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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#821

Post by Topfi »

praisewhitey wrote: post #355
Topfi wrote: post #126

Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement. Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof. I can of…

>Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement. In this case the horrible idea is being forced to push changes to production at a moments notice

Yes, that is very much true. Even if, as some have commented, the people remaining at Twitter lack oversight over the entire codebase to predict that this specific change could have such a knock-on effect, not having testing and staging environments, pushing something straight to production, would give even an inexperienced person pause for thought.

As said, I don't want to speculate whether someone raised their voice on this being a likely outcome specifically, as not having testing prior to release is the much more obvious and significant issue here, driven by leadership.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#822

Post by Shorel »

Topfi wrote: post #126

Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement. Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof. I can of…

It's just another requirement. I don't see anything terrible or even bad with the requirement itself. Rate limiting is the new normal, in a post ChatGPT world. The implementation, of course, is atrocious and should be corrected. You are putting your opinion over the requirements of the job, and basically guaranteeing a bad outcome and an atrocious implementation. Maybe you can share your stories about real bad decisions, so we can judge properly, but so far this is not a good overview.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#823

Post by dbeley »

TheHappyOddish wrote: post #668
agonz253 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting the personality of the owner aside, they have been running an experiment for the last few months on how to operate a tech company, overworking your engineers and treating them like replaceable automata. Do you want them to succeed and set that as an example for others to follow?

Every social network and large tech company has awful people running it? And I'm yet to see anything beyond "an anonymous source" on this apparent overworking. If you work for a large US tech company, you are replacable automata. How do people not know this? Am I the crazy one here?

Every CEO of the top tech companies would be fired for the kind of controversy Musk has monthly.

Musk gets away with it because he's the owner but most social media and tech companies aren't led by this awful people.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#824

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

vuln wrote: post #419
readyplayernull wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could someone report the error at press@twitter.com and see what they think about it?

Quite the knee slapper. Thanks. I hope you didn’t spend many brain cycles on it.

Do you think it's more or less funny than auto-replying to all PR enquiries with poo, when you are an incredibly large company?

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#825

Post by martin8412 »

in_cahoots wrote: post #581
williamsmj wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is like a case study in what happens when you fire everyone except the sycophants and yes-men. The initial and biggest waves of layoffs last year were of people who hadn’t yet had a chance to demonstrate whether they were or were not sycophants. They were essentially random.

I don’t think that’s true at all. Elon allowed any employee who wanted to quit with three months’ severance. Anyone who wasn’t a true believer and had options could have quit.

Last I checked, he hadn't paid a single dime of that promised severance.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#826

Post by olalonde »

tsimionescu wrote: post #808
olalonde wrote: post #720

It's an interesting theory but the DDoS predates the decision to disable anonymous access. In fact, that decision was taken in order to mitigate an ongoing DDoS[0][1]. So while it's possible that the questionnable web front end retry logic is not helping things, it's not the root cause. [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 > Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much tha…

That is a post-backlash claim by Elon Musk, so it should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

It seems more plausible than the alternative. Let's say that Twitter availability issues were really caused by disabling anonymous access and that Elon wants to back out of his decision due to public backlash, wouldn't he just reverse the decision? That would fix both of his issues at once. He could even claim to have solved the scraping issues through a clever trick that doesn't require disabling anonymous access. The fact he hasn't done so indicates that there is a genuine issue that he can't just fix by restoring anonymous access.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#827

Post by guax »

pc_edwin wrote: post #790

Its funny how the entirety of silicon valley just forgot that Twitter was infamous for their unholy mess of a codebase which at some points looked like it had a secret mission to increase world entropy and terraform the planet. I still remember watching podcasts, reading blogposts, hearing prominent VC's like Elad talking about etc.. Now everbody silent because Elon is the baba yaga...

The difference is that Twitter was not arrogant about it. Saying they where hardcore engineers with insane working hours and other bollocks. Musk dislike comes from him being extremely dickish about other peoples work while being an absolute clusterfuck of a manager.

Twitter was not bad because of its tech. Musk made it worse.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#828

Post by smcl »

nwoli wrote: post #269

Seems like it might not even be a bug. Elon says they limited it to 600 viewed tweets per day which is an insane limit. Most people would go through that in 5 minutes of scrolling

5 minutes is maybe an exaggeration. I know that when Tweetbot reported I had >500 in my feed I had enough nonsense to read for a couple of 20 minute tram rides.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#829

Post by tsimionescu »

olalonde wrote: post #826
tsimionescu wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a post-backlash claim by Elon Musk, so it should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

It seems more plausible than the alternative. Let's say that Twitter availability issues were really caused by disabling anonymous access and that Elon wants to back out of his decision due to public backlash, wouldn't he just reverse the decision? That would fix both of his issues at once. He could even claim to have solved the scraping issues through a clever trick that doesn't require disabling anonymous access. T…

The theory is more that Elon wants to prevent public access to Twitter in hopes of making it more profitable, but he doesn't like the backlash to such cash grabs and has invented this story which makes the Auth requirement and non-paying account view quotas more palatable.

It's important to note that Twitter's desires are fundamentally at odds with the desires of the content creators on Twitter on this point. Twitter, ideally, wants to only show it's tweet to real people who will click on an ad, since it costs money to show tweets and bots or people who don't look at ads are not paying that money back. Creators on Twitter want their tweet to be shown to anyone at all, and will leave if they feel people just aren't seeing their tweets.

So, Twitter must walk a fine line when trying to restrict who can see their tweets, lest they alienate content creators. Inventing a common foe is a tried-and-true tactic for getting people to accept changes that hurt them.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#830

Post by littlestymaar »

paxys wrote: post #572
tmpz22 wrote: post #413

Can we please recognize that this is a holiday weekend and Elon rammed a big release forcing his engineers to come in and iterate multiple patches over the last 12 hours.

Twitter Engineers have had over a year to get out and find another job. At this point the terms of their employment and the expectations from their boss are all crystal clear. Hard to sympathize with those who continue to stick around for whatever reason.

Looking for a new job requires time and energy (especially at the moment) and these are scarce resources when you've been un constant crunch for the past 9 months…
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