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Twitter was down

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Re: Twitter was down

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some part of my brain immediately replied to this with the theory "what if those view counts are real and Twitter's just kind of ignoring whether an account is locked now" and damn that is a hell of a possibility to ponder.

There's another plausible theory that the just implemented it by counting database reads. So of course a locked test account will have more reads every time you look .

> There's another plausible theory that the just implemented it by counting database reads. So of course a locked test account will have more reads every time you look.

It'll have one, maybe two more reads every time you look. Not dozens. One person posted an example that had literally over a hundred alleged "views" within a minute, despite not refreshing their timeline after posting the tweet.

Re: Twitter was down

#362
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is fine? Not sure what this means…

Reddit crashes almost weekly it seems. Search is completely broken. The site's UI (new, not old.reddit) is truly atrocious.

Search is and always has been broken on Reddit. I think it’s intentional, because nothing can be so bad for so long in accident.

Re: Twitter was down

#363
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is what non-tech people said. #2 is what hardcore Elon fans said. #3 was always the most likely prediction and is what any actual tech engineer should have said.

certainly not all of them https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33498116

Should have.

Re: Twitter was down

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I blocked him and I don't see his posts any more. What did you try to do? I'm the opposite of an Elon fan, but so many people don't seem to know how to actually use social media. Who/what you follow and who you block can completely change your experience.

Social media growth is all about recommendations and algorithms, people actually curating their network a la 2010 facebook is dead, so your idea of "how to use social media" is also aligned with completely not knowing how to make a growing social media platform where almost >99% of users are consumers and automatically are recommended things and curate their experience implicitly. People do not want to manually do anything for the most part.

Re: Twitter was down

#365
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know some of the former Twitter engineers, and they were great engineers. I'm sure they built a fairly resilient system. But at the scale and complexity, eventually you hit an unforeseen error that requires some institutional knowledge to fix, and it's doubtful they still have that, unless the ex-engineers loved the product so much they are willing to take phone calls from the people that are left and point them in…

>I don't think we landed on a time frame. I'm actually surprised it stayed up this long. How much to get in on this? Seems like free money if you thought the time frame was that early.

The problem with bets with strangers is counterparty risk. The counterparty cannot prove that they will fulfill in the loss scenario, which makes it a guaranteed loss. Bets with friends don't have that problem, since the bet is usually either cash-free or for such a small value that retaining the friendship is more important.

Re: Twitter was down

#366
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And that's what might eventually kill it.

It seems really unlikely to die from a single spectacular failure, where a key bit of infrastructure dies and just cannot be brought back online for any amount of love or money.

A steady drip of annoying but individually minor issues will gradually chase people away: more spam and less relevant recommendations discourage users; bad spend data and fewer account reps make it a lower priority for advertisers. Twitter's main value prop is its network effect, and if a few people leave (or even engage less) every issue, that value will wither away....

Re: Twitter was down

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't fire or alienate hordes of engineers with firm-specific talent. Especially for a product/service as mature as Twitter.

Or else your site for logged out users will go down for an hour? What was the reason when Twitter went down pre-Elon? I really don't see the reason for this artificial drama. Do other "X service is down" threads go this way? People say Elon is dramatic, but this thread is honestly ridiculous and way more dramatic than anything I've seen him post.

The frequency and types of outages and failures is significantly more frequent now than pre-Elon. This isn't a surprise to anyone, given Elon's strategy for maintaining Twitter (or not maintaining it, as the case may be).

I don't interpret a lot of "drama" as you put it, but interest. Many observers here are in this field, and follow the "chaos engineering" discipline. Some of them use tools like "chaos monkey" that simulates a metaphorical monkey running through your server room turning off random things, to see how well your resilience systems cope. It's a rare and greatly interesting sight to such practitioners to get to see what happens when the monkey "disconnecting the more sensitive server racks" is a more literal one.

Re: Twitter was down

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not expired. That site is using the wrong cert (ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID). How odd.

Browsers still look at the commonName?.. Hasn't this field been deprecated since 2000?

CN/SAN. It amounts to the same thing.

They are serving the cert for "*.twimg.com" here.

Re: Twitter was down

#370
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is what non-tech people said. #2 is what hardcore Elon fans said. #3 was always the most likely prediction and is what any actual tech engineer should have said.

certainly not all of them https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33498116

I'd assume that person is group 2.
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