people say what they want. This does not mean every single tweet is left up, or that annoying Elon isn't a catastrophically stupid thing for journalists to do.

Do you dispute this?

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#903

Post by unconed »

benzible wrote: post #455
unconed wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels. The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everyth…

You claim with a straight face that, had Musk not taken over Twitter, it would have had the same rate of outages and level of degradation as it does now? It's completely obvious to anyone familiar with the stability of Twitter pre and post Musk that his takeover was an inflection point. You're ignoring reality in order to support a claim that fired non-coders and "diversity hires" contributed nothing.

No, you claim that I am claiming that.

What I claim is that: - OPs story that Twitter was a healthy and productive tech company pre-Elon is complete non-sense. How many years did people pine for an edit button? - Twitter returned to pre-2020 staffing levels, which is true - Twitter struggled to push out new features (like an edit button) for years, which is true, wheras post-Elon they pushed out edit buttons, longer tweets, subscriptions, etc.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#904

Post by unconed »

NegativeK wrote: post #481
unconed wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels. The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everyth…

> The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the ... diversity ... side. Your statement is gross.

Your statement is an admission that you prefer to judge messages for their implied moral valence instead of their truth content. Personally I find that pathetic.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#905

Post by lolinder »

maxlin wrote: post #850
lolinder wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 80% of Twitter was laid off or quit. I think it's a reasonable supposition that a good number of those were critical personnel who felt they could get a better deal somewhere else.

This rhetoric is well past its peak. When the firings happened, people said twitter would crash in a week. It's been a long time since then, and twitter, for my very generic uses and purposes, has just gotten better. Demonizing past hard decisions at every unrelated point of difficulty has to be the worst kind of toxicity there is.

There were some people who predicted that in the heat of the moment, but the rational people at the time were predicting that Twitter would limp along, gradually start to show cracks, and eventually become a husk of what it was as the systems slowly degraded. I'd say we're well on track for that prediction.

This isn't an unrelated difficulty—this kind of bug is the direct result of losing (or ignoring) the people who knew better. Institutional knowledge is a tech company's lifeblood, and Musk gleefully discarded most of Twitter's when he came in.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#906

Post by unconed »

miunau wrote: post #508
unconed wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels. The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everyth…

What a fantastically bad take supported by no facts whatsoever. I like your graphics work but you should really think before you type this kind of a thing up.

Twitter went from a 4.9k headcount in Dec 2019, to 7.5k in Dec 2021. Fact.

I don't care if you "like my graphics work" or not. You seem to be implying I owe you something, which is crazy. I have been publishing stuff online for decades and I can tell you, judgy and entitled people such as yourself have _never_ done anything useful in return.

What's amazing is you chastizing me for a "bad post", even as you dispute something you could've googled in 5 seconds.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#907

Post by onion2k »

tomatocracy wrote: post #879
onion2k wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current state of Twitter seems to indicate there's a significant problem with the code, which implies the people who would have either spotted that before it was deployed or fixed it quickly afterwards, are unable to do so. Given the number of layoffs and resignations Occam's Razor would suggest the reason is because those people aren't available to do that work. We don't kmow it's true but it is a likely explana…

But these are "significant problems with the code" which evidently can't be fixed by simply reverting relevant changes. In that case, it seems more likely to me that these are due to long-standing issues which would have caught up to the company sooner or later.

which evidently can't be fixed by simply reverting relevant changes

Rumors suggest that part of the change is moving from GCP to something else. Something like can't be reverted without signing a new contract with Google (and paying the bill..).

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#910

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

paxys wrote: post #898
Johnny555 wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone pointed out that it looks like most of the workers that stayed at Twitter appear to be foreign born and are probably reliant on Twitter's sponsorship of their H1-B visa. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7z5px/twitter-employees-on-...

How many Twitter engineers are on H-1B? 10%? 50%? 90%? Unless someone can find this number out for real, why is the default argument "they are all being held captive and cannot leave"? Would you apply the same logic to Tesla and SpaceX, who have the same working conditions? Here's a more reasonable take - engineers believe in the product they are building and are happy with the salary they get.

Twitter workforce is down ~80%: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.masslive.com/business/2023/...

Facebook was reportedly ~15% H1B workers. It doesn't take a lot of skew in who was fired and who didn't leave for other employment for Twitter to be >50% H1B at the moment.

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