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Twitter ‘smytes’ customers
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dmead 8y agonpm? that sounds way worse than the others
- threeseed 8y agoWe don't know what happened to the other ones though.
- gingernaut 8y agoIncredible. Shutting of API access to paying customers after a 30 minute heads up at 6AM. Astoundingly unprofessional.
- tomkinson 8y agolisten all y'all this is sabotage - such a good Bestie Boys song!
- sbr464 8y agoWow, who would do this, especially since all of the brands mentioned are probably also Twitter customers.
- pedalpete 8y agoThey're twitter users, unlikely twitter customers.
- sbr464 8y agoI assure you they are all paying for promoted tweets, ads, or using expensive social media tracking tools to monitor usage, respond to requests etc. in one way or another. Twitter is a pretty big part of any modern online company’s strategy, whether they like it or not.
- dvtrn 8y agoI'm fully prepared for whatever negativity comes with this comment because it's being asked from a place of genuine curiosity-but yes there some snark baked in: Does the rapacious acquisition game of Silicon Valley and seemingly increased rate of consolidation of startups to established giants feel weirdly like he days of Ma Bell to anyone else? It seems like more and more There's tales of these acqui-hires with promises that the aquirer will present some kind of "polished" alternative but under the larger brand and I've found quite frequently the promised offer-if ever shipped at all-is far less superior and far more self serving to the brand than what was previously offer by the acquired when they had more on the line by operating as a startup. Or am I just a cynic?
- bradhe 8y ago> seemingly increased rate of consolidation of startups to established giants Do you have any data to support increased acquisition rate?
- dvtrn 8y agoNot much by way of a published study if that's what you're after, just a supposition if I'm being completely honestly. Welcome to being wrong on this if some good soul does have the data on this, though. It's why I asked, maybe someone has research that would prove me wrong and I'll gladly take being corrected on the matter.
- seanp2k2 8y agoYeah, I feel that way too. Like, every company whose products / services I liked that got acquired never released another interesting product or service. Dropcam is one that I can think of, nest is another which is related. Microsoft buying Wunderlist also seems like it’s only leading to Wunderlist getting shut down. CoreOS sold to RedHat and while I have my doubts, this sounds good: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/coreos-user/GR4YlF2c1dM https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/coreos-user/GR4YlF... (but don’t these kinds of messages always paint a rosy picture of the future?). We’ll see what happens to CoreOS. EDIT: just remembered WhatsApp. This happened recently: https://www.cnet.com/news/whatsapp-founders-may-have-left-1-3-billion-behind-in-their-facebook-breakup/ https://www.cnet.com/news/whatsapp-founders-may-have-left-1-... and it doesn’t seem like them selling did anything positive for their product or customers, only their bank accounts. Seems like they couldn’t even wait for FB to open up the golden handcuffs. Anyone have examples where the acquired company goes on to be really amazing, on a trajectory that they wouldn’t have had access to without the big injection of funding from the acquiring company? I can’t name any, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there.
- astonex 8y agoWhat the hell are npm doing that this caused a prod outage. Either way, really poor from Smyte. No reason to immediately turn off access
- sbr464 8y agoI could imagine (just guessing): submit new repo -> scan with Smyte -> on success, publish repo. Maybe not handling an error properly and skipping Smyte. This problem creeps up with external mfa/2 factor auth APIs that go down, bringing down the main login. Some choose to skip mfa if down, some don’t
- astonex 8y agoIt's the not handling an API failure correctly that surprises me. That seems like it'd be quite common
- cwyers 8y agoI mean, sometimes handling an API failure correctly is failing over. If an API call actually matters, then when the API stops responding, throw an error. Even if you're probably catching that and giving out an error message, I'd still call that a production outage.
- astonex 8y agoWe have a differing opinions on what outage means then. Catching the error and showing it to the user is obviously the right thing to do, but not what I'd call an outage.
- drchickensalad 8y agoI can't say I've ever met a developer who thinks that a 100% error rate to valid requests isn't an outage. Not sure why you have such a strong view of your semantics.
- 8y ago
- benatkin 8y ago"Smyte" would be a good name for something that kicks users off a social network in a dystopian novel. "Smite" appears dozens of times in the Bible and means to strike someone, sometimes fatally.
- shakna 8y ago> Indiegogo, GoFundMe, npm, Musical.ly, TaskRabbit, Meetup, OLX, ThredUp, YouNow, 99 Designs, Carousell, and Zendesk Half an hour of warning, to screw over all of these? They broke npm's user sign-ups, and publishing of packages, with half an hour of warning. I can't imagine the havoc over at Zendesk either. That is not 'winding down'. That's ghosting.
- jquery 8y agoMore companies than that, and large ones. These are just the ones that went public... some of them don't want you to know their trust/safety/moderation features just went dark. Smyte just ruined a lot of people's day(s).
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoTwitter. Twitter just ruined a lot of people’s days.
- chris_wot 8y agoTwitter has ruined a lot of people's days for a long time now. Especially in the Trump era. Nothing new here!
- workinthehead 8y agoNot sure why you are being downvoted since Twitter has a well-established history of pulling the rug out from under people who depend on it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kentonv 8y agoNo. Smyte had a responsibility to its customers, and should not have entered into any deal that did not include some reasonable wind-down plan.
- kaeawc 8y agoWe had 20 minutes notice, and then everyone was kicked out of the Slack support channel and API responses simply died. What the actual fuck. They have mobile client SDKs out in the wild that are now just eating up battery life as they retry an impossible query forever.
- brazzledazzle 8y agoShockingly bad. I wonder if they shitcanned the whole technical team and they turned the lights off on the way out. Not that it’s really much better but at least it wouldn’t make sense.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hsaliak 8y agoAnd there will be absolutely no consequence to these actions. Completely messed up!
- bdfsvbyudflsvg 8y agoOh please. Don't pretend that battery destroying, relentlessly network hogging apps are a good thing. No app should retry an impossible query forever. This is not the same as some sort of laughable abstinence-only birth control policy, where you get to roll your eyes, and say "yeah right. good luck with that." What's more, an app that hits the network of an uncontrollable third party, should always check with a controlled system periodically, to verify that the third party shall continue to respond predictably, as a sanity check. And beyond even that, if the sanity check within your own domain, for your own app that you created, and are responsible for, is unresponsive, it really should cripple the app's connections to things you don't control. Finally, as one last safety measure, if your status/activation end point dies, and your native apps go dormant, you should expect to be able to re-activate them with a number of channels, including emails, push notifications and new releases that up-version the app. If you build your kingdom within a walled garden to begin with, and rent all your tools of the trade from an external platform, expect to behave as a subsistence farmer.
- jasontan 8y ago
- sergiotapia 8y agolmao this is hilarious. Never seen something like this happen with such a large company. Let's hope the codebases out there had a simple integration with Smyte and the change to that "smyte" filter was fast. Crikey!
- r3vrse 8y agoIn the next installment of "How To Make A Successful Exit While Not Give A Flying Füçk About Your Existing Customer Base Or Industry Rep. That Got You There 101" Is anyone else as tired of this schism of material gain over all other considerations? If the tech industry wants to end up with the same ill repute as Wall Street this is certainly the right way to go about it.
- iamdave 8y agoThis is it? I've often considered the abuse of 1099 workers to be the thing that one day catches up with tech as a precursor to its own "Enron" moment. Maybe it'll be both.
- r3vrse 8y agoHow visible is that issue though? How likely to be digested by the masses? "Tech company takes money and screws over customers" is a headline that writes itself.
- Endy 8y agoAbuse of 1099 independent contractors is pretty much endemic to every large industry and profession in the US, though. The tech sector isn't going to get called out on it before sales, etc. It's just "the way it is", because the IC regs are almost entirely in the employer's favor financially. And since the capitalists have the money, the rest of us are unable to influence the government with the same net effect.
- Zarel 8y agoHm, one of the tweets mentions a "3 year contract". A contract means two parties agree to something, with penalties if they don't do what they agree to, right? Couldn't they sue Smyte/Twitter or something?
- sbr464 8y agoUsually there are terms on acquisitions deeply nested in contracts.
- glangdale 8y agoUsually those terms involve "keeping the lights on". I imagine Twitter will just pay people off, which eases a lot of pain.
- Endy 8y agoThat depends on how the contracts are written and whether Smyte continue as a company on its own or just as a software product of Twitter.
- mullingitover 8y agoI'd really like names to be named here, so everyone knows who never to do business with in the future.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- qbaqbaqba 8y agoTwitter
- zaarn 8y agoBasically, don't do business with Twitter. Don't give them your data, don't sell your ads on twitter, don't develop for Twitter. There are alternatives.
- ry_ry 8y agoin twitter's case the closest alternative is standing in a crowded street, barking disjointed sentences at passers by in the hope somebody acknowledges you.
- zaarn 8y agoWell, there is mastodon/pleroma/fediverse, in which case you are standing in a less crowded street in your neighboor casually barking disjointed sentences and vaguely familiar passers.
- Rjevski 8y agoDo you actually need to bark at passers-by, or do you think you need just because every other dog is doing it? Replacing Twitter is simple. Have a proper support channel (Intercom, etc) so your customers don’t need Twitter to get support from you, and use your existing marketing tools (email, push notifications, etc) to keep in touch with them. Done.
- FrozenVoid 8y agoThis is incredibly fragile ecosystem if one obscure API getting shutdown causes so much damage. This could be prevented by a simple periodic check that would determine if API is available and some fail-safe alternative to remain online. Instead this is like a house of cards that breaks with any of the cards fold. I'm not excusing the abrupt shutdown, its obviously a wrong way to end service, but being prepared for it is much better.
- im3w1l 8y agoI can see cases where you want an anti-abuse system to "fail closed".
- sethammons 8y agoWhen I work on systems, I ask, "how does it scale and how does it fail?" Everything I work on considers handling of failure cases, especially 3rd party APIs. I'm surprised by how many people assume that the network will just work and their provider will be available.
- necubi 8y agoThis is a hard call when the system is question is your anti-abuse provider. If you "fail open" when they're down, you risk allowing a flood of bad users during outages. Depending on your business, that may be much worse than having an outage yourself. (Disclaimer: I work for a smyte competitor).
- FrozenVoid 8y agoYou can turn on something like manual verification of new users, an alternative security service, or just temporary halt new account registration. All of which don't result in system wide failure. Even a few abusive users is a small and temporary cost to absorb vs complete outage.
- krainboltgreene 8y agoAh, yes, just the casual manual verification of checks notes a fire hose of data.
- saudioger 8y agoBased on this I assume the Smyte founders were retiring on a tropical island before the ink even dried.
- eganist 8y agoDoes anyone inside Twitter know who the executive was who pulled the trigger on this decision? There's no way this person knew the gravity of accepting the risk for blowing this many high-profile customers out of the water all at once. I'm pretty accustomed to executives making dreadful decisions without the approval/acceptance of other stakeholders within said person's firm. I'd rather know who made this error and not interact with that specific person's department rather than stop doing business (e.g. large ad-buys) with Twitter as a whole. I don't want this to be a witch-hunt so much as I want the person to just come forward and own the decision, because unless they have an exceptionally good reason for it, it comes off as absurdly high-risk to both Twitter-the-business as well as to all the clients who've likely written serious penalties into their contracts for events like this, which again brings that business risk back full-circle to... Twitter.
- cosmicexplorer 8y agoI work at twitter and wasn’t able to find out immediately, but have been collecting responses like these + the article and communicating with someone who knows what to do. I only found out about this over twitter and I am personally deeply frustrated and working to understand whatever led to this.
- kaeawc 8y agoSorry to hear that, can imagine the frustration.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ta1357 8y agoI don't really think there's any polite way to put this: Your employers are simply assholes.
- dang 8y agoThis is the sort of informationless pile-on comment that damages HN regardless of what you're talking about. Please don't post those here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jarfil 8y ago"trust and safety as a service" So... what was the Service Level Agreement? and the Terms Of Service? People get all hyped by -aaS stuff, but services do go down, and if you aren't the one controlling when and how they will go up, then you better have a contract with the Service Provider on some terms you like. Even then, prepare for when they go down, because they will sooner or later, for shorter or longer periods of time. I find it silly to rely on some service, any external service, so much that if it goes down it would cause a prod outage.
- lainga 8y agoWelcome to the world of third-party Twitter clients. Not content with screwing over businesses relying on Twitter's API, it seems, they have now set out to screw over any company relying on any other third-party API as well.
- pvg 8y agoI find it silly to rely on some service, any external service This is always trotted out and it's, by this point, a completely content-free thing to say. Short of removing yourself from the economy and society in general to live off potatoes grown in your own dung, you're going to rely on some external services and the fact that, for the most part, the parties you do business with will behave responsibly. When they behave very irresponsibly, unpleasant things happen and people quite reasonably complain.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bastawhiz 8y agoExactly. You want reliable CAPTCHAs? CDN service? Malware detection? Customer support software? Website uptime monitoring? Accounting software? Analytics? Email delivery? Good luck building and running all that yourself.
- im3w1l 8y agoAll of those can be bought and then self hosted except for CDN.
- rememberlenny 8y agoIf you're looking for a Smyte replacement, check out Koko. It's AI for content moderation and classification, developed at the MIT MediaLa. https://www.koko.ai https://www.koko.ai
- ungzd 8y agoAnother SaaS that may suddenly stop functioning tomorrow.
- gant 8y agoSolid track record. Especially the part about spamming suicidal people on Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/SuicideWatch/comments/5jin1q/warning_if_you_get_a_pm_from_uitskokobot_please/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SuicideWatch/comments/5jin1q/warnin... https://www.reddit.com/r/SuicideWatch/comments/5x60f0/update_on_the_warning_about_pms_from_koko/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SuicideWatch/comments/5x60f0/update...
- jnbiche 8y agoUnless it turns out that Twitter blatantly lied to Smyte's founders regarding how they would shut down the service, I personally will never use any service or software that these founders create in the future. This is absolutely unbelievable, even for Twitter. [I've removed the founders' names, even though I strongly disagree with the characterization that I was somehow acting out of rage. My intent was rather consumer advocacy. I've had a service cut off in a similar way, and I view such behavior as being unethical. Fine if you disagree, but please don't characterize my emotional state that led to this post (which itself is in violation of HN's admonition to "Assume good faith")]
- narendranag 8y agoSeconded.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- duxup 8y agoBut you'll use Twitter? Kinda a weird dynamic there don't you think?
- jnbiche 8y agoOh, I've long since learned not to depend on Twitter for anything critical or business related. The thing is about Smyte is that it was a b2b SaaS with paying customers, not a consumer social media company. People justifiably have certain expectations when they pay for a serious b2b SaaS that they don't have for a free social media service.
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoI like to use Twitter from a distance. Like a street brawl. It's fascinating to watch, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to get involved. Too messy.
- 8y ago
- lilyball 8y agoGiven that these businesses had contracts with Smyte, how is this not a flagrant violation of the contracts? Surely Twitter took on Smyte's contractual obligations when they acquired the startup?
- noobermin 8y agoIt is in fact a possibility that Smyte's terms were extremely one-sided.
- gnicholas 8y agoPerhaps the default terms were Smyte-friendly, but I can't imagine that some of these big companies (with savvy lawyers) would sign an agreement with a change-of-control provision that would permit this. There might be a carveout for consequential damages (which would be huge here), but this seems like it will trigger a number of sizable lawsuits against Smyte's new owner.
- marcus_holmes 8y agoThis is the thing that occurred to me. Surely those contracts don't have a clause that says "Smyte can terminate all services with no notice"? If so, surely someone spotted it by now? Or is this normal in service contracts in the US? I guess the liability is covered by the usual "no liability outside provision of the service" clause - so you can't claim that you were damaged by their lack of service. But I can see a lawyer making a convincing case that the liability should rest with Smyte. IANAL, obviously, but it seems like the sort of thing they love to fight about ;) gets popcorn this one will be interesting...
- DannyBee 8y agoThere are many ways to accomplish this, for example, doing it as an asset purchase instead of acquiring all the stock. In the former, you can take the assets (including employee contracts) without the liabilities. There's actually a reasonable quora answer (for once) on this, saving me from writing it up for you :) https://www.quora.com/What-happens-to-legal-contracts-financial-obligations-and-employee-agreements-during-an-acquisition https://www.quora.com/What-happens-to-legal-contracts-financ...
- flukus 8y agoThe screwed over themselves as soon as the decided to rely on third party SaaS solutions for core infrastructure. How many more examples do we need for this to sink in?
- ishi 8y agoI assume that in the real world you grow your own food, generate your own electricity, dig up your own wells for water, and knit your own clothes? Companies have to rely on other companies for critical services, just like we do in the real world.
- flukus 8y agoFood and clothing aren't services they are once off purchases that you own, these are more like buying the software and self hosting it than SaaS. Electricity and water are heavily regulated and often government owned, not run by Silicon Valley cowboys.
- rcthompson 8y agoI don't want to make assumptions about your metabolism, but I find that I actually need to eat food on a fairly regular basis, to the point that I would not characterize it as a "once off" purchase.
- flukus 8y agoWhen I need more food I'll make another once off purchase. If the place that had lunch today has boarded up it's windows tomorrow I'll just eat somewhere else. If I bought that food from a supermarket it doesn't disappear from my pantry when the supermarket closes down. My food supply is a self organising network that can route around any single point of failure. This is about as far removed from SaaS as you can get.
- JackCh 8y agoIf the company I buy food from decides to ghost all their customers with 30 minutes notice, I can walk a block in the opposite direction and buy food from a completely different company. And I can walk a block further and buy food from yet another company. Any of these companies vanishing into thin air would only cost me a 10 minutes of my time at most.
- _jal 8y agoThat's really amazing - I am having great difficulty imagining a situation in which doing this would make sense. Just for starters, even if you completely discount goodwill, ethics or even PR, I'm guessing Twitter just bought a bunch of lawsuits. This just seems nuts.
- Endy 8y agoWhile this should be upsetting, and I'm sure it was to the people who were affected, I'm actually happy to see it. I'm of the mindset that this will have an overall positive effect on the state of the Web. Why? Because users and devs both need to remember that companies are not friends, and contracts are only as enforceable as the courts will allow. Imagine if Google decided that tomorrow at 6AM PT they were pulling the plug on YouTube embedding, or GMail / GDrive integrations. The court's going to say, "They put in the contract that they can change the terms of service at any time, and they're not liable for outages or lack of service. And you signed it. Sucks for you." Then again, I'm just anti-corp in general and this gives me better reason to avoid Twitter.
- bastawhiz 8y agoThere's a difference between Google turning off a feature and Google cutting off a whole service. This is the kind of thing negotiated with contracts. Lawyers on both sides. If you build your business around another company, you protect yourself. Twitter with surely get sued for this, if for no reason other than failure to provide a service that they promised to customers in writing. Thankfully, your flavor of cynicism generally does not apply in situations like this where many tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars are at stake.
- busterarm 8y ago> Thankfully, your flavor of cynicism generally does not apply in situations like this where many tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars are at stake. This will be how it turns out for a few big players with deep enough pockets. Surely though this is hurting somebody's business that can't afford the lawsuit -- potentially to the point of putting them out of business. That's good for Twitter (and especially Twitter, as precarious as they are). We've all joked for years about how FAANG pay their engineers so much mostly to keep other companies from being able to hire great engineers. We've gotten the big three slapped for colluding against their employees on wages. Why do you think they would engage in some anti-competitive business practices and not others?
- 8y ago
- a_lieb 8y agoI feel like there must be more to this story. Maybe they immediately saw security problems, or legal issues. Not saying it's going to exonerate Twitter (maybe the truth is even worse than it sounds), but this is such an obvious PR mess that I can't see them doing it for no reason.
- pishpash 8y agoThat they didn't notice during due diligence?
- rrcaptain 8y agoPerhaps they still wanted the company for some reason? Someone knows. Time will tell most likely.
- jamesmiller5 8y agoThe @HelloSmite Twitter account stopped abruptly on June 4th after daily posts in May. I postulate more than few roles were halted at that time.
- nstj 8y agoI may have just stumbled in to the middle of this, but why the brouhaha? Did customers pre-pay for Smyte service and not receive it?
- shakna 8y agoSome customers had 3 years left in their contracts. Some customers were huge, like npm. Everybody got 30mins before lights out. It broke stuff.
- 6nf 8y agoDid you read the article?
- danso 8y agoFTA: > According to reports from those affected, Smyte disabled access to its API with very little warning to clients, and without giving them time to prepare. Customers got a phone call, and then – boom – the service was gone. Clients had multi-year contracts in some cases.
- msla 8y agoWell, you know what they say: If you aren't paying for it, you aren't the customer, you're the product.
- nstj 8y agoAs a group response to the sibling comments I'll point out that yes I read the article, but my question related to something which the article didn't cover: did anyone lose prepaid services from their contracts? I can't see this being discussed in any of the coverage of the Smyte acquisition.
- noobermin 8y agoTell me again how the silicon valley system works and works well at what it does. Create a product, gather funding. Attract customers. Get acquired, founders make bank. New owners trash the product, stranding customers. Tell me again how this is good system not for only making money but actually providing value to customers.
- adventured 8y agoPeople are so shocked by this precisely because it's an extremely abnormal way to do business, which demolishes your chip-on-the-shoulder premise. You're using a rare occurrence (thus the shock), to extrapolate that it applies exactly the same to the majority of Silicon Valley.
- rhizome 8y agoAcquisitions are pretty much always bad for the acquired company and its employees.
- jakoblorz 8y agoHow so? Aquisitions happen all the time, many of them improve the product / processes, embrace the VP!
- ta1234567890 8y agoGoing off on a tangent here, but it's interesting how the first thing on that list is "create product". I would argue that most new companies (at least started by and solely run by technical founders) fail exactly because of that. Product-oriented people tend to think that the success of a business is due to its product(s), when the reality is businesses succeed due to their ability to sell their products. Hence, the most important thing is actually being able to properly find and target an audience, which should be the first step of starting a business. The second step of starting a business should be to test marketing channels to make sure the selected audience can be effectively/efficiently reached. Only after this has been properly done should a product be ideated, based on the knowledge acquired about the target audience and the marketing channel(s) that work. Just my 2 cents to the HN community after having learned this lesson the hard way, failing multiple times and starting several businesses.
- dmitrygr 8y agoAnd this, boys and girls, is why you never use any service of which you cannot host a fully working copy yourself.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago" which you cannot host a fully working copy yourself" Sadly, no. The majority of services have complex functions often requiring key data and updates, and it's just not possible, let alone feasible to 'self host' most things. But it's a neat idea ... maybe there's a solution there ...
- dmitrygr 8y agoMake your own and host that, or risk this. again and again and again. If this was not a painful enough lesson, the next time will be. :)
- sonnyblarney 8y ago"Make your own and host that" You're going to host your own version of Google maps? Host your own version of 'background check' or 'credit check'? Host your own DB of global financial transactions? Host your own instance of weather data? Geospatial data? It's not possible in most situations, and not feasible in most others, unfortunately.
- dmitrygr 8y agoI'm almost entirely sure that Google is not in the habit of turning Services down with no warning. I guess I should have been more specific: never rely on a start-up to be here tomorrow
- Shish2k 8y ago> You're going to host your own version of Google maps? I've never worked on a service which involves the other things you mentioned, but I've worked on some map-based services, and we went with self-hosted OpenStreetMap instances for exactly this reason :)
- sonnyblarney 8y agoThere needs to be a class action suit. This is BS.
- mortenjorck 8y agoFortunately for Smyte, its former customers probably all signed arbitration agreements.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- laumars 8y agoIs this really that out if character for Twitter as an organisation though? They have a history of being rather hostile toward developers and their own APIs. Which is ironic considering the nature of the platform. I would say we should use this as a sign to migrate away but we've had enough warnings already. I guess Twitter is too big to fail?
- jsilence 8y agoand this is yet another example why we need protocols and not APIs.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- recursive 8y agoI treat the two as synonyms. What do they mean?
- lioeters 8y agoPerhaps "protocol" is meant as a standard specification (like ActivityPub) and "API" as a specific implementation for a company/service?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 8y agoYou could say that an API implements a protocol, but a protocol is much more general. For instance IRC is a well known and widely implemented protocol. Facebook messenger implements a protocol for client server commination, but there are few or none implementations if either side and the main implementation can change the protocol arbitrarily and without notice.
- cortesoft 8y ago
- mrleiter 8y agoHow's the legal situation in America regarding breach of contract? At least in Austria we have a law that exactly tries to prevent such things (§38 et seq. UGB): when you buy a company you enter into all of their existing (non highly personal) contracts and obligations, unless you specifically don't want that, in which case you must tell the other side and give them some time.
- Can_Not 8y agoI am not lawyer. I don't think there's a valid loop hole that would pass a judge in a court of law. Either the contract specifies early termination damages or it was neglected.
- fipple 8y agoOooh.. I'm glad they screwed over well-funded companies with multi-year contracts. Now at least they're going to get the shit sued out of them unlike when they go after regular users.
- toephu2 8y agoSued for what? Have you seen the contracts these companies signed w/ Smyte?
- abiox 8y agoit seems curious that someone would sign (and pay for) a service provider contract that's largely pointless, but maybe there's a non-obvious loophole.
- fipple 8y agoIf these companies signed an agreement with a vendor that allowed them to cut off service with 15 minutes notice, they deserved everything they got.
- ComodoHacker 8y agoWas there something so dangerous for Twitter in Smyte's business model that required such a brutal shutdown?
- Rjevski 8y agoThe fact they had an actual product they were proud of? Clearly that’s considered unacceptable by Twitter’s standards.
- chris_wot 8y agoThey had contracts that they took on when they acquired the company. Twitter are now legally liable for these contracts, I won't be at all surprised if someone sues them. And frankly, they would be in the right. What an absolute debacle. This doesn't bode well for the entire Twitter platform.
- x0x0 8y agoOften not. I went through an acquisition of an unsuccessful company. My employer created a shell which is what was acquired. The old corporation wasn't acquired and existed as an independent entity to wind down contracts / deal with the acquisition hold-back, etc. If eg smyte was out of money, this is plausible. And all of a sudden no-one was there to run the old corp. crunchbase says they raised a $4m A in Mar 2017, but linkedin says they had 23 employees. They could burn that in 1.25 years with 23 employees and have hit a cash crunch. I have no knowledge, just speculation.
- sgt101 8y agoThey had customers (hence the problem) and so they had revenue. So they should have had plenty runway.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoIt's not unlikely the costs of work performed for these customers wasn't enough to keep the company running. Honestly, it looks more like "let's cut down on costs, immediately", rather than a mistake on a part of an exec.
- the_watcher 8y agoIt's very easy to have revenue but no runway. If your monthly burn is $1M and monthly revenue is $800K and you have no cash in the bank, you have no runway.
- sgt101 8y agoThey had a $4m raise a year ago and 22 employees. They must have had a very high compensation scheme.
- busterarm 8y agoI think everyone is missing that this is the canary in the coalmine for how the tech giants are going to behave going forward. Hell, Twitter isn't even that big! Every tech company big enough probably sees the same writing on the wall the rest of us do that it's time to press their advantages. That means shutting everyone else out. We probably all have mission-critical parts of our infrastructure that aren't core competencies. We probably can't afford for them to go away tomorrow, but now it's time to expect and plan for it. Get ready to ride the consolidation wave.
- pedalpete 8y agobut why? If they have contracts with these external companies, and revenue, why shut it down. Even if it isn't for a huge amount of $. The goodwill itself has to be worth a TINY bit.
- Rjevski 8y agoGoodwill works for good companies proud of what they do. Companies like Twitter whose core business is to shit on their users and customers don’t care about goodwill.
- danso 8y agoMaybe I'm in the minority, but I take an interest in the latest software/tech/ideas for dealing with the hard problem of moderation, and I had never heard of Smyte, until now (which made me think TC was being literal with its "Twitter 'smytes' customers" headline). Apparently, they were a dominant player in this space, such that its shutdown impacted such a wide array of significant-sized companies, from ZenDesk to TaskRabbit to Meetup. Even more surprising is that they were part of YC (W15), and yet from what I can tell, have only had one significant mention on HN from 3 years ago (65 upvotes, 11 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9758464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9758464 I would've guessed that Smyte would've been the kind of Silicon Valley business that was made for media hype (what with all the attention/criticism given to fake news and Google/FB/Twitter moderation). Then again, it does seem that content moderation -- important as it may be -- isn't a field as sexy as AI/deep-learning and other forms of automation.
- bsimpson 8y agoThey were also noteworthy for their founder Pete Hunt, who is largely credited with instigating the open sourcing of React. (As I recall, it was internal Facebook tech that he extracted into a separate library when he moved from FB to Instagram after that merger.)
- dacox 8y agoWhich is funny because they were actually dabbling in some AI/ML.
- AJRF 8y agoTwitter seem to have an institutional blindess towards the importance of APIs. Their execs need to be sat down and have it drummed into them that breeding this much bad “karma” (for lack of a better term) is going to come back and bite them in the ass.
- busterarm 8y agoThis is the same company with NIH Syndrome severe enough to in-house their own woefully-under-performing message queue. Twice. And they blamed Rails after the first go of it. I'm not sure they know what interop means.
- dickbasedregex 8y agoYup. They started the "rails don't scale" narrative. Something something, a good craftsman doesn't blame his tools.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 8y ago> Twitter seem to have an institutional blindness towards the importance of APIs. Which is especially weird for Twitter. Their official iOS client was a third-party API client they bought. Third-parties created @replies, #hashtags, etc. If anyone should recognize the important of third-parties using APIs, it should be Twitter... yet they've been probably the most abusive of the large APIs.
- yborg 8y agohttps://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ Twitter will never change how they do business, replacement is the best strategy.
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoI'm always surprised that Twitter has managed to stay in business so long. Anaemic growth, massive spam and bot accounts, an advertising platform that's hostile to most small advertisers, a user-base that makes YouTube's comments look downright gentle, constant hostility to third party developers...and yet it continues to chug along.
- simonbarker87 8y agoI agree, and one specific thing that is very annoying is that tech podcasts seem to rely on Twitter as their sole means of communication with the show. Some shows and networks don’t have email addresses, just twitter handles, and others actively tell you not to email their address as you probably will just get deleted. I’m not on twitter and have no desire to be but I would like to contact the show once in a blue moon.
- cpeterso 8y agoBuzzfeed posted an article called "How Twitter Made The Tech World's Most Unlikely Comeback" just today: https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/how-twitter-made-the-tech-worlds-most-unlikely-comeback https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/how-twitter-made-the... even as those eulogies were being published, things started changing. Twitter began beating earnings expectations. Star ex-employees trickled back in, finding a new, more positive internal culture than the toxic one they’d left. Advertisers came back too, as did users. The company finally began addressing its trolling problem. And its stock, once unappealing to analysts like Nathanson at $14, is now trading above $46. It’s still somewhat taboo to say it, but it’s no longer possible to deny it: Twitter is making an unexpected, somewhat miraculous comeback. It is the first major consumer social company to lose users and start growing again in a meaningful way.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jumbopapa 8y agoI really think they need to thank President Trump for that. He saved Twitter.
- sidcool 8y agoThe call to wind down business with existing clients is a worrying trend. Why would I avail services of a startup if there is a risk that upon acquisition, the startup's new parent company won't service us anymore. It's a risk.
- pavlov 8y agoIt’s fairly common in so-called acquisitions of startups that the the acquirer never buys the company stock. This leaves annoying liabilities like existing contracts in the selling company which will be shut down. The buyer might purchase IP so that the company to be shut down can pay out their investors and old customers. However that situation would usually never be described as an acquisition by the buyer. (The seller might put out an announcement that says “We’re proud to be joining FooGleZon, it’s been an amazing journey!”) In Smyte’s case, Twitter PR does use the word “acquire”: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/CommitmentToHealth.html https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/... That sounds like something else than an “amazing journey” non-acquisition. But IANAL, just speculating out loud.
- TheCapeGreek 8y agoWow, even Smyte's website was gutted. Bold move, to say the least.
- jakoblorz 8y agoNote to self: add "to smyte" to vocabulary
- jeswin 8y agoLessons: 1. Trust small, third-party, closed-source SaaS vendors at your own peril. 2. Do not spend/waste your time integrating with random third party services of questionable/unknown sustainability.
- dingaling 8y ago3. Have a test environment where you can delete routes to external services and assess the failure modes of your application. Does the whole page hang? Do UI elements disappear ot overlap others? Do JS error messages surface in the UI? Can the user continue with core functionality or at least receive an explanatory message?
- russellbeattie 8y agoI expect no less from a company that essentially elected Trump and continues to function as his mouthpiece to this day. Screwing over Smyte's customers must seem like nothing after they screwed over the entire country. What do employees there say to themselves every morning to justify staying? Trump continually breaks Twitter's rules, yet he hasn't been banned. He threatens world leaders, bullies, insults and lies non-stop, and Twitter is the bullhorn he uses to do it. Google's engineers stopped the company from bidding on war-related contracts, when are Twitter's engineers going to develop a backbone and get Trump banned? I stopped using Twitter the day that jackass was inaugurated. Everyone who works at Twitter should be ashamed of themselves.
- wompwomp66 8y agowomp womp
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rusk 8y agoWow, twitter really are just "the worst" these days. Say what you like about Facebook but it does at least seem as though somebody is calling the shots in there.
- tzahola 8y agoDaily reminder that every SaaS is a liability out of your control.
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y agoOff-topic, but twitter related: has the site fallen off search engines? Yesterday I wanted to look at some joke account (by correctly spelled name), Google yields nothing from the domain, Twitter wants me to sign up to search there ... (Not a habitual user, or even reader, as you may guess.)
- dhruv_bansal 8y agoc1
- dhruv_bansal 8y agoc2
- consultSKI 8y agothis is typical Twitter. no surprise.
- fauigerzigerk 8y agoIt makes me wonder. Does anyone actually read the contracts they sign? I usually hate it when people blame the victims for being so stupid whenever something bad happens. But some of the victims in this case are corporations with lawayers. So either this really isn't a mission critical service and they just took a calculated risk, or these lawyers haven't done the job they were hired to do, or Twitter is in breach of contract.
- snowwolf 8y agoOne thing that doesn't make sense is surely a service like this greatly benefits from the network effects of being able to see activity across multiple sites, so if Twitter wanted to continue using the technology, wouldn't they have been better off leaving it running?
- make3 8y agoI'm not convinced of your premise, spam is adversarial & spam detection is just pattern recognition. Twitter likely doesn't want to allow people to be able to test against their spam shields by spamming other people
- snowwolf 8y agoAs I understood it they were using machine learning models to identify attacks. Abuse and fraud strategies are constantly evolving, so the benefit of having many clients is that once you see a new attack strategy at one, you can instantly protect all your clients from that threat. In your own example "Twitter likely doesn't want to allow people to be able to test against their spam shields by spamming other people" Yes, the attacker may find a new pattern that can bypass the shield, but as soon as that pattern is added to the machine learning recognition, they are then protected against it on their own system. "spam detection is just pattern recognition" The more patterns you can analyse, the better your recognition?
- dredmorbius 8y agoTwitter may have sufficient scale that the additional data aren't meaningful. Friend worked on a large, multi-institutional risk-modelling project ... until the largest institution decided it had enough data on its own, and didn't need competitors who were competitive in this regard, and pulled the plug. Law of large numbers (statisttics) is powerful. Even for complex (multvariate) models. It sounds as if there may well be other considerations at play, but I'm answering your question specifically.
- ratsimihah 8y agoHere's a cookie, I'll take your life in exchange.
- polskibus 8y agoThat will make ALL companies think twice about trusting a startup when choosing a SaaS provider. VC got its way but at the same time decreased any future startup success potential by a huge measure.
- tjpnz 8y agoWhat on earth do they mean by "safety"?
- mcintyre1994 8y agoYC W15, I wonder if this will have any impact on the ecosystem of startups like Smyte getting established YC companies as early adopters. Also I wonder how many customers are staying quiet, because "our fraud protection provider just stopped working" isn't something they want to reveal.
- Rjevski 8y agoI hope this ends up litigated. The idiots at Twitter need to understand what accountability is about.
- Hendrikto 8y agoThis is why I don‘t really like SaaS for important parts of infrastructure. It‘s not under your control.
- tomelders 8y agoSite's that block users for not allowing cookies and tracking are essentially paywalled. Communities like HN should do their part to penalise sites that pull these kinds of tricks. If not us, then who? So, anyone got a non-paywalled version of this?
- workinthehead 8y agoSure is rich seeing Laurie Voss (of NPM) complaining about unprofessionalism from a vendor.
- douglaswlance 8y agoTwitter is starting to seem awfully authoritarian...
- ourcat 8y agoShocking in many ways. But not in others. I predict some back-pedalling later today and access switched back on and properly 'wound down'. If not, customers with contracts should have every right to angrily sue.
- erikb 8y agoI want names out there. Who is responsible for this!!!! Who was the CEO of smyte? Who is the manager at Twitter that gave the comand to shut down everything?
- dickbasedregex 8y agoAfter hearing so many stories like this for so many years, any time a company acquires another, it usually seems advisable to jump ship from the acquired to other vendors before things start going south. PR will come up with all sorts of reasons said acquisition will benefit both company's customers but I've yet to see it.
- alex_duf 8y agoI wonder if twitter uses npm...
- dentemple 8y agoThey utilize SSR React, so, yes, yes they do.
- whatshisface 8y ago>Clients had multi-year contracts in some cases. I'm calling it now: B2B startups will soon have to sign poison pill contracts that specifically detail what happens if they're bought out. This might ruin the "buy them for their people and discard the business" method of hiring - or at least it will if the customers have any sense.
- frankc 8y agoI don't know how it works in Silicon valley, but finance companies I have worked for have pretty much always required that source code be turned over if the vendor folds when doing business with small vendors.
- walshemj 8y agoYes I worked for the company doing the .coop registry and ICANN had very strict rules about code escrow we had to follow.
- jacquesm 8y agoIt's amateur hour if your contracts do not already contain such clauses. For anything business critical that's the norm. Change of control clauses are super common and tend to trigger penalties, escrow arrangements, contract voidance and other niceties.
- Bartweiss 8y agoI'm baffled if this wasn't already the case. Surely the entire point of signing a long-term contract (as opposed to just paying by the 'unit' used) is to protect against exactly this kind of outcome? I know it doesn't always happen, but it seems like most rapid "hire and shutter" moves hit either consumer-facing services or B2B stuff like analytics that isn't production critical. I had assumed Twitter was going to be paying out a bunch of breach-of-contract penalties, because this is basically what contracts are for. Is there a standard way around this?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- greggarious 8y agoSo Smyte's customers had a valid contract (article mentions a 3 year contract with one customer who was cut off). I find it hard to believe being acquired magically relieves you of your contractual obligations... could this be cause for litigation?
- ttul 8y agoIt depends. Was Smyte acquired, or was it merely an acquisition of their assets?
- asfasgasg 8y agoEven if the assets were acquired, I wonder why you can't sue the remaining shell and get a cut of the money that was exchanged for the assets. I guess the real issue is that smyte's contract probably said something like (from GCP's terms of service): > 13.1 Limitation on Indirect Liability. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, NEITHER PARTY, NOR GOOGLE’S SUPPLIERS, WILL BE LIABLE UNDER THIS AGREEMENT FOR LOST REVENUES OR INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, EVEN IF THE PARTY KNEW OR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT SUCH DAMAGES WERE POSSIBLE AND EVEN IF DIRECT DAMAGES DO NOT SATISFY A REMEDY. > 13.2 Limitation on Amount of Liability. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, NEITHER PARTY, NOR GOOGLE’S SUPPLIERS, MAY BE HELD LIABLE UNDER THIS AGREEMENT FOR MORE THAN THE AMOUNT PAID BY CUSTOMER TO GOOGLE UNDER THIS AGREEMENT DURING THE TWELVE MONTHS PRIOR TO THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO LIABILITY.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ttul 8y agoPerhaps their TOS said that the contract could be canceled automatically if there was a change in control. That's not uncommon.
- kirRoyale 8y agoRemember when the Trending section wasn't advertisements?
- nstj 8y agoIt surprises me that this article has so many votes when nowhere has it actually provided any details of either the commercial terms of the acquisition OR whether any Smyte customers actually lost any money from prepaid service. Sure, it sucks that people lost an API they were using, that much we know, but hundreds of votes for a “bad” commercial transaction on which we have no details? The way I see it, a number of Smyte users just received a free billing period of API access?
- ksajadi 8y agoAs multi-stepped and prolonged as it is to sell to large enterprises, I don’t look forward to tomorrow when yet another question to be answered before any large org signs a contract with a small startup like us is: are you going to sell and shutdown? This has happened so many times that it can really affect how small companies are preceived as too risky too deal with by larger customers. sigh
- tw1010 8y agoCompanies can do this, there's no regulation against it and there probably shouldn't be any. But there are going to be consequences and they're probably not good for the industry at large. Moves like this fundamentally change how much trust consumers have in SaaS apps. The risk factor of using new apps fundamentally changes, if ever so slightly. Unfortunately, this arguably works in favour of the companies that do this. By reducing trust in startups, there's fewer users who will take the leap on new actors. Twitter and Google wins by having fewer competitors, but the customer loses doubly so. If Facebook acquires every fifth social network, followed by immediate shutdown, users will eventually stop using them, hence less competition as a whole to FB.
- alliecat 8y agoAh I see the plan here: Twitter knows their platform is a cesspool of abuse and harassment, but instead of fixing it they're pulling the rest of the internet down to their level so they stand out less! Genius. /s
- ComputerGuru 8y agoTwitter continues its insanely tone-deaf approach to dealing with third parties that interact with / rely on their services. I don’t expect anything more from them, but am surprised Smyte sold out their users just like that, as I’m sure their fate was part of the negotiations. Given there are actual damages coming out of this to paying customers perhaps we’ll finally see them taken to task.
- kbyatnal 8y agoFunnily enough, they had a HN "Who's Hiring" post less than 3 months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16739153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16739153
- songzme 8y agoPlaying devil's advocate. Here's a possible scenario: 1. Smyte had a security flaw that could potentially (or already did) affect twitter customers. 2. Leaving Smyte service on could do alot of damage, so turning it off would be the sensible thing to do. 3. Telling the world about this security flaw would create a really bad backlash.
- jrochkind1 8y ago> We had a 3 years contract with them and they just disappeared overnight. No communication at all, they just turned their servers off Hmm, is the new owner not bound by that contract?
- ojuara 8y agoI don’t know how to run a business. But, I know how not to run a business. That’s one way.
- sidcool 8y agoThis is also a responsibly of the founders of Smyte. They cannot just leave the customers hanging.
- lightedman 8y agoProper answer: Sue Twitter for tortious interference of contract. Especially those that had something like a 3-year CONTRACT.
- Zooper 8y agoThe reason companies shouldn't use each other's proprietary code for basic operations: it's insecure, there's little-to-none of your interests being protected.
- wmil 8y agoGiven the speed there might have been a legal reason. Perhaps they were in violation of either the GDPR or their customer data agreements.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoWow. That sort of thing can be the effect of little to now negotiating leverage by the acquired company. They only raised 6.3M according to Crunchbase.
- pgroves 8y agoBased on the email from the VP, my wild guess is they figured out that Twitter operating Smyte would make Twitter itself not GPDR compliant (or some other big regulation), and they didn't figure it out until after the deal was done.
- gowld 8y agoTwitter bought a company, then found out that is isn't production-ready because it doesn't handle customer data safely, so immediately shut down the service. I wonder if that triggers any clawbacks in the purchase price, as Smyte was running a substandard service.
- tedivm 8y agoThis is the best theory I've heard on this so far.
- itronitron 8y agoif you aren't the customer then you're the product... no wait, they are the customers.
- tempodox 8y agoIf the umpteenth demonstration was needed that you can't rely on any 3rd-party internet service, here it is.
- tripzilch 8y agoI'm pretty sure that "to wind down" is not a proper euphemism for "to shut down". "Winding down" literally means that before shutting down, there is an incremental process with the explicit purpose to smoothly move into the transition. There wasn't anything like that, not even a little. What's especially rich is that Engineering VP Mike Montano nonsensically repeats this phrase after the fact: "we made the difficult decision to wind things down right away". That's plain bullshitting. He should have said, "we made the difficult decision to shut things down right away". But that would have sounded super irresponsible! But it was super irresponsible, and describing it differently is just dishonest. And that wasn't accidental, this entire situation is exactly about the difference between "winding down" and "shutting down". Why do we allow people to communicate in this way? (publicly and/or from a position of leadership). Twisting words in plain sight. There is no good motivation behind this, it represents messed up priorities between appearance/saving-face and responsibility. I don't know anything else about this Mike Montano. Maybe he's a very good manager when not talking like this. But leadership comes with responsibility and when you twist words like that, it's only because you're trying to wriggle out from underneath the responsibility.