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The technology ? What, pray tell, other than ad tracking is their technology? If you remove the ads and the surveillance, Twitter is 60 lines of Perl.

by rsync 5y ago

jll29 5y ago
It's less about the number of lines of code to replace/replicate it, more about the existing user base size & the fact that Twitter is _the_ place where conversations about any topic happen these days. The world being as unpredictable as it is, the conversation may also move to another medium tomorrow.
dkislyuk 5y ago
Obligatory _Sounds Easy_: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ Doing anything on Twitter scale has significant technical challenges.
VirusNewbie 5y ago
I can't think of better way to diminish one's own technical skills than to make a claim that twitter is '60 lines of perl'. Let's see, let's even take one tiny component of twitter, realtime push notifications across a distributed system, can you do that in 60 lines of perl?
JoshCole 5y ago
> If you remove the ads and the surveillance, Twitter is 60 lines of Perl. If you remove ads and surveillance Twitter isn't 60 lines of Perl. Just their frontend, without even getting into problems of scale, is already much heavier than sixty lines. It also happens to have been an influential technology export [1]. You can find more than sixty projects, not just sixty lines of Perl, open sourced by Twitter. While some of them are related to ad tracking and surveillance not all of them are [2]. Although I haven't checked, I would be shocked if any of them are below sixty lines. The idea that modern tech companies can be replaced with sixty lines of code is exceedingly naive. There are certain problems that naturally come up at scale like the regular failure of hardware, hot users, persistent dedicated attacks by intelligent malicious actors, and regulatory requirements around data handling which, even taken alone rather than together, demand more than sixty lines of code to adequately address. Twitter may be simple in theory, but you are quite clearly provoking a straw man conception of the value of Twitter's technology. If you weren't, you wouldn't need to lie or exaggerate to the point of absurdity. [1]: https://getbootstrap.com/2.0.2/ https://getbootstrap.com/2.0.2/ [2]: https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/ https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/ > What, pray tell, other than ad tracking is their technology? The person you are responding to is largely repeating first-party accounts of motivation - Elon says he believes that producing greater transparency in algorithmic moderation and active moderation at Twitter, understood as a technology owned by Twitter, is a core ideologically rooted reason for the takeover. You can get this first party account of motivation by listening to the TED interview with Elon Musk which covers the topic of why he feels Twitter should be taken private and why he feels it would benefit from having its moderation practices be incredibly transparent to the point of open sourcing the entirety of Twitter and making their moderation process public.

The technology ? What, pray tell, other than ad tracking is their technology? If you remove the ads and the surveillance, Twitter is 60 lines of Perl.

by rsync 5y ago

The technology ? What, pray tell, other than ad tracking is their technology? If you remove the ads and the surveillance, Twitter is 60 lines of Perl.

jll29 5y ago

It's less about the number of lines of code to replace/replicate it, more about the existing user base size & the fact that Twitter is _the_ place where conversations about any topic happen these days. The world being as unpredictable as it is, the conversation may also move to another medium tomorrow.

dkislyuk 5y ago

Obligatory _Sounds Easy_: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ Doing anything on Twitter scale has significant technical challenges.

VirusNewbie 5y ago

I can't think of better way to diminish one's own technical skills than to make a claim that twitter is '60 lines of perl'. Let's see, let's even take one tiny component of twitter, realtime push notifications across a distributed system, can you do that in 60 lines of perl?

JoshCole 5y ago

> If you remove the ads and the surveillance, Twitter is 60 lines of Perl. If you remove ads and surveillance Twitter isn't 60 lines of Perl. Just their frontend, without even getting into problems of scale, is already much heavier than sixty lines. It also happens to have been an influential technology export [1]. You can find more than sixty projects, not just sixty lines of Perl, open sourced by Twitter. While some of them are related to ad tracking and surveillance not all of them are [2]. Although I haven't checked, I would be shocked if any of them are below sixty lines. The idea that modern tech companies can be replaced with sixty lines of code is exceedingly naive. There are certain problems that naturally come up at scale like the regular failure of hardware, hot users, persistent dedicated attacks by intelligent malicious actors, and regulatory requirements around data handling which, even taken alone rather than together, demand more than sixty lines of code to adequately address. Twitter may be simple in theory, but you are quite clearly provoking a straw man conception of the value of Twitter's technology. If you weren't, you wouldn't need to lie or exaggerate to the point of absurdity. [1]: https://getbootstrap.com/2.0.2/ https://getbootstrap.com/2.0.2/ [2]: https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/ https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/ > What, pray tell, other than ad tracking is their technology? The person you are responding to is largely repeating first-party accounts of motivation - Elon says he believes that producing greater transparency in algorithmic moderation and active moderation at Twitter, understood as a technology owned by Twitter, is a core ideologically rooted reason for the takeover. You can get this first party account of motivation by listening to the TED interview with Elon Musk which covers the topic of why he feels Twitter should be taken private and why he feels it would benefit from having its moderation practices be incredibly transparent to the point of open sourcing the entirety of Twitter and making their moderation process public.