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Unrelated, but genuine question from someone who doesn't really use twitter. What happened to Twitter's QoS falling apart after Musk laid off all those people?

Unrelated, but genuine question from someone who doesn't really use twitter. What happened to Twitter's QoS falling apart after Musk laid off all those people? Were the warnings overblown and unrealistic, or is there just an inside story? I feel like I heard a lot about how they were doomed and now it seems like they're rolling out new features.

dagmx 4y ago
They’ve had significant outages, managed to block their own API, account fraud and reduced content moderation. Nobody said the system failures would be overnight, they happen slowly in the form of unmaintained rot that’s already manifested multiple times since the layoffs. I would also warn against the fallacy that new features imply that old infrastructure is also getting the attention it deserves. Elon has been rolling out tons of new things since he bought it, and redirecting people to what he wants.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  > Nobody said the system failures would be overnight There was literally a massive Tweet storm of whiners writing drawn out farewells to their loyal followers one night late last year as people were convinced that the rapid culling of staff and firings would lead to unrepairable, technical collapse of Twitter that very weekend, and that it would be impossible for them to get it back up because no tech people would want to work for them anymore.
tpmx 4y ago
https://istwitterdownyet.com/ https://istwitterdownyet.com/ Personally I don't really see much of a difference tbh.
- mvdwoord 4y ago
  Just anecdata from a very simple user. I typically only read the following tab, in Firefox with uBlock and have seen zero difference in functionality or reliability and actually enjoy not being tricked into the algorithmic feed anymore. Then again, i don't use DMs, bookmarks, or any other advanced features. It feels more or less the same if not better. I do distinctly remember though that there were plenty of voices, also here iirc, that definitely predicted a faster decline than what is mentioned nowadays. I have no horse in this race though... Just eating popcorn and watching the show :)
  - tpmx 4y ago
    For reference: This is what it looks like now: [For you] | [Following] Following is not strictly chronological, but mostly. I think this is fair. > and actually enjoy not being tricked into the algorithmic feed anymore Same. I also noticed that sometimes I actually want to dip into the "For You" tab. I like this UX. Since so much on Twitter is political (I know there are other uses), a third tab might be interesting: "Other perspectives", "Break out of the bubble" or something along the lines of that.
  - Phil_Latio 4y ago
    @tpmx Same. The "explore" features are still kind of lacking in general. Can't switch to other country trends easily, or have a list of active spaces etc. I expected this to get fixed first!
  - flangola7 4y ago
    Public search no longer works. I don't want to have to give Twitter a phone number just to use its search bar.
    - suddenclarity 4y ago
      Sounds like a reasonable simple fix to reduce scrapers trying to bypass paying for API. I honestly don't see why Twitter would allow non users to search considering how the service works.
      - flangola7 4y ago
        It's not about bots it's a brazen money/user data grab. They don't want you to use search unless they have an account to track you with. What other website does that? Not Reddit or Google or Bing or HN or YouTube or GitHub or Twitch or Wikipedia. The bot argument they make is a facade.
brookst 4y ago
I’d love to see data, but anecdotes suggest reliability has declined and the company is addressing it by charging (a lot) for formerly-free features as a way to reduce load. https://news.yahoo.com/nyc-subway-stop-tweeting-because-132400658.html https://news.yahoo.com/nyc-subway-stop-tweeting-because-1324...
- asimpletune 4y ago
  Interesting, the article mentions that they were asked to start paying $50K/mo. It seems like they didn't feel like they were getting their money's worth.
- brigadier132 4y ago
  > and the company is addressing it by charging (a lot) for formerly-free features as a way to reduce load Twitter was losing a ton of money, the free features had to go regardless.
  - ryanjshaw 4y ago
    I do think it's a bit silly I can't use the free API to read my own tweets, though.
  - gdulli 4y ago
    Twitter was profitable as recently as 2019. A simple round of layoffs to fix the pandemic overhiring could have brought them back to that, or close enough that they wouldn't have had to blow up the service in bigger ways. Although this is an avenue that would have been open to the prior leadership. The extra debt and baggage introduced by Musk may have taken a solution that simple away.
  - brookst 4y ago
    "Free features" like letting public agencies post public service info? Rule 1 of being a content aggregator: never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, for any reason, should you charge people for giving you content that makes your platform more valuable.
meibo 4y ago
Things are definitely noticeably degrading, but not in a way that keeps you entirely from using the site(most of the time, anyway, they did block their own API tokens once or twice). Anecdotally, it's things like bookmarks being stuck 4 days in the past, and then suddenly updating with everything you've bookmarked in the meantime. What you would expect from huge distributed systems slowly falling apart. Most of the features he's added are retooled old things or very small things, so I wouldn't necessarily say that it's an indicator that things are going well on a technical level.
- night-rider 4y ago
  > Things are definitely noticeably degrading Yes. Rudimentary & basic functionality like the ability to follow people was briefly broken on Twitter's web app. You clicked 'follow' and the button didn't change to 'following' and it didn't register that you clicked follow. And an anecdotal thing that happened to me on the iOS app: their reporting feature was broken and I went to report some questionable content I found whilst randomly browsing, only to find the reporting functionality was broken. It just hanged with a vague message: 'Something went wrong'. This is unacceptable behavior. Users should be able to police content, not just algos and content moderation teams. Then there's the 'Lists' feature which doesn't tally the amount of members of a list properly. You add five members to it, and the tally displays '0 members'. I keep hoping a new update fixes this, but it's treated as a second class citizen of Twitter: 'Who even uses lists, we don't need to pay attention to Lists' mentality. And another nitpick: the iOS app keeps asking me to enable notifications even after repeatedly declining to turn notifications on. Can't they just get the message: I never want to enable notifications on Twitter. Infact I have notifications turned off for everything in iOS cause I don't want to be bombarded with pointless little 'red dots' that diminish my dopamine supply and distracts me.
mcqueenjordan 4y ago
Search routinely doesn’t work lately. Wrong results and/or extremely slow. Just my anecdotal experience but corroborated by others.
Ruq 4y ago
I just casually use Twitter as an observer and I haven't noticed anything degrading. It runs the same way it used to.
- postpawl 4y ago
  You haven’t noticed major differences in search results? I used to see reputable sources like Reuters and AP in the top few tweets when you search for a news story. Now it’s people like that catturd guy.
  - suddenclarity 4y ago
    I don't think most people use search except at major news events so most people wouldn't notice. Twitter search has always been broken and a common thing to complain about. At least now under Musk it's not 60% gay porn spam accounts anymore. No clue how the precious people messed it up under those few weeks. Even worse than the spam comments YouTube had.
asimpletune 4y ago
It looks like their last time down was April 21 for about an hour, but for the year the site's only been down twice for a total of about 2.5 hrs. I compared that to the last place I worked and it was about the same. Both were at about 99.91%.
VincentEvans 4y ago
Open replies under the tweet linked in this submission. If this is any indication what the discourse on twitter is like… judge for yourself.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  I don't think that's really fair. The replies to Elon have always been the worst of twitter.
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    Every time I've looked under one of Elon's tweets it's nothing of substance, just fellatio en masse
  - VincentEvans 4y ago
    Elon: - if not #1 most famous person on twitter, then surely in top 10. - richest, or second richest, or third richest, i mean it changes by week, but he is up there, person in the world. I bring it up because he is certainly a person with resources and influence. - owns twitter. Which is relevant because if one wanted to change something about twitter, i think he has the tools at his disposal. - publicly went on record, not like anyone was pulling his tongue, about his agenda for bringing change to twitter. … and having said all that - the replies on his posts specifically are somehow not representative of what twitter is, and it is “unfair” to to use them as an example? I mean if >I< were in charge - I’d start there.
fogzen 4y ago
It works more or less like it did before. The media is mostly histrionics, as usual.
gdulli 4y ago
My client stopped working and I deleted an account that I'd used daily for over a decade. It would have been hard for me to break that habit on my own if I'd actively tried. Twitter is a lame duck. Its problems and missteps are more nuanced than downtime. But just like Facebook didn't go out of business as it became irrelevant to people below a certain age, Twitter is also too big to fail quickly.
themagician 4y ago
Most tech companies don’t run lean. They run bloated because they are trying to chase a dozen different things at once in the hopes of finding the thing that lets them 10x to please investors. A lot of companies can do what Twitter just did and come out relatively fine, perhaps better in some ways. I’m surprised people here ever thought Twitter would collapse. So many of us have worked at these companies. We know how bloated they are. You can spend a decade at Google, Facebook, Twitter or Amazon and make an amazing salary but never work on a single thing that makes it to market.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I’m surprised people here ever thought Twitter would collapse. I'm surprised people think Twitter hasn’t been in a state of continuous functional degradation with a particular bad period around each significant feature rollout. I’m kind of jealous and wish I had access to the Twitter they are using.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    I don't know what version of Twitter you're using, but mine (web and android) has been reasonably fine. Sure, there have been periods of buggy behavior, but that's always going to happen when the system is changing, and they get resolved reasonably quickly. My "For You" feed has only been getting better and better recently. I don't even bother with my "Following" feed anymore because it tends to get drowned out by addicts who tweet hundreds of times a day.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Sure, there have been periods of buggy behavior, but that's always going to happen when the system is changing, and they get resolved reasonably quickly. I also use web and android, and the periods of buggy behavior have been more frequent, more severe, and taken longer to get resolved (some of them appear to be serious unresolved but intermittent, though maybe they are resolved and re-caused, though in some ways that would be more worrying.) But, if you’re happy with what you’re getting, good for you.
abletonlive 4y ago
Of course it's overblown. Twitter still operates better than reddit does most of the time.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  True but that's an extremely low bar.
BigBalli 4y ago
just politics.
Giorgi 4y ago
Reddit is radical left leaning, they do not like Musk and hive-mind believed that "Twitter was collapsing", yet, after gazillions were fired, nothing happened. Goes to show you that one should never let brain mix what one wants to happen with what is actually happening.

dagmx 4y ago

They’ve had significant outages, managed to block their own API, account fraud and reduced content moderation. Nobody said the system failures would be overnight, they happen slowly in the form of unmaintained rot that’s already manifested multiple times since the layoffs. I would also warn against the fallacy that new features imply that old infrastructure is also getting the attention it deserves. Elon has been rolling out tons of new things since he bought it, and redirecting people to what he wants.

anonporridge 4y ago
> Nobody said the system failures would be overnight There was literally a massive Tweet storm of whiners writing drawn out farewells to their loyal followers one night late last year as people were convinced that the rapid culling of staff and firings would lead to unrepairable, technical collapse of Twitter that very weekend, and that it would be impossible for them to get it back up because no tech people would want to work for them anymore.

tpmx 4y ago

https://istwitterdownyet.com/ https://istwitterdownyet.com/ Personally I don't really see much of a difference tbh.

mvdwoord 4y ago
Just anecdata from a very simple user. I typically only read the following tab, in Firefox with uBlock and have seen zero difference in functionality or reliability and actually enjoy not being tricked into the algorithmic feed anymore. Then again, i don't use DMs, bookmarks, or any other advanced features. It feels more or less the same if not better. I do distinctly remember though that there were plenty of voices, also here iirc, that definitely predicted a faster decline than what is mentioned nowadays. I have no horse in this race though... Just eating popcorn and watching the show :)
- tpmx 4y ago
  For reference: This is what it looks like now: [For you] | [Following] Following is not strictly chronological, but mostly. I think this is fair. > and actually enjoy not being tricked into the algorithmic feed anymore Same. I also noticed that sometimes I actually want to dip into the "For You" tab. I like this UX. Since so much on Twitter is political (I know there are other uses), a third tab might be interesting: "Other perspectives", "Break out of the bubble" or something along the lines of that.
- Phil_Latio 4y ago
  @tpmx Same. The "explore" features are still kind of lacking in general. Can't switch to other country trends easily, or have a list of active spaces etc. I expected this to get fixed first!
- flangola7 4y ago
  Public search no longer works. I don't want to have to give Twitter a phone number just to use its search bar.
  - suddenclarity 4y ago
    Sounds like a reasonable simple fix to reduce scrapers trying to bypass paying for API. I honestly don't see why Twitter would allow non users to search considering how the service works.
    - flangola7 4y ago
      It's not about bots it's a brazen money/user data grab. They don't want you to use search unless they have an account to track you with. What other website does that? Not Reddit or Google or Bing or HN or YouTube or GitHub or Twitch or Wikipedia. The bot argument they make is a facade.

brookst 4y ago

I’d love to see data, but anecdotes suggest reliability has declined and the company is addressing it by charging (a lot) for formerly-free features as a way to reduce load. https://news.yahoo.com/nyc-subway-stop-tweeting-because-132400658.html https://news.yahoo.com/nyc-subway-stop-tweeting-because-1324...

asimpletune 4y ago
Interesting, the article mentions that they were asked to start paying $50K/mo. It seems like they didn't feel like they were getting their money's worth.
brigadier132 4y ago
> and the company is addressing it by charging (a lot) for formerly-free features as a way to reduce load Twitter was losing a ton of money, the free features had to go regardless.
- ryanjshaw 4y ago
  I do think it's a bit silly I can't use the free API to read my own tweets, though.
- gdulli 4y ago
  Twitter was profitable as recently as 2019. A simple round of layoffs to fix the pandemic overhiring could have brought them back to that, or close enough that they wouldn't have had to blow up the service in bigger ways. Although this is an avenue that would have been open to the prior leadership. The extra debt and baggage introduced by Musk may have taken a solution that simple away.
- brookst 4y ago
  "Free features" like letting public agencies post public service info? Rule 1 of being a content aggregator: never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, for any reason, should you charge people for giving you content that makes your platform more valuable.

meibo 4y ago

Things are definitely noticeably degrading, but not in a way that keeps you entirely from using the site(most of the time, anyway, they did block their own API tokens once or twice). Anecdotally, it's things like bookmarks being stuck 4 days in the past, and then suddenly updating with everything you've bookmarked in the meantime. What you would expect from huge distributed systems slowly falling apart. Most of the features he's added are retooled old things or very small things, so I wouldn't necessarily say that it's an indicator that things are going well on a technical level.

night-rider 4y ago
> Things are definitely noticeably degrading Yes. Rudimentary & basic functionality like the ability to follow people was briefly broken on Twitter's web app. You clicked 'follow' and the button didn't change to 'following' and it didn't register that you clicked follow. And an anecdotal thing that happened to me on the iOS app: their reporting feature was broken and I went to report some questionable content I found whilst randomly browsing, only to find the reporting functionality was broken. It just hanged with a vague message: 'Something went wrong'. This is unacceptable behavior. Users should be able to police content, not just algos and content moderation teams. Then there's the 'Lists' feature which doesn't tally the amount of members of a list properly. You add five members to it, and the tally displays '0 members'. I keep hoping a new update fixes this, but it's treated as a second class citizen of Twitter: 'Who even uses lists, we don't need to pay attention to Lists' mentality. And another nitpick: the iOS app keeps asking me to enable notifications even after repeatedly declining to turn notifications on. Can't they just get the message: I never want to enable notifications on Twitter. Infact I have notifications turned off for everything in iOS cause I don't want to be bombarded with pointless little 'red dots' that diminish my dopamine supply and distracts me.

mcqueenjordan 4y ago

Search routinely doesn’t work lately. Wrong results and/or extremely slow. Just my anecdotal experience but corroborated by others.

Ruq 4y ago

I just casually use Twitter as an observer and I haven't noticed anything degrading. It runs the same way it used to.

postpawl 4y ago
You haven’t noticed major differences in search results? I used to see reputable sources like Reuters and AP in the top few tweets when you search for a news story. Now it’s people like that catturd guy.
- suddenclarity 4y ago
  I don't think most people use search except at major news events so most people wouldn't notice. Twitter search has always been broken and a common thing to complain about. At least now under Musk it's not 60% gay porn spam accounts anymore. No clue how the precious people messed it up under those few weeks. Even worse than the spam comments YouTube had.

asimpletune 4y ago

It looks like their last time down was April 21 for about an hour, but for the year the site's only been down twice for a total of about 2.5 hrs. I compared that to the last place I worked and it was about the same. Both were at about 99.91%.

VincentEvans 4y ago

Open replies under the tweet linked in this submission. If this is any indication what the discourse on twitter is like… judge for yourself.

sebzim4500 4y ago
I don't think that's really fair. The replies to Elon have always been the worst of twitter.
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  Every time I've looked under one of Elon's tweets it's nothing of substance, just fellatio en masse
- VincentEvans 4y ago
  Elon: - if not #1 most famous person on twitter, then surely in top 10. - richest, or second richest, or third richest, i mean it changes by week, but he is up there, person in the world. I bring it up because he is certainly a person with resources and influence. - owns twitter. Which is relevant because if one wanted to change something about twitter, i think he has the tools at his disposal. - publicly went on record, not like anyone was pulling his tongue, about his agenda for bringing change to twitter. … and having said all that - the replies on his posts specifically are somehow not representative of what twitter is, and it is “unfair” to to use them as an example? I mean if >I< were in charge - I’d start there.

fogzen 4y ago

It works more or less like it did before. The media is mostly histrionics, as usual.

gdulli 4y ago

My client stopped working and I deleted an account that I'd used daily for over a decade. It would have been hard for me to break that habit on my own if I'd actively tried. Twitter is a lame duck. Its problems and missteps are more nuanced than downtime. But just like Facebook didn't go out of business as it became irrelevant to people below a certain age, Twitter is also too big to fail quickly.

themagician 4y ago

Most tech companies don’t run lean. They run bloated because they are trying to chase a dozen different things at once in the hopes of finding the thing that lets them 10x to please investors. A lot of companies can do what Twitter just did and come out relatively fine, perhaps better in some ways. I’m surprised people here ever thought Twitter would collapse. So many of us have worked at these companies. We know how bloated they are. You can spend a decade at Google, Facebook, Twitter or Amazon and make an amazing salary but never work on a single thing that makes it to market.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> I’m surprised people here ever thought Twitter would collapse. I'm surprised people think Twitter hasn’t been in a state of continuous functional degradation with a particular bad period around each significant feature rollout. I’m kind of jealous and wish I had access to the Twitter they are using.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  I don't know what version of Twitter you're using, but mine (web and android) has been reasonably fine. Sure, there have been periods of buggy behavior, but that's always going to happen when the system is changing, and they get resolved reasonably quickly. My "For You" feed has only been getting better and better recently. I don't even bother with my "Following" feed anymore because it tends to get drowned out by addicts who tweet hundreds of times a day.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Sure, there have been periods of buggy behavior, but that's always going to happen when the system is changing, and they get resolved reasonably quickly. I also use web and android, and the periods of buggy behavior have been more frequent, more severe, and taken longer to get resolved (some of them appear to be serious unresolved but intermittent, though maybe they are resolved and re-caused, though in some ways that would be more worrying.) But, if you’re happy with what you’re getting, good for you.

abletonlive 4y ago

Of course it's overblown. Twitter still operates better than reddit does most of the time.

sebzim4500 4y ago
True but that's an extremely low bar.

BigBalli 4y ago

just politics.

Giorgi 4y ago

Reddit is radical left leaning, they do not like Musk and hive-mind believed that "Twitter was collapsing", yet, after gazillions were fired, nothing happened. Goes to show you that one should never let brain mix what one wants to happen with what is actually happening.