4 ms·
What blows my mind is how does Twitter not have a "maintenance" mode -- where no new tweets can be posted and the site is essentially read-only?
by dvt 6y ago
What blows my mind is how does Twitter not have a "maintenance" mode -- where no new tweets can be posted and the site is essentially read-only?
- one2know 6y agoCorporations don't do anything unless there is a executive sponsor and business need/attached revenue. Probably they have never needed a maintenance mode, aka self imposed downtime. The only thing worse that unexpected downtime is some manager causing the need to turn on maintenance mode. They would lose their job.
- adrr 6y agoWe had maintenance mode at MySpace. We could shutdown any part of the site with feature flags that can be turned on for ranges of users. Very useful for bringing back the site after an outage and allow the caches to fill without overloading the underlying dbs. I am sure twitter has the same, they had scalability issues at the beginning . I guarantee they have a mode to disable posts and mode to disable authentication so they can recover the underlying systems .
- jayflux 6y agoMaybe they do and they haven’t needed to resort to that yet?
- raldi 6y agoWhat makes you think they don’t? We had one on Reddit in 2008.
- dvt 6y agoBecause if there ever was a moment to press that button, it would be now. Thousands of accounts are still tweeting that BTC address.
- raldi 6y agoIt’s unfathomable to me that they don’t have this button, but equally so that they haven’t pressed it. Edit: There we go. https://twitter.com/JacKnutson/status/1283527213606789121 https://twitter.com/JacKnutson/status/1283527213606789121
- hu3 6y ago2 hours later. it's more likely that they developed the button and deployed it
- ForHackernews 6y ago...so what? People tweet garbage all the time. There are already millions of twitter spambots. What's so horrible about a few more?
- TeMPOraL 6y agoApparently they flow from high-profile accounts. If someone can inject one message across so many Twitter handles, they most likely can inject other messages as well. Like ones tailored to manipulate the stock market, or impacting international politics.
- ForHackernews 6y agoSilver linings: Maybe this will teach people a valuable lesson about not believing nonsense they read on Twitter.
- quickthrower2 6y agoAnd more generally, always question the authenticity of any information you receive electronically (email, SMS, PMs, websites etc.), as a basic security principle. "Are they asking for something valuable?". In this case red flags are obviously 1. bitcoin, 2. too good to be true, 3. why would these people just give out money randomly. In the future the scope may grow to include visual and audio communications which could be faked using AI.
- erk__ 6y agoAs others in the thread have pointed out it has been pressed now, users with blue checkmarks can currently not post anything. Edit: They have just enabled posting again. Edit Edit: Or maybe not.
- askvictor 6y agoWhat if the attackers disabled this? Unlikely, but still worth considering when designing a maintenance mode...