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Twitter was down

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371–380 of 493 posts

Re: Twitter was down

#371
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's never sent a tweet, what did you get out of it Pre-SpaceJesus?

I quit Twitter when Elon took it over. It provided me with: Easy access to information and articles about breaking news events. Community. A feed of interesting articles and discussions. Enjoyment gained from following quickly evolving memes, discussions, and jokes. A way to verbalize incidental thoughts, and the pleasure of crafting those thoughts into small nuggets to share with my friends. Of course there are many…

All still present (positive and negative) on Twitter, plus the benefit to open-minded people of hearing opinions from all sides, which has improved post-Elon.

Re: Twitter was down

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I checked this morning, he was busy posting borderline sexist dad jokes: ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1632574090216103937 ) I still don't understand why every fifth post in my feed is an Elon tweet, I don't even follow him. I could block him but I find it interesting to see how much of his content is pushed toward me who hasn't asked for it.

He intentionally demanded the site be jury-rigged to force-feed everyone his posts regardless

It's unintentionally becoming a symbol of its downturn.

Re: Twitter was down

#373

In case people are wondering what this is about: All links and images are not working on twitter right now. Seems like they accidentally included their own services in the api blocklist? Sending best of luck to the engineers. The whole twitter saga has given me a good chunk of valuable "lesson learned" over the last weeks and months.. so thanks for that.

> Sending best of luck to the engineers. ... mostly around the hope they can jump ship before the Titanic pulls them under.

Why would you stay at Twitter? Even if you believe in the platform and the mission, this has to be one of the most stressful work environments in tech right now.

The only cases I can think of for staying:

- Unfortunate H-1Bs tied to the job. (We really need to make it easier for these folks to switch jobs and keep their visa!)

- A feeling one needs the job and can't easily get work elsewhere. Perhaps living paycheck to paycheck, haven't interviewed in awhile, imposter syndrome... (If you're worried you'd not be able to get hired, instead ask why you weren't fired.)

Re: Twitter was down

#374
post #250
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,…

> Interesting to me that when Twitter was ascendant the same predictions of doom were not made so frequently

... wait, they absolutely were, though? I remember at the time people saying that Twitter was doomed for this very reason, by analogy to Friendster, an early MySpace-ish/Facebook-ish thing which was never able to stay up.

It was a pretty common belief at the time that unreliable Twitter would be replaced by Pownce/Google Buzz/something entirely different.

Re: Twitter was down

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Source?

Many users have reported weird view counts on locked accounts with few or zero followers: https://twitter.com/search?q=Locked%20followers%20views&src=...

Re: Twitter was down

#376
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…

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...

I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality. People seem to be acting as if Twitter was good prior to 2022 until Musk ruined it, but my experience has always been that Twitter is awful, both from an engineering and content viewpoint.

Maybe it's because I use an Android, but I've always found the experience terrible. I get notifications, but when I click them and they don't take me anywhere; the back button is completely broken; mentions randomly don't produce any alerts; it resets me to the algorithmic timeline every few days; replies often fail to load; the spam problem is completely out of control and most adverts are irrelevant crypto-spam; search never finds what I wanted; it's constantly putting tweets on my timeline from people I don't follow; and the whole app seems optimised to produce as much hatred and outrage as possible. Nowhere on the planet is as toxic as a Twitter thread, and yet the media and political sphere collectively decided that reporting on and catering to Twitter spats is the most important aspect of their career.

Frankly, if Musk destroys Twitter, it might be the best thing he could do for society. I may be misremembering, but I thought that prior to Musk buying Twitter, everyone was decrying it as toxic and lots of people were suggesting the government should step in to reduce its influence. Now it seems to be imploding by itself, yet everyone's upset.

Re: Twitter was down

#377
post #269
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.

Most of those people will presumably have other jobs now, which would tend to preclude this. You do _not_ want to be in the position of begging employees you fired to come back as consultants; it's not at all as easy as you seem to think.

Re: Twitter was down

#378
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.

I’m in what is likely the top 1% of Reddit users by volume (I have a problem, send help), and I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about.

Further, as a dev of 15 years, I’m not even sure what you mean by “crash” here. Are you saying that Reddit serves exclusively 500s or timeouts for a sustained period of time on a weekly basis? Or that it serves more than zero 500s at some point during a given week? Or that you, personally, encounter an issue of any kind over a week?

So many ways to describe “crashes” that yeah, by some definitions it probably does, but “can’t use the service” such as what Twitter is experiencing, I don’t think that’s accurate.

Re: Twitter was down

#379

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.

>What was the reason when Twitter went down pre-Elon?

To use a tennis metaphor, good players minimize unforced errors and recover quickly from forced errors.

This is a very clear unforced error that could likely have been prevented by just waiting to roll out the new feature.

To extend the tennis metaphor, it would be like Serena Williams losing a set on 50 double faults. Sure, she's lost other sets before, but it would be notable for her to lose in such a unique way, even if she still went on to win the match.

That's why people are talking about this, it's a very weird way for a site to fail and it's interesting how it happened.

Re: Twitter was down

#380
post #310
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A lot of people are on H1Bs that don't have the luxury of quitting without solid work lined up. It's also not a great time to be looking for a job.

Jack Dorsey ought to raise a round (not that he needs it) and hire the remaining engineers for BlueSky.
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