Twitter was down • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter was down

#261

Post by yakubin » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 6:21 PM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #236

O__________O wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s not pretend like Twitter has never had downtime, they literally popularized the “Fail Whale” meme way before Elon was around: - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-s...

Yes, but my recollection is that the whale fail was usually due to huge growth or unprecedented traffic peaks. I don't think Twitter is growing at a fast rate any longer.

> my recollection is that the whale fail was usually due to huge growth or unprecedented traffic peaks

My recollection is that around ~2011 a day without a fail whale was the odd one out.

Re: Twitter was down

#262

Post by runarberg » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 6:21 PM UTC

MrOwnPut wrote: post #230

runarberg wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People should be allowed to work how they want to I disagree. There is a race to the bottom and a tragedy of the commons. A company could easily exploit this by gamifying the work and hiring workers with addictive tendencies. Most national labor laws and labor contracts set a maximum number of daily and weekly working hours for a reason. Workplace safety is only one of those reasons.

Safety laws are fine, we're talking about a person saying they enjoyed a late night coding session.

Yes, and if they do, there is a risk of company exploiting that person and their co-workers for underpaid labor. One worker’s enjoyment of work does not justify this risk.

Re: Twitter was down

#263

Post by random314 » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 6:21 PM UTC

stronglikedan wrote: post #244

paxys wrote: post #151

There were many different hypotheses on the outcome of Elon firing 80%+ of Twitter employees: 1. The site would crash and burn the next day. 2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around. 3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various s…

A simple and short lived glitch does not a #3 make. Twitter is better than ever now. Elon did good.

This is one of several different glitches and downtime seen this year.

A revenue collapse of 40% with a surge in fake verified profiles does not make Twitter better than ever. It is crazy to see a sudden sharp 40% revenue decline being described as better than ever.

Re: Twitter was down

#264

Post by James_Henry » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 6:21 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #252

munk-a wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't really been able to read anything on twitter for a while now as I run noscript by default and haven't deigned to whitelist twitter. I remain astounded by how much their product has declined (even pre-Musk acquisition) from their glory days of being so light weight that they were used to organize protests when governments would clamp down on internet access.

Mileage varies. For me, Twitter’s user experience hasn’t changed noticeably.

Is it working for you today?

Re: Twitter was down

#265

Post by libraryatnight » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 6:21 PM UTC

stronglikedan wrote: post #244

paxys wrote: post #151

There were many different hypotheses on the outcome of Elon firing 80%+ of Twitter employees: 1. The site would crash and burn the next day. 2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around. 3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various s…

A simple and short lived glitch does not a #3 make. Twitter is better than ever now. Elon did good.

[flagged]

Re: Twitter was down

#266

Post by chimeracoder » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 6:22 PM UTC

O__________O wrote: post #258

sneak wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk claims often that Twitter engagement numbers are at record highs. I don't believe these are lies.

At the very least per tweet it’s possible to see really view patterns, which to my knowledge what’s possible before.

> At the very least per tweet it’s possible to see really view patterns, which to my knowledge what’s possible before.

Those numbers have been proven to be incorrect, by people who are posting from locked accounts with 0 followers racking up large nonzero view counts within a few minutes.

Re: Twitter was down

#267

Post by RC_ITR » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 6:22 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #250

paxys wrote: post #151

There were many different hypotheses on the outcome of Elon firing 80%+ of Twitter employees: 1. The site would crash and burn the next day. 2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around. 3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various s…

Interesting to me that when Twitter was ascendant the same predictions of doom were not made so frequently when the fail whale was a regular occurrence. It's possible Twitter didn't need to be spending all the money they were to be maintaining five nines or whatever, given the shift in product focus (humans and not a general/universal message bus - bots can't @-mention anymore, etc). Given that they are unprofitable,…

> Given that they are unprofitable, if I were a shareholder I would be upset if I did not see experiments being run to see how much cost can be cut and where.

Twitter will never get to $44bn market cap again (much less a valuation with a decent IRR) by cutting costs alone. They need to grow way more than they need to cut costs.

If any of those experiments lead to less growth (which I’d argue is true of a broken Tweetdeck), then they are wholly not worth it.

Re: Twitter was down

#268

Post by emilsedgh » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 6:22 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #151

There were many different hypotheses on the outcome of Elon firing 80%+ of Twitter employees: 1. The site would crash and burn the next day. 2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around. 3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various s…

4. Something in between? In short term we'll see some issues but overall nothing important will change and these downtimes and small issues are a justifiable cost for letting such massive cut in the payroll.

Re: Twitter was down

#269

Post by xwdv » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 6:23 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #151

There were many different hypotheses on the outcome of Elon firing 80%+ of Twitter employees: 1. The site would crash and burn the next day. 2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around. 3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various s…

4. The institutional knowledge is not gone, in the event of any massive catastrophe employees who previously worked at Twitter can return as “consultants” and charge very high rates to fix issues as they occur. It’s pay as you go.

Re: Twitter was down

#270

Post by vkou » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 6:23 PM UTC

vanjajaja1 wrote: post #93

renewiltord wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you land on the bets? It appears that when Twitter goes down, its engineers were indispensable but when it's up, it's because the engineers foresaw this. Given those factors, how long it stays up must be an interesting combination of how indispensable the engineers made themselves vs how much foresight they had.

Exactly right, which is why this whole saga is so irritating to watch. The commentary is heavily biased and its exhausting to filter back to neutral. I just want to know the impact of many engineers leaving

You're not going to know that impact, because most of the technical problems that Twitter as a company can have aren't even visible to us.

Sure, images and hyperlinks breaking and not paying the Slack bill and Musk having another mental break makes the front page of hacker news, but will a spam and abuse detection pipeline being silently busted for 3 months do that? A reporting backend that was providing advertisers with incorrect data on their ad spend? Some customer-relations workflow that ruined the week of a group of TAMs, and had revenue impact?

Twitter is a big ship. There are more places things can break than anyone, inside or outside it can imagine. But as an outside observer, the only signal that we can act on is 'Has the ship sunk? Or is it floating?'

Observing that binary state answers a question, but not the question of 'Is the ship working well?'