4 ms·

I think we're about at the point where the people who predicted chaos at twitter after Elon basically fired most of the experienced engineers have been proven c

I think we're about at the point where the people who predicted chaos at twitter after Elon basically fired most of the experienced engineers have been proven correct. The duct tape is all coming apart at the seams now. It isn't quite as decisive as a submarine imploding, and ceasing to exist, but it has turned into a brightly burning tirefire.

bravoetch 3y ago
25 years of products being honed for shareholder value, instead of customer or user value. We may be at peak consumer tolerance for anti-pattern, in-app purchase, subscription-model, ad-packed, data-siphoning, dopamine driven, gated experiences.
- OnlineGladiator 3y ago
  > We may be at peak consumer tolerance for anti-pattern, in-app purchase, subscription-model, ad-packed, data-siphoning, dopamine driven, gated experiences. As much as I want this to be true, I think this sentiment is really only popular on tech-savvy forums like HN. Most people don't use ad blockers, and I've had people get mad at me when I suggest that they do (directly in response to something where they are complaining about ads).
  - tough 3y ago
    > and I've had people get mad at me when I suggest that they do. lol that's a new one, why?
    - NikolaNovak 3y ago
      Not the op but I have that experience frequently. These are perceived as geeky needy techie things that are not for normal people (sprinkle quotations as needed). It's the same as people getting upset at suggestion to add lock of some sort to their phone (face, fingerprint, whatever) or backup their phone. After some pondering I think it's peoples' insecurity misfiring. They use these complicated layered and potentially risky and dangerous pieces of technology, aware they don't fully understand them, that they work as magic that could stop any moment. Trying to understand and secure them is a massive rabbit hole. So I think there's kind of a rejection to go down that hole or acknowledge the problem or, most of all, face the vulnerability and exposure. My 100 Croatian lipa fwiw :-)
      - tough 3y ago
        I can see it at which point I just install it for them, tell them how it works and how to disable if it gets and the way and move on. But you gotta have a very good relationship with someone to just do that I guess
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - OnlineGladiator 3y ago
      Ultimately it boils down to "it should just work" but to be more specific one person said "I shouldn't have to do anything different!" and directed their anger towards me instead of the ads they were previously complaining about. People that aren't tech-savvy don't want to think about tech any more than they already do. Having to understand something new about tech is just another problem to them. I'm not saying that as an insult - just an observation.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
      I’ve had someone say they want to support the content, which I understand. If only they knew how their data was being abused.
- bozhark 3y ago
  AAA video game industry sure seems to be pushing this idea with the past years of broken, unfinished, beta projects being released as complete products.
- hyperpape 3y ago
  This is a perfect example of how "shareholder value" is a thought-terminating cliche. Twitter was previously a public company, which was beholden to shareholders, and aimed to try and increase its stock price (as far as "shareholder value" actually means anything, this is basically it). I wouldn't praise previous management (the company wasn't profitable), but they were not a complete dumpster fire. Then Twitter was bought out, and taken private, removing the obligation to "shareholder value." The ensuing dumpster fire is one that will be marveled at for years. I'm not saying public corporations are better than private, or that "shareholder value" is a good slogan. I'm just saying that your comment is every bit as irrelevant as the porn spam that's clogging Twitter these days. (Thanks for fixing the spam problem, y'all!).
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    > Then Twitter was bought out, and taken private, removing the obligation to "shareholder value." Does it really though? Private shareholders are still shareholders. It replaces a diffuse duty to keep a bunch of public-shareholders happen with a possibly-more-direct "do what I say or be replaced tomorrow." > "shareholder value" is a thought-terminating cliche I think when people use it dismissively, it's not really about shareholders per se, but about one that are focused on short-term growth at the expense of long-term growth or a sustainable business model.
    - hyperpape 3y ago
      If your point is that both old Twitter and new Twitter have people who have put money into it, and expect to not lose their money, you are correct. I would still recommend not using the word “shareholder value” for the concept. It’s just…having a business that you don’t want to lose money? Some people do dislike the concept of business, but I don’t think they should talk about “shareholder value”, they should just attack capitalism. In any case, it’s still irrelevant to a discussion of Twitter. The old management was also expected to turn a profit, but somehow avoided Elon’s string of silly ideas.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
    > not a complete dumpster fire. I never liked Twitter, don't have accounts, etc. To me this "dumpster fire" talk sounds like just sour grapes.
lr4444lr 3y ago
I dunno. We are several months out after the major layoffs. Maybe some very recent bad decisions were made internally that pared back too far, but I think Musk has long since been proven correct that the core platform could function on a fraction of the workforce it had at the time of takeover.
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  Do you think if we fired every civil engineer tomorrow, the bridges and the highways they built would fall apart right afterwards, or even in a few months? Engineering isn't like service positions where the lack of competent personnel is felt immediately; the debt keeps growing until your whole system collapses under it one day, how far the day is in the future depends on what system you're working on.
  - oittaa 3y ago
    Did you forget how people were saying that Twitter would stop working within days?
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      Maybe "Twitter would stop paying it's bills within days" was too brash a prediction and it was stepped back.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- firesteelrain 3y ago
  Agree. Plus it’s easy to crap on Elon but it’s also the poor Twitter architecture and quality of people they have working for them that caused this despite Elon’s desire to require login to read Twitter. He didn’t write the code.
  - simonw 3y ago
    Elon is responsible for the quality of the people who work for Twitter. That's what a CEO does.
avl999 3y ago
I am not disagreeing with you but self-ddos is not entirely uncommon. When I worked at Amazon this would happen a few times a year. Not on the main amazon.com website but on supporting services often initiated by but not limited to kindle devices. Having something like this slip through the cracks of even experienced engineers isn't uncommon.
- Tade0 3y ago
  But in such cases surely there's some kind of rate limiter in place? I mean, if I'm reading that screenshot correctly this is 700+ requests a minute. I've tripped the rate limiter with less on other sites.
  - avl999 3y ago
    > But in such cases surely there's some kind of rate limiter in place? Not really, our team maintained a reverse-proxy that fronted all requests that came into amazon. And whenever we would have a self-ddos event, we'd get a request from the backend team whose service was getting self-ddos'd to shed traffic before it reached their service hosts to prevent it from browning out. In many case ddos's were coming from kindle devices which were not even easy to update so deploying a "fix" wasn't even always an option.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Yeah it happened when I worked at Amazon as well. I also more recently worked pretty closely with people at Facebook and knew something about the issues they would occasionally have (which didn't match what the headline speculations were at all). But twitter is repeatedly having these kinds of issues.
- dcunit3d 3y ago
  I tried to point this out below. It's not even a DDoS, it's fake news. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2019/expand-the-edge https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life" fdsa
terminatornet 3y ago
right? it's a shame hacker news doesn't let you reply to old comments, there's a few threads I'd like to follow up on from people who refused to believe Elon was destroying twitter
- Marazan 3y ago
  I think I had someone do the old sarcastic "remind me of this in one year" under one of my posts predicting technical doom for Twitter. Definitely a good one to revisit.
  - Marazan 3y ago
    Found it, in response to me saying Twitter was dead but it just didn't realise it yet a poster said "i'm favoriting this so i can come back to it, like that dropbox comment." Delicious.
  - dcunit3d 3y ago
    Yeh, except you're completely wrong. I tried to point this out below. It's not even a DDoS, it's fake news. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2019/expand-the-edge https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
  I think it’s intents like yours which is why they’re not allowed. Shame, because there are some genuine value in having it too..
- dcunit3d 3y ago
  I tried to point this out below. It's not even a DDoS, it's fake news. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2019/expand-the-edge https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life" ...
shon 3y ago
I have to disagree. If you honestly take the emotion and politics out of this and evaluate on merit alone, what do you think? Twitter wasn’t healthy before Musk bought it. It wasn’t a thriving business, it was a very old, very large startup still struggling to find market fit and loosing a lot of money. Also, it wasn’t a thriving product. It was stagnant. Since Twitter was purchased, the amount of features they have shipped has been impressive. They’ve shipped a lot of features and extended the platform a lot. To your point they have also done this with far less engineers than before. Regarding any downtime, everyone has downtime. Google, Amazon, Meta… the best of the best still have it regardless of money or manpower. Considering what that team has done with less resources, I think the achievement still pretty good. What do you think?
- mooreds 3y ago
  > It wasn’t a thriving business, it was a very old, very large startup still struggling to find market fit and loosing a lot of money. Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019. https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-usa/1418091-TWITTER-INC/#firstlist https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...
  - meowkit 3y ago
    After years of losing money, and then not being profitable in 2020+. I'm not going to spend a lot of time researching this. This 2019 article says they cut costs/Vine and jumped to video ads which boosted revenue 24% which might explain why they were profitable in 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/07/tech/twitter-earnings-q4/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/07/tech/twitter-earnings-q4/inde... In 2018 there is mention of a "one-time release of deferred tax asset valuation allowance,” which accounted for $683 million [of income]". https://www.vox.com/2018/10/25/18018046/twitter-q3-2018-earnings-profit-charts-user-growth https://www.vox.com/2018/10/25/18018046/twitter-q3-2018-earn... OP's point stands in my opinion. Twitter was/is a flagging centralized service that may not survive if it doesn't pivot.
- felipelemos 3y ago
  > [...] it was a very old, very large startup [...] Can we start to call companies with almost 18 years old just "companies" and not startup anymore?
dcunit3d 3y ago
I tried to point this out below. It's not even a DDoS, it's fake news. it's so "not even wrong" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2019/expand-the-edge https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"

bravoetch 3y ago

25 years of products being honed for shareholder value, instead of customer or user value. We may be at peak consumer tolerance for anti-pattern, in-app purchase, subscription-model, ad-packed, data-siphoning, dopamine driven, gated experiences.

OnlineGladiator 3y ago
> We may be at peak consumer tolerance for anti-pattern, in-app purchase, subscription-model, ad-packed, data-siphoning, dopamine driven, gated experiences. As much as I want this to be true, I think this sentiment is really only popular on tech-savvy forums like HN. Most people don't use ad blockers, and I've had people get mad at me when I suggest that they do (directly in response to something where they are complaining about ads).
- tough 3y ago
  > and I've had people get mad at me when I suggest that they do. lol that's a new one, why?
  - NikolaNovak 3y ago
    Not the op but I have that experience frequently. These are perceived as geeky needy techie things that are not for normal people (sprinkle quotations as needed). It's the same as people getting upset at suggestion to add lock of some sort to their phone (face, fingerprint, whatever) or backup their phone. After some pondering I think it's peoples' insecurity misfiring. They use these complicated layered and potentially risky and dangerous pieces of technology, aware they don't fully understand them, that they work as magic that could stop any moment. Trying to understand and secure them is a massive rabbit hole. So I think there's kind of a rejection to go down that hole or acknowledge the problem or, most of all, face the vulnerability and exposure. My 100 Croatian lipa fwiw :-)
    - tough 3y ago
      I can see it at which point I just install it for them, tell them how it works and how to disable if it gets and the way and move on. But you gotta have a very good relationship with someone to just do that I guess
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - OnlineGladiator 3y ago
    Ultimately it boils down to "it should just work" but to be more specific one person said "I shouldn't have to do anything different!" and directed their anger towards me instead of the ads they were previously complaining about. People that aren't tech-savvy don't want to think about tech any more than they already do. Having to understand something new about tech is just another problem to them. I'm not saying that as an insult - just an observation.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
    I’ve had someone say they want to support the content, which I understand. If only they knew how their data was being abused.
bozhark 3y ago
AAA video game industry sure seems to be pushing this idea with the past years of broken, unfinished, beta projects being released as complete products.
hyperpape 3y ago
This is a perfect example of how "shareholder value" is a thought-terminating cliche. Twitter was previously a public company, which was beholden to shareholders, and aimed to try and increase its stock price (as far as "shareholder value" actually means anything, this is basically it). I wouldn't praise previous management (the company wasn't profitable), but they were not a complete dumpster fire. Then Twitter was bought out, and taken private, removing the obligation to "shareholder value." The ensuing dumpster fire is one that will be marveled at for years. I'm not saying public corporations are better than private, or that "shareholder value" is a good slogan. I'm just saying that your comment is every bit as irrelevant as the porn spam that's clogging Twitter these days. (Thanks for fixing the spam problem, y'all!).
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > Then Twitter was bought out, and taken private, removing the obligation to "shareholder value." Does it really though? Private shareholders are still shareholders. It replaces a diffuse duty to keep a bunch of public-shareholders happen with a possibly-more-direct "do what I say or be replaced tomorrow." > "shareholder value" is a thought-terminating cliche I think when people use it dismissively, it's not really about shareholders per se, but about one that are focused on short-term growth at the expense of long-term growth or a sustainable business model.
  - hyperpape 3y ago
    If your point is that both old Twitter and new Twitter have people who have put money into it, and expect to not lose their money, you are correct. I would still recommend not using the word “shareholder value” for the concept. It’s just…having a business that you don’t want to lose money? Some people do dislike the concept of business, but I don’t think they should talk about “shareholder value”, they should just attack capitalism. In any case, it’s still irrelevant to a discussion of Twitter. The old management was also expected to turn a profit, but somehow avoided Elon’s string of silly ideas.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
  > not a complete dumpster fire. I never liked Twitter, don't have accounts, etc. To me this "dumpster fire" talk sounds like just sour grapes.

lr4444lr 3y ago

I dunno. We are several months out after the major layoffs. Maybe some very recent bad decisions were made internally that pared back too far, but I think Musk has long since been proven correct that the core platform could function on a fraction of the workforce it had at the time of takeover.

polygamous_bat 3y ago
Do you think if we fired every civil engineer tomorrow, the bridges and the highways they built would fall apart right afterwards, or even in a few months? Engineering isn't like service positions where the lack of competent personnel is felt immediately; the debt keeps growing until your whole system collapses under it one day, how far the day is in the future depends on what system you're working on.
- oittaa 3y ago
  Did you forget how people were saying that Twitter would stop working within days?
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    Maybe "Twitter would stop paying it's bills within days" was too brash a prediction and it was stepped back.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
firesteelrain 3y ago
Agree. Plus it’s easy to crap on Elon but it’s also the poor Twitter architecture and quality of people they have working for them that caused this despite Elon’s desire to require login to read Twitter. He didn’t write the code.
- simonw 3y ago
  Elon is responsible for the quality of the people who work for Twitter. That's what a CEO does.

avl999 3y ago

I am not disagreeing with you but self-ddos is not entirely uncommon. When I worked at Amazon this would happen a few times a year. Not on the main amazon.com website but on supporting services often initiated by but not limited to kindle devices. Having something like this slip through the cracks of even experienced engineers isn't uncommon.

Tade0 3y ago
But in such cases surely there's some kind of rate limiter in place? I mean, if I'm reading that screenshot correctly this is 700+ requests a minute. I've tripped the rate limiter with less on other sites.
- avl999 3y ago
  > But in such cases surely there's some kind of rate limiter in place? Not really, our team maintained a reverse-proxy that fronted all requests that came into amazon. And whenever we would have a self-ddos event, we'd get a request from the backend team whose service was getting self-ddos'd to shed traffic before it reached their service hosts to prevent it from browning out. In many case ddos's were coming from kindle devices which were not even easy to update so deploying a "fix" wasn't even always an option.
lamontcg 3y ago
Yeah it happened when I worked at Amazon as well. I also more recently worked pretty closely with people at Facebook and knew something about the issues they would occasionally have (which didn't match what the headline speculations were at all). But twitter is repeatedly having these kinds of issues.
dcunit3d 3y ago
I tried to point this out below. It's not even a DDoS, it's fake news. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2019/expand-the-edge https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life" fdsa

terminatornet 3y ago

right? it's a shame hacker news doesn't let you reply to old comments, there's a few threads I'd like to follow up on from people who refused to believe Elon was destroying twitter

Marazan 3y ago
I think I had someone do the old sarcastic "remind me of this in one year" under one of my posts predicting technical doom for Twitter. Definitely a good one to revisit.
- Marazan 3y ago
  Found it, in response to me saying Twitter was dead but it just didn't realise it yet a poster said "i'm favoriting this so i can come back to it, like that dropbox comment." Delicious.
- dcunit3d 3y ago
  Yeh, except you're completely wrong. I tried to point this out below. It's not even a DDoS, it's fake news. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2019/expand-the-edge https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"
hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
I think it’s intents like yours which is why they’re not allowed. Shame, because there are some genuine value in having it too..
dcunit3d 3y ago
I tried to point this out below. It's not even a DDoS, it's fake news. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2019/expand-the-edge https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life" ...

shon 3y ago

I have to disagree. If you honestly take the emotion and politics out of this and evaluate on merit alone, what do you think? Twitter wasn’t healthy before Musk bought it. It wasn’t a thriving business, it was a very old, very large startup still struggling to find market fit and loosing a lot of money. Also, it wasn’t a thriving product. It was stagnant. Since Twitter was purchased, the amount of features they have shipped has been impressive. They’ve shipped a lot of features and extended the platform a lot. To your point they have also done this with far less engineers than before. Regarding any downtime, everyone has downtime. Google, Amazon, Meta… the best of the best still have it regardless of money or manpower. Considering what that team has done with less resources, I think the achievement still pretty good. What do you think?

mooreds 3y ago
> It wasn’t a thriving business, it was a very old, very large startup still struggling to find market fit and loosing a lot of money. Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019. https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-usa/1418091-TWITTER-INC/#firstlist https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...
- meowkit 3y ago
  After years of losing money, and then not being profitable in 2020+. I'm not going to spend a lot of time researching this. This 2019 article says they cut costs/Vine and jumped to video ads which boosted revenue 24% which might explain why they were profitable in 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/07/tech/twitter-earnings-q4/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/07/tech/twitter-earnings-q4/inde... In 2018 there is mention of a "one-time release of deferred tax asset valuation allowance,” which accounted for $683 million [of income]". https://www.vox.com/2018/10/25/18018046/twitter-q3-2018-earnings-profit-charts-user-growth https://www.vox.com/2018/10/25/18018046/twitter-q3-2018-earn... OP's point stands in my opinion. Twitter was/is a flagging centralized service that may not survive if it doesn't pivot.
felipelemos 3y ago
> [...] it was a very old, very large startup [...] Can we start to call companies with almost 18 years old just "companies" and not startup anymore?

dcunit3d 3y ago

I tried to point this out below. It's not even a DDoS, it's fake news. it's so "not even wrong" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808 it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS. https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2019/expand-the-edge https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"