5 ms·

Why? What complex technical problem is there to solve at twitter at this point?

by kcb 4y ago

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
Oddly enough I don’t see this being discussed here. There hasn’t been growth in user counts that might bring large technical problems. Sure there’s going to be work needed, optimizations, new features or whatever. I think twitters problems are how to grow users and grow revenue, neither of which require technical solutions to get traction going.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Operating with 80% less humans is a technical challenge.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Twitter is a service which handles bursty type demand. One of these events is the World Cup, which starts on Sunday. Which Twitter engineering has previously noted is one of their most challenging demand times.
  - avereveard 4y ago
    I think this is super weird. massive events happen every so often. the first one is a challenge, the second one might bring a new set of challenges, but by the third one you haven't a well oiled process, then there's some serious engineering issues that go deeper than the challenge itself. this is something that was talked well before Elon, they have thousands upon thousands engineers, for a plafromt that had a fixed set of features since forever. I don't claim that twitter could be run by the smart cousing from it's basement, but the effort/result numbers seem way off from here. I think everyone is conveniently setting this topic aside in the ferwor to pile up on Elon (whom actions I don't defent in any way, shape or form) but something in that area was in need of a correction for a while, and apparently the whole stack is politicized enough than steering the ship would have been challenging irregardless by whom would have taken such task.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      You should go work for a big retail giant during a christmas season. It's not the pure load that does you in, spinning up more clusters on AWS and bumping up the size of the instance is super easy. What kills you every time is the edge cases and "1 in a million" chances that the load brings. Every single bit of code you've written since the last huge season is suddenly very aggressively being tested in ways you couldn't really simulate. Sure you've fixed the problems that caused fires last year but there is ALWAYS new stuff to start fires. Even if you froze the code base from the previous year, you would still see new patterns and behaviors, and all the problems they will uncover. Twitter was definitely poorly managed, had no vision, and the engineers were probably closing lots of tickets with well written and documented and smart code. The problem is that if the tickets being created are stupid, no amount of "hardcore engineering" can fix that. You can't fix "draw a red line using this blue pen" with better coders. If you actually care about twitter (you shouldn't), what it needed was a plan to make people hate it less, since even the people who use it constantly seem to hate it, and a strategy to make things more reliable and cheaper, essentially pay off all the tech debt they accrued by doing everything before it was done. But that would have required a massive undertaking, and public companies generally hate that kind of thing, and would rather slowly die over decades than make things better by spending a couple bucks up front. None of that makes walking in, shitting on everyone's keyboard, pissing off everyone that could be talented, firing lots of people seemingly randomly or off the cuff, and saddling the company with a bunch of new debt they no longer have revenue streams for because your stupid feature idea was predictably stupid, a smart or correct or laudable action.
nomel 4y ago
A scaled up Birdwatch [1], or some other system, with the ability to find truths, could be incredible. Trust in media is, rightfully, near all time lows [2]. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196 2. https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-re...
- zerohp 4y ago
  What about Musk's actions make you think he is interested in promoting truth in media?
  - nomel 4y ago
    His attempt at pay-for checks, and the layoffs, show he's very interested in making/losing less money. I was highlighting a potential path to attract users, and not (potentially) scare advertisers, which would align with that goal. I don't think a rational person would try to make any long term conclusions from less than a month of new ownership.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Twitter's media capabilities are really awful and have remained awful for as long as I can remember. The media player is slow as hell and malfunctions all the time. Twitter was built on shaky foundations. From the very earliest days, the "fail whale" was a recurring theme
dorkwood 4y ago
Apparently uploading videos that don't degrade to unwatchable quality is a pretty hard problem to solve. A lot of artists work around this by uploading gifs, which then get converted to videos by Twitter's backend, but aren't degraded as badly for whatever reason.

Why? What complex technical problem is there to solve at twitter at this point?

by kcb 4y ago

Why? What complex technical problem is there to solve at twitter at this point?

Oddly enough I don’t see this being discussed here. There hasn’t been growth in user counts that might bring large technical problems. Sure there’s going to be work needed, optimizations, new features or whatever. I think twitters problems are how to grow users and grow revenue, neither of which require technical solutions to get traction going.

charcircuit 4y ago
Operating with 80% less humans is a technical challenge.
XorNot 4y ago
Twitter is a service which handles bursty type demand. One of these events is the World Cup, which starts on Sunday. Which Twitter engineering has previously noted is one of their most challenging demand times.
- avereveard 4y ago
  I think this is super weird. massive events happen every so often. the first one is a challenge, the second one might bring a new set of challenges, but by the third one you haven't a well oiled process, then there's some serious engineering issues that go deeper than the challenge itself. this is something that was talked well before Elon, they have thousands upon thousands engineers, for a plafromt that had a fixed set of features since forever. I don't claim that twitter could be run by the smart cousing from it's basement, but the effort/result numbers seem way off from here. I think everyone is conveniently setting this topic aside in the ferwor to pile up on Elon (whom actions I don't defent in any way, shape or form) but something in that area was in need of a correction for a while, and apparently the whole stack is politicized enough than steering the ship would have been challenging irregardless by whom would have taken such task.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    You should go work for a big retail giant during a christmas season. It's not the pure load that does you in, spinning up more clusters on AWS and bumping up the size of the instance is super easy. What kills you every time is the edge cases and "1 in a million" chances that the load brings. Every single bit of code you've written since the last huge season is suddenly very aggressively being tested in ways you couldn't really simulate. Sure you've fixed the problems that caused fires last year but there is ALWAYS new stuff to start fires. Even if you froze the code base from the previous year, you would still see new patterns and behaviors, and all the problems they will uncover. Twitter was definitely poorly managed, had no vision, and the engineers were probably closing lots of tickets with well written and documented and smart code. The problem is that if the tickets being created are stupid, no amount of "hardcore engineering" can fix that. You can't fix "draw a red line using this blue pen" with better coders. If you actually care about twitter (you shouldn't), what it needed was a plan to make people hate it less, since even the people who use it constantly seem to hate it, and a strategy to make things more reliable and cheaper, essentially pay off all the tech debt they accrued by doing everything before it was done. But that would have required a massive undertaking, and public companies generally hate that kind of thing, and would rather slowly die over decades than make things better by spending a couple bucks up front. None of that makes walking in, shitting on everyone's keyboard, pissing off everyone that could be talented, firing lots of people seemingly randomly or off the cuff, and saddling the company with a bunch of new debt they no longer have revenue streams for because your stupid feature idea was predictably stupid, a smart or correct or laudable action.

nomel 4y ago

A scaled up Birdwatch [1], or some other system, with the ability to find truths, could be incredible. Trust in media is, rightfully, near all time lows [2]. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196 2. https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-re...

zerohp 4y ago
What about Musk's actions make you think he is interested in promoting truth in media?
- nomel 4y ago
  His attempt at pay-for checks, and the layoffs, show he's very interested in making/losing less money. I was highlighting a potential path to attract users, and not (potentially) scare advertisers, which would align with that goal. I don't think a rational person would try to make any long term conclusions from less than a month of new ownership.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Twitter's media capabilities are really awful and have remained awful for as long as I can remember. The media player is slow as hell and malfunctions all the time. Twitter was built on shaky foundations. From the very earliest days, the "fail whale" was a recurring theme

dorkwood 4y ago

Apparently uploading videos that don't degrade to unwatchable quality is a pretty hard problem to solve. A lot of artists work around this by uploading gifs, which then get converted to videos by Twitter's backend, but aren't degraded as badly for whatever reason.