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Last week Twitter was supposed to break in a couple of days. Now it will have regulatory problems any time soon. I'll be interested when Twitter has actual iss

Last week Twitter was supposed to break in a couple of days. Now it will have regulatory problems any time soon. I'll be interested when Twitter has actual issues instead of crazy conspiracy theory of the day about the future problems that are sure to come, never to be spoken about again if the prediction doesn't turn out to be true.

medler 4y ago
Twitter has been having actual issues. I have routinely been seeing “this tweet is unavailable,” and have to refresh once or twice to get the tweet to load. The old Twitter kept on top of those kinds of issues because having a reliable app is key to keeping ad money rolling in. New Twitter hasn’t had a major outage yet, but the degradation in various services kind of suggests that the remaining SREs/ops people are overwhelmed, since they can’t even keep up the full functionality of the site.
senttoschool 4y ago
I've been seeing way more spam posts.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
> Last week Twitter was supposed to break in a couple of days. The "it was supposed to break in a couple of days" meme is an often repeated strawman by Elon's defenders. Can you point to any ex-Twitter employee claiming Twitter is supposed to break in a couple of days? Most said the system is built to be resilient, as long as THERE ARE NO CHANGES MADE TO IT. And no significant outages, hacker attacks, and so on challenges. You tell me, can Twitter coast indefinitely without changes? How do they plan to monetize it without changes? And without advertisers? The problem is Elon and his goons are randomly shutting down things in attempt to "remove the bloat" and then they don't know how to turn them on. So things have been breaking in the last few weeks. Any way you look at it, Twitter is on a course to disaster. But like the Titanic, it takes a bit to get there.
croes 4y ago
At the moment Musk didn't fix anything but he removed the safety net. Like removing all fire extinguishers doesn't mean your house will burn tomorrow. It won't fail immediately but at the first major problem it will get interesting.
- anticristi 4y ago
  Did you see the UI regression withthe oddly bold menu on Twitter? That's a stove that wasn't turned off.
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    Oh no! An "oddly bold" menu! How will Twitter ever recover?
    - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
      The issue isn't that a menu was bold, but that no one in the test chain caught it. One reason being that chain is mostly not there anymore. That suggests other less visible, and more important slip-ups are happening, and will be happening.
      - chitowneats 4y ago
        Or it was a known regression that was deemed acceptable because the company is now moving quickly on priorities that actually matter? So many assumptions you have to make to get from "Twitter shipped a minor css bug" to "Twitter as a web service is going to come imminently crashing down".
        BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
        > Or it was a known regression that was deemed acceptable because the company is now moving quickly on priorities that actually matter? Shitposting and unbanning accounts? > So many assumptions you have to make to get from "Twitter shipped a minor css bug" to "Twitter as a web service is going to come imminently crashing down". I'm taking it as a data point together with other similar data points and building a picture. Twitter is full of weird little issues lately. Like the trends turning into a hilarious list of generic words... not signifying any trend at all: https://twitter.com/Whatapityonyou/status/1596115396318597120 https://twitter.com/Whatapityonyou/status/159611539631859712...
random314 4y ago
> Last week Twitter was supposed to break in a couple of days I did not see anyone make any such statements. Who are you referring to?
- ignoramceisblis 4y ago
  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-19/twitter-latest-potential-crash-world-cup-weekend/101674320 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-19/twitter-latest-potent... https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1593378041882820608 https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1593378041882820608 https://twitter.com/cwarzel/status/1593381808112291840 https://twitter.com/cwarzel/status/1593381808112291840 https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter%20will%20break%20world%20cup https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter%20will%20break%20world%... etc. Typical fear-mongering. From many of the same people who claim "the other side" fear-mongers. Quick: better move to my social media platform... I heard Twitter is failing. Meanwhile, Twitter is at record-high usage.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    most people are saying it may break in near future. Your comment says people said it should break by now. That isn’t the case. > Meanwhile, Twitter is at record-high usage. Why do you have loyalty to someone who doesn’t care about you — Elon.
    - ignoramceisblis 4y ago
      The parent comment which I replied to said, verbatim: >> Last week Twitter was supposed to break in a couple of days > I did not see anyone make any such statements. Who are you referring to? So I answered that poster. I provided the parent comment with some avenues for witnessing a small sampling of the lies and fear-mongering about Twitter. For example, if you spend some time at my last link, a Twitter search page, you'll find one possible search query that results in statements of the kind the parent comment asked for. For example: > Staying on twitter until it breaks, but make no mistake— it will break (World Cup tweets alone…). > If no big news story breaks this weekend I suspect Twitter will crash on Monday, sometime after 8am when England scores their 1st World Cup goal. I read that Twitter staff would have watch parties for WC traffic & pray for no goals so there'd be no cascading server failures. > Twitter will break next week. The World Cup is the #1 driver of social media posts - by ALOT - and would stress a system at full functionality. Twitter is going down faster than Neymar. > I don’t wanna stir fear but a site like Twitter having a skeleton crew running it means that 100% shit will break. Oh and the Qatar World Cup is coming soon, Twitter may not be able to cope with that (if Steve broke Twitter then the World Cup for sure will) > Predictions are that the World Cup traffic will likely “break” Twitter. > The World Cup is gonna kill Twitter > The World Cup will break Twitter, probs And from the first link I posted, a news article: > the 2022 FIFA World Cup over the weekend. It has historically been one of Twitter's busiest events, when Tweet surges heavily stress its systems. "It does look like he's going to blow up Twitter," said Robert Graham. > "I can't see how the lights won't go out at any moment." Again: *etc.* There's plenty more out there. --- > Your comment says people said it should break by now. That isn’t the case. Wrong. My comment does provide evidence of people saying it should break (have broken) by now; it gave the parent commenter the exact information they requested: people saying it should break "by now"--days prior to the world cup. Also, I said nothing about what "most people" are saying. Although, now I would expect you to provide evidence for your assertion. I'd like to see evidence that "most people" are saying it "may" break in the "near future." I expect goalposts to continue to move, so your comment is not surprising. > Why do you have loyalty to someone who doesn’t care about you — Elon. Whoa. That one came out of nowhere. I'd like to know what you imagined I wrote in my first post that signified I'm "loyal" to Twitter's new owner.
sschueller 4y ago
There are people at Twitter now that think the entire thing can be built and operated by just "20 amazing engineers" [1] . That is so beyond stupid that if Elon thinks the same way the company is absolutely doomed. This isn't some WordPress blog. [1] https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1595320501156487168?t=0Z3e2biJVfMO_sRrtp6tqw&s=19 https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159532050115648716...
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > There are people at Twitter now that think the entire thing can be built and operated by just "20 amazing engineers" Thing is - you can absolutely build and operate a site that allows people to post things and have other people follow them with just "20 amazing engineers". What you can't do with just "20 amazing engineers" is operate a safe, harassment-limiting, CSAM-free, ad-friendly, legality-following, privacy-preserving, FTC consent decree'd site.
  - ncr100 4y ago
    Don't forget, publicly traded company... Requires statistical/ redundant trust.
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    Twitter is rife with porn and links to onlyfans and famous for its mob justice and crypto-scamming. I think you're overselling what engineers can accomplish.
  - random314 4y ago
    And have actual revenues exceeding 1B$. Which would be the interest payments Musk needs to make. Fat chance of that happening with 20 engineers.
  - GauntletWizard 4y ago
    I was part of a team that built Houseparty, a video chat application that had millions of concurrent users, and it had, at peak, about 30 great devs. Twitter can survive Musk's cuts. It might not be pretty, and I think he's an ass in many ways (and I've interviewed with him!) But he's not wrong that it was bloated.
snailmailman 4y ago
Anecdotally I’ve had loads of issues with twitter these past few weeks. I had to re-block a bunch of accounts I swear I had previously blocked. (Mostly brand accounts. I had previously blocked just about every major company to stop getting their ads, and suddenly started getting ads from large brands I’m almost certain I had blocked before) Plus suddenly I’m getting really weird “topics” or whatever these random posts are in my feed. I’ve opted out of several of them and they just keep appearing. Like “popular videos” keeps inserting itself into my feed, and if I click on it it will say “don’t worry, you won’t see more of these” every time. I’ve clicked the “never show me this” button a dozen times or so and it’s still appearing in my feed. Not to mention just the general algorithm being bad. I follow tons of accounts. But last few times I’ve checked twitter there’s maybe a page or two of new posts, then I scroll a bit further and it’s the same stuff as yesterday. Or tweets from a few days ago that I already saw. I’ve had to manually check the pages of people I follow to find their tweets. I’m just missing lots of stuff now. Twitter is slowly falling apart. I think it’s only a matter of time before larger site-breaking issues appear. Most of the accounts I follow are also posting to mastodon now, and at least there mastodon will show me their posts in my feed.
genmud 4y ago
I have seen nobody say that twitter will break in days. What I have seen is people say the service will have degradation, which I have definitely observed first hand. I have also noticed the quality of ads have gone from major brands using it, to what I would consider much lower quality ads. Additionally, for some of the few mainstream ads I have seen, there have been ads I have seen directly above/below NSFW/NSFL content, which is a major brand safety issue. Being blunt, they have saddled themselves with massive amounts of debt, their revenue sources are fleeing quicker than they can replace, some of their core user bases are actively trying to find a different platform and they have hemorrhaged employees they want to keep. Couple that with the current leadership at Twitter being very impulsive and doing stuff like unbanning everyone’s accounts (do people remember when ISIS was recruiting on Twitter), ad buyers (where almost the entirety of their revenue comes from) don’t see things getting better soon. Even someone who is blinded by Elons charisma can add 2+2 and realize as a company that Twitter is in murky waters. MySpace didn’t disappear in a month, neither will Twitter.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > I have also noticed the quality of ads have gone from major brands using it, to what I would consider much lower quality ads. It's not fair to blame Elon for a few marketing firms telling all of their clients to stop advertising on Twitter because they don't like Elon.
  - genmud 4y ago
    > It's not fair to blame Elon for a few marketing firms telling all of their clients to stop advertising on Twitter because they don't like Elon. Uh, people in the ad industry for the most part don’t give a fuck about political or personal views, nearly all the concerns about placement with publishers revolve around brand safety, ease of use and success rates. It’s absolutely fair to say that Elons decisions have made Twitter very unattractive to both brands and agencies, which will take years to build trust back.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    They don’t care about Elon. Money runs the world not people liking a person.

medler 4y ago

Twitter has been having actual issues. I have routinely been seeing “this tweet is unavailable,” and have to refresh once or twice to get the tweet to load. The old Twitter kept on top of those kinds of issues because having a reliable app is key to keeping ad money rolling in. New Twitter hasn’t had a major outage yet, but the degradation in various services kind of suggests that the remaining SREs/ops people are overwhelmed, since they can’t even keep up the full functionality of the site.

senttoschool 4y ago

I've been seeing way more spam posts.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BulgarianIdiot 4y ago

> Last week Twitter was supposed to break in a couple of days. The "it was supposed to break in a couple of days" meme is an often repeated strawman by Elon's defenders. Can you point to any ex-Twitter employee claiming Twitter is supposed to break in a couple of days? Most said the system is built to be resilient, as long as THERE ARE NO CHANGES MADE TO IT. And no significant outages, hacker attacks, and so on challenges. You tell me, can Twitter coast indefinitely without changes? How do they plan to monetize it without changes? And without advertisers? The problem is Elon and his goons are randomly shutting down things in attempt to "remove the bloat" and then they don't know how to turn them on. So things have been breaking in the last few weeks. Any way you look at it, Twitter is on a course to disaster. But like the Titanic, it takes a bit to get there.

croes 4y ago

At the moment Musk didn't fix anything but he removed the safety net. Like removing all fire extinguishers doesn't mean your house will burn tomorrow. It won't fail immediately but at the first major problem it will get interesting.

anticristi 4y ago
Did you see the UI regression withthe oddly bold menu on Twitter? That's a stove that wasn't turned off.
- chitowneats 4y ago
  Oh no! An "oddly bold" menu! How will Twitter ever recover?
  - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
    The issue isn't that a menu was bold, but that no one in the test chain caught it. One reason being that chain is mostly not there anymore. That suggests other less visible, and more important slip-ups are happening, and will be happening.
    - chitowneats 4y ago
      Or it was a known regression that was deemed acceptable because the company is now moving quickly on priorities that actually matter? So many assumptions you have to make to get from "Twitter shipped a minor css bug" to "Twitter as a web service is going to come imminently crashing down".
      - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
        > Or it was a known regression that was deemed acceptable because the company is now moving quickly on priorities that actually matter? Shitposting and unbanning accounts? > So many assumptions you have to make to get from "Twitter shipped a minor css bug" to "Twitter as a web service is going to come imminently crashing down". I'm taking it as a data point together with other similar data points and building a picture. Twitter is full of weird little issues lately. Like the trends turning into a hilarious list of generic words... not signifying any trend at all: https://twitter.com/Whatapityonyou/status/1596115396318597120 https://twitter.com/Whatapityonyou/status/159611539631859712...

random314 4y ago

> Last week Twitter was supposed to break in a couple of days I did not see anyone make any such statements. Who are you referring to?

ignoramceisblis 4y ago
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-19/twitter-latest-potential-crash-world-cup-weekend/101674320 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-19/twitter-latest-potent... https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1593378041882820608 https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1593378041882820608 https://twitter.com/cwarzel/status/1593381808112291840 https://twitter.com/cwarzel/status/1593381808112291840 https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter%20will%20break%20world%20cup https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter%20will%20break%20world%... etc. Typical fear-mongering. From many of the same people who claim "the other side" fear-mongers. Quick: better move to my social media platform... I heard Twitter is failing. Meanwhile, Twitter is at record-high usage.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  most people are saying it may break in near future. Your comment says people said it should break by now. That isn’t the case. > Meanwhile, Twitter is at record-high usage. Why do you have loyalty to someone who doesn’t care about you — Elon.
  - ignoramceisblis 4y ago
    The parent comment which I replied to said, verbatim: >> Last week Twitter was supposed to break in a couple of days > I did not see anyone make any such statements. Who are you referring to? So I answered that poster. I provided the parent comment with some avenues for witnessing a small sampling of the lies and fear-mongering about Twitter. For example, if you spend some time at my last link, a Twitter search page, you'll find one possible search query that results in statements of the kind the parent comment asked for. For example: > Staying on twitter until it breaks, but make no mistake— it will break (World Cup tweets alone…). > If no big news story breaks this weekend I suspect Twitter will crash on Monday, sometime after 8am when England scores their 1st World Cup goal. I read that Twitter staff would have watch parties for WC traffic & pray for no goals so there'd be no cascading server failures. > Twitter will break next week. The World Cup is the #1 driver of social media posts - by ALOT - and would stress a system at full functionality. Twitter is going down faster than Neymar. > I don’t wanna stir fear but a site like Twitter having a skeleton crew running it means that 100% shit will break. Oh and the Qatar World Cup is coming soon, Twitter may not be able to cope with that (if Steve broke Twitter then the World Cup for sure will) > Predictions are that the World Cup traffic will likely “break” Twitter. > The World Cup is gonna kill Twitter > The World Cup will break Twitter, probs And from the first link I posted, a news article: > the 2022 FIFA World Cup over the weekend. It has historically been one of Twitter's busiest events, when Tweet surges heavily stress its systems. "It does look like he's going to blow up Twitter," said Robert Graham. > "I can't see how the lights won't go out at any moment." Again: *etc.* There's plenty more out there. --- > Your comment says people said it should break by now. That isn’t the case. Wrong. My comment does provide evidence of people saying it should break (have broken) by now; it gave the parent commenter the exact information they requested: people saying it should break "by now"--days prior to the world cup. Also, I said nothing about what "most people" are saying. Although, now I would expect you to provide evidence for your assertion. I'd like to see evidence that "most people" are saying it "may" break in the "near future." I expect goalposts to continue to move, so your comment is not surprising. > Why do you have loyalty to someone who doesn’t care about you — Elon. Whoa. That one came out of nowhere. I'd like to know what you imagined I wrote in my first post that signified I'm "loyal" to Twitter's new owner.

sschueller 4y ago

There are people at Twitter now that think the entire thing can be built and operated by just "20 amazing engineers" [1] . That is so beyond stupid that if Elon thinks the same way the company is absolutely doomed. This isn't some WordPress blog. [1] https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1595320501156487168?t=0Z3e2biJVfMO_sRrtp6tqw&s=19 https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159532050115648716...

zimpenfish 4y ago
> There are people at Twitter now that think the entire thing can be built and operated by just "20 amazing engineers" Thing is - you can absolutely build and operate a site that allows people to post things and have other people follow them with just "20 amazing engineers". What you can't do with just "20 amazing engineers" is operate a safe, harassment-limiting, CSAM-free, ad-friendly, legality-following, privacy-preserving, FTC consent decree'd site.
- ncr100 4y ago
  Don't forget, publicly traded company... Requires statistical/ redundant trust.
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  Twitter is rife with porn and links to onlyfans and famous for its mob justice and crypto-scamming. I think you're overselling what engineers can accomplish.
- random314 4y ago
  And have actual revenues exceeding 1B$. Which would be the interest payments Musk needs to make. Fat chance of that happening with 20 engineers.
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  I was part of a team that built Houseparty, a video chat application that had millions of concurrent users, and it had, at peak, about 30 great devs. Twitter can survive Musk's cuts. It might not be pretty, and I think he's an ass in many ways (and I've interviewed with him!) But he's not wrong that it was bloated.

snailmailman 4y ago

Anecdotally I’ve had loads of issues with twitter these past few weeks. I had to re-block a bunch of accounts I swear I had previously blocked. (Mostly brand accounts. I had previously blocked just about every major company to stop getting their ads, and suddenly started getting ads from large brands I’m almost certain I had blocked before) Plus suddenly I’m getting really weird “topics” or whatever these random posts are in my feed. I’ve opted out of several of them and they just keep appearing. Like “popular videos” keeps inserting itself into my feed, and if I click on it it will say “don’t worry, you won’t see more of these” every time. I’ve clicked the “never show me this” button a dozen times or so and it’s still appearing in my feed. Not to mention just the general algorithm being bad. I follow tons of accounts. But last few times I’ve checked twitter there’s maybe a page or two of new posts, then I scroll a bit further and it’s the same stuff as yesterday. Or tweets from a few days ago that I already saw. I’ve had to manually check the pages of people I follow to find their tweets. I’m just missing lots of stuff now. Twitter is slowly falling apart. I think it’s only a matter of time before larger site-breaking issues appear. Most of the accounts I follow are also posting to mastodon now, and at least there mastodon will show me their posts in my feed.

genmud 4y ago

I have seen nobody say that twitter will break in days. What I have seen is people say the service will have degradation, which I have definitely observed first hand. I have also noticed the quality of ads have gone from major brands using it, to what I would consider much lower quality ads. Additionally, for some of the few mainstream ads I have seen, there have been ads I have seen directly above/below NSFW/NSFL content, which is a major brand safety issue. Being blunt, they have saddled themselves with massive amounts of debt, their revenue sources are fleeing quicker than they can replace, some of their core user bases are actively trying to find a different platform and they have hemorrhaged employees they want to keep. Couple that with the current leadership at Twitter being very impulsive and doing stuff like unbanning everyone’s accounts (do people remember when ISIS was recruiting on Twitter), ad buyers (where almost the entirety of their revenue comes from) don’t see things getting better soon. Even someone who is blinded by Elons charisma can add 2+2 and realize as a company that Twitter is in murky waters. MySpace didn’t disappear in a month, neither will Twitter.

josephcsible 4y ago
> I have also noticed the quality of ads have gone from major brands using it, to what I would consider much lower quality ads. It's not fair to blame Elon for a few marketing firms telling all of their clients to stop advertising on Twitter because they don't like Elon.
- genmud 4y ago
  > It's not fair to blame Elon for a few marketing firms telling all of their clients to stop advertising on Twitter because they don't like Elon. Uh, people in the ad industry for the most part don’t give a fuck about political or personal views, nearly all the concerns about placement with publishers revolve around brand safety, ease of use and success rates. It’s absolutely fair to say that Elons decisions have made Twitter very unattractive to both brands and agencies, which will take years to build trust back.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  They don’t care about Elon. Money runs the world not people liking a person.