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Thoughts about Twitter

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Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#181

Post by macmcirish »

infamouscow wrote: post #162
macmcirish wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s unfair to call out the first sentence of the argument, if you’re trying to persuade with several paragraphs of content and the very first sentence has a gross error, it transcends pedantry in my opinion. Rather, I think it makes the original argument look irrational if they have an extreme exaggeration if they have to use that to make their point.

It's a typo. There isn't some kind of grave epistemic problem with the first sentence where everything that follows is predicated on a falsehood. We don't discard the contents of books just because the publication has a typo.

As noted in their other reply, it is actually not a typo. A central part of their point is in that first sentence they note the extra eyes on marginalized people making more money than other marginalized people, but it’s blown out to being extremely exaggerated.

So yes, I think there is a “grave epistemic problem” with the first sentence that hurts the argument and its credibility as a whole, without having to get into the details of the argument itself.

That you called the first replier “stupid” or even their argument “stupid” is wholly unjustified.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#183

Post by throwaway82388 »

wnevets wrote: post #165
throwaway82388 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may or may not be true, it's all unclear. All I know for certain is that the people commenting have no idea either.

> That may or may not be true, it's all unclear. It has already been proven Twitter will stop being the Twitter its users have enjoyed for the past decade. You are free to argue Twitter will be better for it but there is absolutely no disputing the old Twitter is dead.

I haven't heard a single proclamation on this that isn't likely to be reversed at some point in the near future. People may quit using Twitter in protest and come back in a week. Or they may all leave for good. Or they may join mastodon, or whatever. Remember the mass Facebook departure to ello?

The point I was making is that nobody seems to think any particular thing, other than that which can be post-rationalized from their feelings, pro or anti Musk. The whole thing has the loosened-reality-grip feel of a culture war battle.

> Firing the leadership and a massive percentage of the workforce at once changes who the company is. I am not entirely sure why this needs to be explained.

Sure. QED. But not a point related to mine.

> That just means what you wrote is not related to anything I wrote

See parent post.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#184

Post by macmcirish »

ricardo81 wrote: post #163
macmcirish wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orders of magnitude are typically in log 10, 2^2 being 4 is in the same order of magnitude. The national average wage for the USA is roughly 70k according to a quick Google search, unless you’re suggesting the devs are making $4.9 billion per year I think you’re not using exponents correctly.

Quoted post unavailable.

Please don’t troll here.

If there is something that x is referring to that is not wage, then please enlighten us because I honestly cannot read it as any other way.

There are no realistic values of x for x^2 that work with this argument.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#185

Post by vineyardmike »

arein3 wrote: post #57
vineyardmike wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s too early to claim it’s dead but he’s right that it’s a coin toss to see if the service can stay running (without downtime). With 50% layoffs (and the rumors of how lax their security was) it’s only a matter of time before the on-call needed to save some issue won’t exist. A breach or bug or something is inevitable. Remember when meta -a far bigger and richer company- messed up basic networking and took the comp…

You need a few people to maintain the servers, not a few thousand people.

Maintain servers not maintain services. Twitter likely had thousands of services doing thousands of different things. At their scale yes you need to keep thousands of people on payroll at least to turn off all the “fluff”.

Even if you can refactor and simply their work to half the workload, you can’t do that within a week. Even the boring organizational stuff is crazy at this scale. They for sure slashed whole teams at once. Who turned off those services? Or if they’re meant to be running, who owns them, organizationally? Where is the code living, what repo, what part of the code base, when something goes wrong, what metrics are being watched? Overnight teams had to become responsible for twice the code/services, potentially stuff they have never seen before. Bloated or not, that’s not easy.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#186

Post by mcrad »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #144
Levitz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which wouldn't be half as bad if it wasn't for the potential for echo chambers and tribalism fostering political radicalization. This seems to be a person that thinks that they had something beautiful and nice that contributed to the public sphere and doesn't realize that for many this event in which twitter may change drastically or die is a good thing either way. Then again if I was in a server room where 4chan, ki…

What political radicalization specifically are you concerned about?

blue anon - you know those brainwashed radicals that say government and SV has all the solutions.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#187

Post by wnevets »

throwaway82388 wrote: post #183
wnevets wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That may or may not be true, it's all unclear. It has already been proven Twitter will stop being the Twitter its users have enjoyed for the past decade. You are free to argue Twitter will be better for it but there is absolutely no disputing the old Twitter is dead.

I haven't heard a single proclamation on this that isn't likely to be reversed at some point in the near future. People may quit using Twitter in protest and come back in a week. Or they may all leave for good. Or they may join mastodon, or whatever. Remember the mass Facebook departure to ello? The point I was making is that nobody seems to think any particular thing, other than that which can be post-rationalized f…

Firing the leadership and a massive percentage of the workforce at once changes who the company is. I am not entirely sure why this needs to be explained.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#188

Post by ricardo81 »

macmcirish wrote: post #184
ricardo81 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Please don’t troll here. If there is something that x is referring to that is not wage, then please enlighten us because I honestly cannot read it as any other way. There are no realistic values of x for x^2 that work with this argument.

I'm not trolling. My basic point was that people in SV make orders of magnitude more money than the average person. But if we want to be pedantic, you don't know X so you can't refute.

If OP wants to say I don't know what exponents are, that's on them. The whole thing stands.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#189

Post by slantedview »

manmal wrote: post #137
slantedview wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s a cesspool of indignation, racism, faux wokeness > I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving. Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using. Either way, the point isn't how bad Twitter is in your personal opinion, the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse.

I was referring to the favorable state of Twitter OP was describing, which doesn’t hold up IMO. > Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using I‘m an ex heavy Twitter user. I primarily use it for keeping up to date with tech, but the signal/noise ratio is not great nowadays. I can see myself switching to Reddit and HN completely. > the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse That remains to…

The author is definitely projecting, but he's basing his projection on real signals: increases in hate speech, advertisers leaving, mastodon currently trending, etc.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#190

Post by vineyardmike »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #109
WorldMaker wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you don't think you need that much operations labor at scale (and I'm assuming you are drastically under-estimating Twitter's current scale), when you do a 50% layoff before you even know your exact bus factor and are assuming a 100x/1000x redundancy (somehow), what are the odds you lay off one of those "few" people that are critical to operations? How do you know you haven't thrown out the needles in that bi…

Software engineers: we’re engineers Also software engineers: be sure not to fire Ned or else the whole bridge might collapse

It’s not one bridge it’s thousands of bridges, it’s just not know how critical each bridge is. Or how critical it becomes when another one is down.

Look at all the other major engineering failures in history, it’s always small things (a gasket) on a bad day (too cold?) that somehow works day after day until one day it magically doesn’t and you get the Apollo incident. Everything goes catastrophic over tiny things. Imagine if NASA fired half their team before that incident. The only guy who knew the gasket can’t get cold might not still be there because Ned got laid off.

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