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I'm seeing this accidental glimpse into a future where the only content on Twitter is paid content as a gift. I've had trouble quitting Twitter, but it looks li

I'm seeing this accidental glimpse into a future where the only content on Twitter is paid content as a gift. I've had trouble quitting Twitter, but it looks like Twitter's got no problem quitting me. DMs are erroring for me, and the Android native app just tweets into the void. This issue seems to be roughly aligned with the announcement that paid accounts will have a 4000 character limit. As expected, status.twitter.com suggests Twitter is, in green-colored text, operational.

rsynnott 4y ago
> As expected, status.twitter.com suggests Twitter is, in green-colored text, operational. As is well-known, no service will ever switch its status page to red unless people moan about it on Twitter first. So, well, you can see the problem.
- runlevel1 4y ago
  Some companies are a lot more transparent than others. The last couple places I've worked had no such red tape (pun intended I guess).
alfalfasprout 4y ago
A lot of non-knowledgable folks expected twitter to immediately collapse after firing half their engineers. Instead, this is what that kind of failure looks like. Functionality starts to become flaky, some non operational entirely. You can't rely on the status page anymore. Innovation rapidly plateaus. Quality of service suffers on the whole. Rome didn't fall in a day.
- lend000 4y ago
  In fairness, I have yet to see a first party status page that reliably detects all outages.
  - gibolt 4y ago
    Many intentionally don't show outages. Amazon is generally quite picky about what is considered an AWS service outage
    - voakbasda 4y ago
      Of course they are picky, because they have SLAs that say outages cost them money. This speaks to the need for independent monitoring/auditing to ensure that companies are being honest about the metrics that they provide. Right now, no one can hold them accountable for lying on their status pages, because every customer must make their own case that there even was an outage. Worse, there’s no truly independent party to make them accept such evidence, so you are ultimately dependent on them deciding to come clean.
  - leviathant 4y ago
    I'll give credit where it's due, Shopify's status page is pretty reliable at showing downtime as it happens.
  - samb1729 4y ago
    This website is the real status page for me
  - nanidin 4y ago
    Too many bonuses and SLA contracts depend on the “status” for it to be a reliably self reported metric. When I was in one of these positions, I negotiated bonuses to allow for some failures specifically to avoid this type of conflict of interest. I think it’s also mentioned in the seminal SRE book published by Google.
  - miked85 4y ago
    Github is good, though I suspect that will change given the amount of issues they run into daily: https://www.githubstatus.com/history https://www.githubstatus.com/history
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  > Rome didn't fall in a day. But a few hours were enough for Pompeii. There's always hope :)
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Why root for it to collapse? Seems like a bizarre thing to hope for (but I’ve never been on Twitter so I’m coming at this from a distance).
    - kalleboo 4y ago
      Personally I'm rooting for all centralized, corporate, ad-financed tech to collapse and be replaced by open, federated standards.
      - kergonath 4y ago
        I am afraid one does not imply the other and that this will also leave room for new centralised company-controlled services.
    - MonkeyClub 4y ago
      kalleboo summarized it handsomely. I really dislike seeing (mega-) corps usurping the public domain, and find it highly offensive and dangerous to democracy. Twitter isn’t the public square, it’s a private revenue stream for Twitter. It shouldn’t be allowed to sway people into believing it’s a free speech platform, nor should it be used as the public space for official announcements by governments and other authorities.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  One of the worst things about the "new Twitter" is that the "old Twitter" provided so much surplus to the world in terms of the open source work their engineers did, all the design frameworks, the neat technical blogs, the sponsored events and whimsical nature of the company. It felt very much in the original spirit of Silicon Valley. It was a fine, if slightly underperforming company who had ~infinite runway to fix things as they had billions of dollars in the bank and were roughly break-even profitable. "New Twitter" feels like the worst version of private equity LBO capitalism. Suddenly the rationale for every decision is entirely extractive finance; load the company with debt to juice your shareholder returns, fire everyone who can't be proven to be profitable, break your leases, close your offices, kill all perks, cease all meetings of your employee affinity groups, make sure nobody is working on projects that don't have a straight-line to revenue growth, squeeze every dollar out of your users, monetize any surplus that you were previously providing while relying on inertia to keep your users through the much worse user experience. Elon-era Twitter is basically 2000s-era Sears -- and man is it depressing that people are cheering it on.
  - tmpz22 4y ago
    Hard not to think Musk's entourage and zealotry for layoffs didn't provide cover for the more recent tech layoff sprees. “2 day a week office requirement = 20% voluntary departures,” Calacanis wrote. “Day zero…sharpen your blades boys." [1]: https://www.yahoo.com/video/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-messaged-213703298.html https://www.yahoo.com/video/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-messag...
    - enaaem 4y ago
      Adverse selection. The people who voluntarily go have the most options en are generally the most skilled.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - tsol 4y ago
- nimbius 4y ago
  im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman although im sure some of the HN history buffs could correct me. the whole saga still gobsmacks me to this day. one of the wealthiest men in america tantrum-spends 44 billion dollars on a website, then goes through an agonizing six months pretending he didnt have to buy it and is eventually forced by a judge to complete the acquisition. next, said oligarch fumbles the execution so badly the company basically winds up firing everyone it can and accidentally lock themselves out of the headquarters for the weekend in the process. Eventually the man himself, Musk, desperately pleads for "anyone who writes code" to meet him in the dead of night on the tenth floor of his now empty office only to wind up with midlevel managers pledging their fidelity as the vichy scramble to find their place in the new order and various services begin to fail. Finally, mercifully, Musk is hauled back to Tesla where share prices are tumbling almost as quickly as twitter users are jumping ship, but not before unshackling a prison full of reprobates and racists to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    the best part was all the so-sure-they're-right HN takes that ended up being absolutely incorrect every step of the way
    - sdiacom 4y ago
      And they still believe it! He's an unparalleled genius and every single breath he takes directly contributes to saving the world. Unfortunately there's a queer globalist Hollywood blue tick pizza trafficking Democrat conspiracy making it look like Twitter is a massive dumpfire, trying to make him look bad despite every single one of his decisions being unquestionably perfect and logical.
      - adamrezich 4y ago
        [flagged]
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      I can't figure out which takes you're talking about. I have to assume they're the takes that twitter is closing up shop and that everyone is moving to Mastodon, and that Mastodon is scalable enough to accept those people. Journalists Remain on Twitter, but Tweet Slightly Less https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter-but-tweet-slightly-less.php https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter...
- semerda 4y ago
  A lot of folks aren’t open to change and see change and experiments as frightening yielding biased conclusions. It’s fine to have opinions but drawing bold conclusions is best done with factual data over a longer time horizons.
  - alfalfasprout 4y ago
    > A lot of folks aren’t open to change and see change and experiments as frightening yielding biased conclusions. > It’s fine to have opinions but drawing bold conclusions is best done with factual data over a longer time horizons. Not sure if you've heard of the McNamara fallacy, but it's something I see a lot on HN. Point is, the twitter saga is happening now. I'm sure a retroactive analysis of twitter's financials, user growth, activity, etc. would be fascinating ten years from now... but at that point it would have become an academic curiosity. Perhaps a curiosity we can learn from, but in that timespan the tech industry might be totally different. It's thus silly to brush away obvious qualitative observations and dismiss conclusions from them as irrelevant. Worth noting their limitations, sure. A bit silly to call this whole saga an "experiment" either. Musk didn't even want Twitter. He decided to axe a good chunk of the folks arbitrarily. By many accounts, a good chunk of the folks left don't want to be there either. Is it an experiment? If so, it's one of the least controlled and poorly set up experiments I've ever seen.
- mjfl 4y ago
  > Innovation rapidly plateaus. Yeah when I think of innovation I think of Twitter, and when I think of stagnation, I think of Elon Musk - the guy with the rocket company /s.
  - alfalfasprout 4y ago
    It's a bit naive to think SpaceX's ability to innovate is Musk's own doing. Gwynne Shotwell has been the one calling the shots for a long, long time.
    - mjfl 4y ago
      Gwynne calls the shots because Elon put her there. "Surely this next success is ALSO due to luck" - the loser comforts themself on the sidelines. "Surely, this is simply the 14th time they have gotten incredibly, improbably lucky."
  - Arrath 4y ago
    Twitter is (was?) a large contributor to OSS projects, no?
  - mattkevan 4y ago
    I’d wager a great deal of SpaceX’s success is down to competent management and a lot of people who believe in the mission and are willing to work very hard to make it happen. I’d also wager that a not insignificant amount of time and effort is spent insulating Musk from anything important, rather like how an oyster coats an irritant in layers of nacre. Twitter’s problem is that they no longer have competent management. Plus they’ve never needed the kind of organisational immune system that can deal with something like Musk before and are therefore wide open.
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      What's with people constantly inventing myths about SpaceX? It's all out in the open, Musk played an important role in getting it going and still plays an important role in running the R&D side of the company, leaving the 'operational' stuff to Shotwell. There are plenty of testimonies from current and previous employees showing this. It's pathetic to be inventing stories just because you can't accept that someone you dislike has been successful in some things.
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  > Rome didn't fall in a day. Freenode didn't either, but this Twitter thing seriously gives me the same sort of vibes.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  The status page being wrong is somebody making the decision to leave it green in spite of compromised functionality.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    Or no-one left knows how to update it. Has it updated for any of the post-Sink outages?
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  The claim that Twitter would collapse immediately never made any sense. Most engineers tend to design software so that they can take holidays. There might be a handful of Ops people who may be need to be available 24/7 but even in a website the size of Twitter those probably number fewer than a few dozen.
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    Were there prominent engineers making this claim or just the mainstream media that doesn't understand systems engineering?
    - Aperocky 4y ago
      mainstream media generally understand nothing outside of media, and is especially ignorant about science and technology.
    - coredog64 4y ago
      People who claimed to be senior SREs wrote long Twitter threads about how it was going to look like a post-nuclear wasteland within a week of the purchase.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  > Innovation rapidly plateaus Twitter shipped more features in the last 6 months than in the last 10 years. And that’s with a quarter of the staff too.
  - DoesntMatter22 4y ago
    I know. What innovation has twitter done in the 5 years prior? Not too much
    - nicenewtemp84 4y ago
      Someone above was genuinely impressed by allowing alt text on images.
    - nemothekid 4y ago
      Wasn't Spaces under the previous management? That said, I don't know what bar for "feature over the last 6 months" is actually meaningful. The problem with Twitter was never the user-facing product, it was the thing that actually made them money - the ads. Twitter usage exploded under the Trump years while revenue lagged. The product that Twitter should be innovating isn't user facing.
      - drexlspivey 4y ago
        They just added ads in the tweet replies (as opposed to just the main feed) and will be giving a percentage of the revenue to the person starting the thread.
    - drexlspivey 4y ago
      I can only think of Spaces, doubling the character limit and something about NFTs on profiles.
  - ctvo 4y ago
    Do we count turning on something half-baked, finding bugs, turning it off, it wasn't really off, turning it back on later with 3/4th the promised feature 5-6 feature releases? Or maybe we're counting a feature that was developed but not released for N (reasonable) reasons, now discounting those N reasons and releasing it anyway as a signal that there's some sort of innovation occurring?
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > Rome didn't fall in a day. the expression is "Rome was not built in a day." When dealing with issues like "the Sack of Rome", they pretty much did take place on particular days http://web.archive.org/web/20180318005947/https://www.history.com/news/6-infamous-sacks-of-rome/print http://web.archive.org/web/20180318005947/https://www.histor...
  - drdeca 4y ago
    It was presumably a play on the expression, not something they thought was the common expression.
    - fsckboy 4y ago
      not everybody reading the word play would know the reference, it's useful to tell them. and while plays on words are great, when they're counterfactual it gets confusing what is mean, and becomes unclear if the author knows what's being said, and Rome did fall in a day, 6 times
      - kergonath 4y ago
        That is not what is meant by the phrase “the fall of Rome”, which refers to the end of the western Roman Empire.
        ithkuil 4y ago
        It's like quitting smoking. If you're very good at quitting smoking, because you already quit 6 times, it means the first 5 times you haven't really quite. If Rome fell 6 times it also means at least 5 times it didn't fall for good and thus it took more than a day to fall for good.
        fsckboy 4y ago
        but the phrase is "Rome was not built in a day", nobody says Rome did not fall in a day https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=rome+did+not+fall+in+a+day&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=rome+did+not+fall+in+a+day&... If you want to make the case that Rome did not fall in a day, that's fine, you may have even made the case in your comment. I was just commenting on using the stock phrase wrong and expecting it to resonate. For example, I can say "An apple a day sends you straight to the doctor." If I said that, most people would recognize that I had twisted the original phrase, and could decide if they wanted to engage with what I wrote. But if I wrote, "just like an apple a day, gluten every day will send you to the doctor", I'd expect more pushback from people, "hey, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense"
- justinhj 4y ago
  If Twitter has issues it’s because Musk is a foolish billionaire who fired too many people. If it doesn’t have issues then it’s just a testament to the brilliant engineers before his tenure. In other words he can’t win. I expect Twitter will have it’s wins and losses (both technical and fiscal) over the next months but I expect that “knowledgeable” folk will continue to have the same conversation each time there is a loss.
  - voxl 4y ago
    Or you could take a step back and rationally access the situation as Musk's ego causing him to be locked into a doomed to fail deal, and his desperate attempts to turn Twitter around failing spectacularly as he almost immediately alienated advertisers. Instead we have a false dichotomy and more Musk cult of personality.
    - justinhj 4y ago
      I don't see what is false about what I said, the conversation has played out literally over and over. One call fails and Musk is an ego-maniac that ruined Twitter, nothing happens for a week and it is "all praise the great engineers he fired". There is such intellectual dishonesty. I have zero loyalty to Musk, I will criticize his mistakes and laud his successes, can you say the same? Calling any pro-Musk sentiment a cult of personality is just another trick to stick to your dogma.
      - voxl 4y ago
        There is no intellectual dishonesty. Moments after Musk took charge, he enabled the Edit feature. Entire feature length movies where then uploaded to twitter via this feature. He pushed forward buying twitter blue, essentially making twitter verification useless as a feature. As I already said, advertisers pulled out almost instantly, causing his financial situation to be practically unsolvable. The website is still up and running, yes, because servers don't magically explode the next day, but to treat this as intellectual dishonesty is cult of personality. Musk has only hurt Twitter since acquiring it. If all you are capable of is straw manning about the one person you read who meme'd the site would fall down the next day because they've never written a server before, then fuck off.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > A lot of non-knowledgable folks expected twitter to immediately collapse after firing half their engineers. AFAICT at the time, that was more a strawman crea5ed by Musk defenders than the normal criticism/expectation of people who viewed the actions as unwise.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    I think a lot of people maybe conflated “immediately become broken” (which it did, pretty much) with “immediately literally vanish” (which was never likely).
- runlevel1 4y ago
  At first, it might even increase stability because deploys are a big source of outages, and now there are a lot fewer deploys happening. But the risk of a major outage -- one that the remaining engineers are ill-equipped to handle -- grows. There are way fewer people paying down tech debt, and the ones still trying to deliver features are now doing so in a minefield.
AustinDev 4y ago
I've had a bug on Twitter iOS for nearly a year where if I'm on cellular network it cannot connect. I can go to the website fine using desktop user agent but the app will not load tweets. All other apps work fine. The app starts working again when I get on a wifi network.
- r00fus 4y ago
  Could it be something OS config related? I recently migrated phones without "upgrading" (I do this every other upgrade) and realized I put in some draconian lockdowns on my old phone that prevented me from seeing Twitter at all in the browser. New phone worked fine.
- 0x0 4y ago
  Have you checked settings > cellular to see if you might have accidentally denied mobile data usage for that particular app?
- bradtheappguy 4y ago
  If you are on iOS there is a per-app setting where you can disable cellular data for a particular app. It's possible you inadvertently turned that on for Twitter - Its a mistake I've made before and convinced myself I had a bug in my app.
  - AustinDev 4y ago
    Wow, that was it. No idea how that happened.
wnevets 4y ago
"works for me"
justinzollars 4y ago
It wasn't just Twitter having problems https://downdetector.com/ https://downdetector.com/
pyuser583 4y ago
Seems like glitches updating new features.
lost_tourist 4y ago
I got a weird message about "you are following people too much, only 4000 allowed" . I think I follow like 30 people or so lol. They are definitely looking into limiting people who aren't cash cows. They are overlooking the thing that makes twitter twitter, but keep accelerating that spiral.
- lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
  I have the same issue lol. Tried to follow someone and it won’t let me.
AJRF 4y ago
Same for me, I wasn't "addicted" to Twitter, but I did spend an amount of time on it that I often regretted. Elon managed to completely cure this in a few months. Between the constant bugs, the erratic changes, the slowness of the site, getting logged out randomly and being banned at one point for what I can only see as me tweeting a link to my mastodon account, I don't even have the site in muscle memory anymore. Thanks Elon!

rsynnott 4y ago

> As expected, status.twitter.com suggests Twitter is, in green-colored text, operational. As is well-known, no service will ever switch its status page to red unless people moan about it on Twitter first. So, well, you can see the problem.

runlevel1 4y ago
Some companies are a lot more transparent than others. The last couple places I've worked had no such red tape (pun intended I guess).

alfalfasprout 4y ago

A lot of non-knowledgable folks expected twitter to immediately collapse after firing half their engineers. Instead, this is what that kind of failure looks like. Functionality starts to become flaky, some non operational entirely. You can't rely on the status page anymore. Innovation rapidly plateaus. Quality of service suffers on the whole. Rome didn't fall in a day.

lend000 4y ago
In fairness, I have yet to see a first party status page that reliably detects all outages.
- gibolt 4y ago
  Many intentionally don't show outages. Amazon is generally quite picky about what is considered an AWS service outage
  - voakbasda 4y ago
    Of course they are picky, because they have SLAs that say outages cost them money. This speaks to the need for independent monitoring/auditing to ensure that companies are being honest about the metrics that they provide. Right now, no one can hold them accountable for lying on their status pages, because every customer must make their own case that there even was an outage. Worse, there’s no truly independent party to make them accept such evidence, so you are ultimately dependent on them deciding to come clean.
- leviathant 4y ago
  I'll give credit where it's due, Shopify's status page is pretty reliable at showing downtime as it happens.
- samb1729 4y ago
  This website is the real status page for me
- nanidin 4y ago
  Too many bonuses and SLA contracts depend on the “status” for it to be a reliably self reported metric. When I was in one of these positions, I negotiated bonuses to allow for some failures specifically to avoid this type of conflict of interest. I think it’s also mentioned in the seminal SRE book published by Google.
- miked85 4y ago
  Github is good, though I suspect that will change given the amount of issues they run into daily: https://www.githubstatus.com/history https://www.githubstatus.com/history
MonkeyClub 4y ago
> Rome didn't fall in a day. But a few hours were enough for Pompeii. There's always hope :)
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  Why root for it to collapse? Seems like a bizarre thing to hope for (but I’ve never been on Twitter so I’m coming at this from a distance).
  - kalleboo 4y ago
    Personally I'm rooting for all centralized, corporate, ad-financed tech to collapse and be replaced by open, federated standards.
    - kergonath 4y ago
      I am afraid one does not imply the other and that this will also leave room for new centralised company-controlled services.
  - MonkeyClub 4y ago
    kalleboo summarized it handsomely. I really dislike seeing (mega-) corps usurping the public domain, and find it highly offensive and dangerous to democracy. Twitter isn’t the public square, it’s a private revenue stream for Twitter. It shouldn’t be allowed to sway people into believing it’s a free speech platform, nor should it be used as the public space for official announcements by governments and other authorities.
mikeyouse 4y ago
One of the worst things about the "new Twitter" is that the "old Twitter" provided so much surplus to the world in terms of the open source work their engineers did, all the design frameworks, the neat technical blogs, the sponsored events and whimsical nature of the company. It felt very much in the original spirit of Silicon Valley. It was a fine, if slightly underperforming company who had ~infinite runway to fix things as they had billions of dollars in the bank and were roughly break-even profitable. "New Twitter" feels like the worst version of private equity LBO capitalism. Suddenly the rationale for every decision is entirely extractive finance; load the company with debt to juice your shareholder returns, fire everyone who can't be proven to be profitable, break your leases, close your offices, kill all perks, cease all meetings of your employee affinity groups, make sure nobody is working on projects that don't have a straight-line to revenue growth, squeeze every dollar out of your users, monetize any surplus that you were previously providing while relying on inertia to keep your users through the much worse user experience. Elon-era Twitter is basically 2000s-era Sears -- and man is it depressing that people are cheering it on.
- tmpz22 4y ago
  Hard not to think Musk's entourage and zealotry for layoffs didn't provide cover for the more recent tech layoff sprees. “2 day a week office requirement = 20% voluntary departures,” Calacanis wrote. “Day zero…sharpen your blades boys." [1]: https://www.yahoo.com/video/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-messaged-213703298.html https://www.yahoo.com/video/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-messag...
  - enaaem 4y ago
    Adverse selection. The people who voluntarily go have the most options en are generally the most skilled.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - tsol 4y ago
nimbius 4y ago
im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman although im sure some of the HN history buffs could correct me. the whole saga still gobsmacks me to this day. one of the wealthiest men in america tantrum-spends 44 billion dollars on a website, then goes through an agonizing six months pretending he didnt have to buy it and is eventually forced by a judge to complete the acquisition. next, said oligarch fumbles the execution so badly the company basically winds up firing everyone it can and accidentally lock themselves out of the headquarters for the weekend in the process. Eventually the man himself, Musk, desperately pleads for "anyone who writes code" to meet him in the dead of night on the tenth floor of his now empty office only to wind up with midlevel managers pledging their fidelity as the vichy scramble to find their place in the new order and various services begin to fail. Finally, mercifully, Musk is hauled back to Tesla where share prices are tumbling almost as quickly as twitter users are jumping ship, but not before unshackling a prison full of reprobates and racists to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  the best part was all the so-sure-they're-right HN takes that ended up being absolutely incorrect every step of the way
  - sdiacom 4y ago
    And they still believe it! He's an unparalleled genius and every single breath he takes directly contributes to saving the world. Unfortunately there's a queer globalist Hollywood blue tick pizza trafficking Democrat conspiracy making it look like Twitter is a massive dumpfire, trying to make him look bad despite every single one of his decisions being unquestionably perfect and logical.
    - adamrezich 4y ago
      [flagged]
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    I can't figure out which takes you're talking about. I have to assume they're the takes that twitter is closing up shop and that everyone is moving to Mastodon, and that Mastodon is scalable enough to accept those people. Journalists Remain on Twitter, but Tweet Slightly Less https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter-but-tweet-slightly-less.php https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter...
semerda 4y ago
A lot of folks aren’t open to change and see change and experiments as frightening yielding biased conclusions. It’s fine to have opinions but drawing bold conclusions is best done with factual data over a longer time horizons.
- alfalfasprout 4y ago
  > A lot of folks aren’t open to change and see change and experiments as frightening yielding biased conclusions. > It’s fine to have opinions but drawing bold conclusions is best done with factual data over a longer time horizons. Not sure if you've heard of the McNamara fallacy, but it's something I see a lot on HN. Point is, the twitter saga is happening now. I'm sure a retroactive analysis of twitter's financials, user growth, activity, etc. would be fascinating ten years from now... but at that point it would have become an academic curiosity. Perhaps a curiosity we can learn from, but in that timespan the tech industry might be totally different. It's thus silly to brush away obvious qualitative observations and dismiss conclusions from them as irrelevant. Worth noting their limitations, sure. A bit silly to call this whole saga an "experiment" either. Musk didn't even want Twitter. He decided to axe a good chunk of the folks arbitrarily. By many accounts, a good chunk of the folks left don't want to be there either. Is it an experiment? If so, it's one of the least controlled and poorly set up experiments I've ever seen.
mjfl 4y ago
> Innovation rapidly plateaus. Yeah when I think of innovation I think of Twitter, and when I think of stagnation, I think of Elon Musk - the guy with the rocket company /s.
- alfalfasprout 4y ago
  It's a bit naive to think SpaceX's ability to innovate is Musk's own doing. Gwynne Shotwell has been the one calling the shots for a long, long time.
  - mjfl 4y ago
    Gwynne calls the shots because Elon put her there. "Surely this next success is ALSO due to luck" - the loser comforts themself on the sidelines. "Surely, this is simply the 14th time they have gotten incredibly, improbably lucky."
- Arrath 4y ago
  Twitter is (was?) a large contributor to OSS projects, no?
- mattkevan 4y ago
  I’d wager a great deal of SpaceX’s success is down to competent management and a lot of people who believe in the mission and are willing to work very hard to make it happen. I’d also wager that a not insignificant amount of time and effort is spent insulating Musk from anything important, rather like how an oyster coats an irritant in layers of nacre. Twitter’s problem is that they no longer have competent management. Plus they’ve never needed the kind of organisational immune system that can deal with something like Musk before and are therefore wide open.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    What's with people constantly inventing myths about SpaceX? It's all out in the open, Musk played an important role in getting it going and still plays an important role in running the R&D side of the company, leaving the 'operational' stuff to Shotwell. There are plenty of testimonies from current and previous employees showing this. It's pathetic to be inventing stories just because you can't accept that someone you dislike has been successful in some things.
phoe-krk 4y ago
> Rome didn't fall in a day. Freenode didn't either, but this Twitter thing seriously gives me the same sort of vibes.
jupp0r 4y ago
The status page being wrong is somebody making the decision to leave it green in spite of compromised functionality.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  Or no-one left knows how to update it. Has it updated for any of the post-Sink outages?
rhaway84773 4y ago
The claim that Twitter would collapse immediately never made any sense. Most engineers tend to design software so that they can take holidays. There might be a handful of Ops people who may be need to be available 24/7 but even in a website the size of Twitter those probably number fewer than a few dozen.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  Were there prominent engineers making this claim or just the mainstream media that doesn't understand systems engineering?
  - Aperocky 4y ago
    mainstream media generally understand nothing outside of media, and is especially ignorant about science and technology.
  - coredog64 4y ago
    People who claimed to be senior SREs wrote long Twitter threads about how it was going to look like a post-nuclear wasteland within a week of the purchase.
drexlspivey 4y ago
> Innovation rapidly plateaus Twitter shipped more features in the last 6 months than in the last 10 years. And that’s with a quarter of the staff too.
- DoesntMatter22 4y ago
  I know. What innovation has twitter done in the 5 years prior? Not too much
  - nicenewtemp84 4y ago
    Someone above was genuinely impressed by allowing alt text on images.
  - nemothekid 4y ago
    Wasn't Spaces under the previous management? That said, I don't know what bar for "feature over the last 6 months" is actually meaningful. The problem with Twitter was never the user-facing product, it was the thing that actually made them money - the ads. Twitter usage exploded under the Trump years while revenue lagged. The product that Twitter should be innovating isn't user facing.
    - drexlspivey 4y ago
      They just added ads in the tweet replies (as opposed to just the main feed) and will be giving a percentage of the revenue to the person starting the thread.
  - drexlspivey 4y ago
    I can only think of Spaces, doubling the character limit and something about NFTs on profiles.
- ctvo 4y ago
  Do we count turning on something half-baked, finding bugs, turning it off, it wasn't really off, turning it back on later with 3/4th the promised feature 5-6 feature releases? Or maybe we're counting a feature that was developed but not released for N (reasonable) reasons, now discounting those N reasons and releasing it anyway as a signal that there's some sort of innovation occurring?
fsckboy 4y ago
> Rome didn't fall in a day. the expression is "Rome was not built in a day." When dealing with issues like "the Sack of Rome", they pretty much did take place on particular days http://web.archive.org/web/20180318005947/https://www.history.com/news/6-infamous-sacks-of-rome/print http://web.archive.org/web/20180318005947/https://www.histor...
- drdeca 4y ago
  It was presumably a play on the expression, not something they thought was the common expression.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    not everybody reading the word play would know the reference, it's useful to tell them. and while plays on words are great, when they're counterfactual it gets confusing what is mean, and becomes unclear if the author knows what's being said, and Rome did fall in a day, 6 times
    - kergonath 4y ago
      That is not what is meant by the phrase “the fall of Rome”, which refers to the end of the western Roman Empire.
      - ithkuil 4y ago
        It's like quitting smoking. If you're very good at quitting smoking, because you already quit 6 times, it means the first 5 times you haven't really quite. If Rome fell 6 times it also means at least 5 times it didn't fall for good and thus it took more than a day to fall for good.
        fsckboy 4y ago
        but the phrase is "Rome was not built in a day", nobody says Rome did not fall in a day https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=rome+did+not+fall+in+a+day&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=rome+did+not+fall+in+a+day&... If you want to make the case that Rome did not fall in a day, that's fine, you may have even made the case in your comment. I was just commenting on using the stock phrase wrong and expecting it to resonate. For example, I can say "An apple a day sends you straight to the doctor." If I said that, most people would recognize that I had twisted the original phrase, and could decide if they wanted to engage with what I wrote. But if I wrote, "just like an apple a day, gluten every day will send you to the doctor", I'd expect more pushback from people, "hey, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense"
justinhj 4y ago
If Twitter has issues it’s because Musk is a foolish billionaire who fired too many people. If it doesn’t have issues then it’s just a testament to the brilliant engineers before his tenure. In other words he can’t win. I expect Twitter will have it’s wins and losses (both technical and fiscal) over the next months but I expect that “knowledgeable” folk will continue to have the same conversation each time there is a loss.
- voxl 4y ago
  Or you could take a step back and rationally access the situation as Musk's ego causing him to be locked into a doomed to fail deal, and his desperate attempts to turn Twitter around failing spectacularly as he almost immediately alienated advertisers. Instead we have a false dichotomy and more Musk cult of personality.
  - justinhj 4y ago
    I don't see what is false about what I said, the conversation has played out literally over and over. One call fails and Musk is an ego-maniac that ruined Twitter, nothing happens for a week and it is "all praise the great engineers he fired". There is such intellectual dishonesty. I have zero loyalty to Musk, I will criticize his mistakes and laud his successes, can you say the same? Calling any pro-Musk sentiment a cult of personality is just another trick to stick to your dogma.
    - voxl 4y ago
      There is no intellectual dishonesty. Moments after Musk took charge, he enabled the Edit feature. Entire feature length movies where then uploaded to twitter via this feature. He pushed forward buying twitter blue, essentially making twitter verification useless as a feature. As I already said, advertisers pulled out almost instantly, causing his financial situation to be practically unsolvable. The website is still up and running, yes, because servers don't magically explode the next day, but to treat this as intellectual dishonesty is cult of personality. Musk has only hurt Twitter since acquiring it. If all you are capable of is straw manning about the one person you read who meme'd the site would fall down the next day because they've never written a server before, then fuck off.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> A lot of non-knowledgable folks expected twitter to immediately collapse after firing half their engineers. AFAICT at the time, that was more a strawman crea5ed by Musk defenders than the normal criticism/expectation of people who viewed the actions as unwise.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  I think a lot of people maybe conflated “immediately become broken” (which it did, pretty much) with “immediately literally vanish” (which was never likely).
runlevel1 4y ago
At first, it might even increase stability because deploys are a big source of outages, and now there are a lot fewer deploys happening. But the risk of a major outage -- one that the remaining engineers are ill-equipped to handle -- grows. There are way fewer people paying down tech debt, and the ones still trying to deliver features are now doing so in a minefield.

AustinDev 4y ago

I've had a bug on Twitter iOS for nearly a year where if I'm on cellular network it cannot connect. I can go to the website fine using desktop user agent but the app will not load tweets. All other apps work fine. The app starts working again when I get on a wifi network.

r00fus 4y ago
Could it be something OS config related? I recently migrated phones without "upgrading" (I do this every other upgrade) and realized I put in some draconian lockdowns on my old phone that prevented me from seeing Twitter at all in the browser. New phone worked fine.
0x0 4y ago
Have you checked settings > cellular to see if you might have accidentally denied mobile data usage for that particular app?
bradtheappguy 4y ago
If you are on iOS there is a per-app setting where you can disable cellular data for a particular app. It's possible you inadvertently turned that on for Twitter - Its a mistake I've made before and convinced myself I had a bug in my app.
- AustinDev 4y ago
  Wow, that was it. No idea how that happened.

wnevets 4y ago

"works for me"

justinzollars 4y ago

It wasn't just Twitter having problems https://downdetector.com/ https://downdetector.com/

pyuser583 4y ago

Seems like glitches updating new features.

lost_tourist 4y ago

I got a weird message about "you are following people too much, only 4000 allowed" . I think I follow like 30 people or so lol. They are definitely looking into limiting people who aren't cash cows. They are overlooking the thing that makes twitter twitter, but keep accelerating that spiral.

lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
I have the same issue lol. Tried to follow someone and it won’t let me.

AJRF 4y ago

Same for me, I wasn't "addicted" to Twitter, but I did spend an amount of time on it that I often regretted. Elon managed to completely cure this in a few months. Between the constant bugs, the erratic changes, the slowness of the site, getting logged out randomly and being banned at one point for what I can only see as me tweeting a link to my mastodon account, I don't even have the site in muscle memory anymore. Thanks Elon!