Live data from Hacker News

Twitter down?

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 44 posts

Re: Twitter down?

#32
post #10

I swear, the way people panic when it drops off, Twitter is way more like a protocol than a website. It's like someone saying "Email is broken... Everywhere".

We've reached a dangerous point. Everybody in the world joining the internet combined with a lack of knowledge about how things work means the unwashed masses gravitate towards centralized services. Instead of building distributed competitive services on top of a distributed fault-tolerant bi-directional network, we have rampant mass centralization. Protocols and interoperability are dead.

We can now almost legitimately say "The Internet is down!" when AWS goes tits up. People can't get news from their favorite boy bands when mysql hoses twitter (for the 7,000th time).

I forgot my point. Anyway, go read http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked...

Re: Twitter down?

#34
post #10

I swear, the way people panic when it drops off, Twitter is way more like a protocol than a website. It's like someone saying "Email is broken... Everywhere".

I think Twitter is more like a protocol than a website; and frankly it's too important at this point to be left in the hands of Twitter Inc. I'd love to see a serious discussion about making it a community-owned standard on the same level with TCP/IP or SMTP. But I guess that could never happen in a free-enterprise-obsessed world -- unless, perhaps, Twitter proved itself to be such a bad steward that its users demanded some kind of "nationalization."

Re: Twitter down?

#35
post #10

I swear, the way people panic when it drops off, Twitter is way more like a protocol than a website. It's like someone saying "Email is broken... Everywhere".

I think Twitter is more like a protocol than a website; and frankly it's too important at this point to be left in the hands of Twitter Inc. I'd love to see a serious discussion about making it a community-owned standard on the same level with TCP/IP or SMTP. But I guess that could never happen in a free-enterprise-obsessed world -- unless, perhaps, Twitter proved itself to be such a bad steward that its users demand…

> I think Twitter is more like a protocol than a website; and frankly it's too important at this point to be left in the hands of Twitter Inc.

Yeah, what we really need is the same people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Post Office to take it away from the filthy profit-seekers who created it.

THAT will improve uptime AND innovation.

Re: Twitter down?

#36
post #10

I swear, the way people panic when it drops off, Twitter is way more like a protocol than a website. It's like someone saying "Email is broken... Everywhere".

I think Twitter is more like a protocol than a website; and frankly it's too important at this point to be left in the hands of Twitter Inc. I'd love to see a serious discussion about making it a community-owned standard on the same level with TCP/IP or SMTP. But I guess that could never happen in a free-enterprise-obsessed world -- unless, perhaps, Twitter proved itself to be such a bad steward that its users demand…

I believe app.net was recently pivoted to create this sort of a thing.

Re: Twitter down?

#37
post #10

I swear, the way people panic when it drops off, Twitter is way more like a protocol than a website. It's like someone saying "Email is broken... Everywhere".

I think Twitter is more like a protocol than a website; and frankly it's too important at this point to be left in the hands of Twitter Inc. I'd love to see a serious discussion about making it a community-owned standard on the same level with TCP/IP or SMTP. But I guess that could never happen in a free-enterprise-obsessed world -- unless, perhaps, Twitter proved itself to be such a bad steward that its users demand…

A decentralized twitter clone wouldn't be that hard; just mimic Email with subscriptions. The hard part is getting adoption.
Post reply on HN