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Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

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Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#751
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to be more specific about the inaccurate parts and/or provide counterpoints (preferably with appropriate counter-evidence)?

Why? He’s not the one making claims. Do you have any idea how this works?

> He’s not the one making claims.

Yes. Do you?

> Do you have any idea how this works?

Counter-claims are claims that should be evidenced too.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I don't believe on that because Twitter is a billion dollar company and that kind of mistake is dumb. This sort of mistake is very common especially when a product is going through a period of change, so it seems very believable to me that recent rate limiting features (or older features that have not been used in a long time or maybe ever) on the backend hadn't been adequately tested to make sure there are no…

Very common for start ups with inexperienced devs, not for long standing tech companies with the best and most experienced employees... Isn't Elon supposed to know this shit himself? I guess we learned alot about the state of the company as well as elons own coding skills with this event, didn't we?

Even in “long standing tech companies with the best and most experienced employees” this sort of issue has been known to fall through the cracks. Twitter has experienced significant staffing changes, procedure changes, and code changes, recently and any one of those three things can exacerbate the chances of side-effects of changes not being realised until too late.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter does not trade right now.

Oh crap, you're right, I'm off the loop. So he just made it private?

It's private now, yes. Owned by Musk, Saudi Arabian investors, Jack Dorsey is in with 1 billion (which is now more like 1/3 of a billion) Elon loaned 13 billion of high interest loan from banks, in a leveraged buyout, which means now Twitter owns that debt of 13 billion and paying interest on it of 1 billion a year.

It's a rather dramatic situation.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very common for start ups with inexperienced devs, not for long standing tech companies with the best and most experienced employees... Isn't Elon supposed to know this shit himself? I guess we learned alot about the state of the company as well as elons own coding skills with this event, didn't we?

Even in “long standing tech companies with the best and most experienced employees” this sort of issue has been known to fall through the cracks. Twitter has experienced significant staffing changes, procedure changes, and code changes, recently and any one of those three things can exacerbate the chances of side-effects of changes not being realised until too late.

When you buy a company and your staff has had near complete turnover and your product significantly changes (at least in consumers eyes), are you actually the same company?

I'd say that shortly after Elon bought it twitter effectively became a start-up rather than an established company.

Arguing otherwise is like saying Xerox Park would have been the exact same institution even if all the staff were swapped with interns and management fundamentally change mission statements etc.....

Kind of absurd when framed that way, huh?

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#755
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly outside of the Youtube/Imgur I don't think these companies are unsustainable. The problem is the VCs are aiming for huge returns. Instead of focusing on their niche and running a lean but profitable business they are forced to chase trends and exponential growth. Who on Reddit wanted chat or live streams. Why is Facebook spending so much money on videos. does Uber really make any money off hellocopters rides…

Most of these companies seemingly were in a good place, and then started doing stupid pivots to try and make even more money than they already were. Reddit was doing fine as a text-only forum supported by advertising and Reddit Gold. Then they went a billion dollars in debt building the redesign which is widely disliked by power users (who are responsible for most of Reddit’s actual activity thanks to volunteer moder…

> After Twitch got big, they added livestreams, which didn’t go anywhere. After Discord got big, they added chat

I never heard of twitch as a non-streaming site and discord as a non-chat website.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean to tell me that you can't actually run a tech company with three engineers and a Mac Mini?

I mean, hat tip to the pie-acquisition engineers, Twitter has done better than I thought it would without maintenance.

I'm not terribly surprised. General rule of thumb is you devote 20% of your resources to KTLO. If you fire 50% of your staff, you can still keep the lights on, just the portion of new development fell from 80% of your capacity to 60%.

Now obviously firing entire teams changes that metric some. Probably why there's been some high profile outages like MFA. But most companies can sacrifice large portions of their workforce if they only want to maintain the status quo.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean to tell me that you can't actually run a tech company with three engineers and a Mac Mini?

Have you checked how many engineers Mastodon has? https://joinmastodon.org/de/about Four.

They are not involved in running your instance
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