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I'm inclined to believe that they consolidated their code across a lot of their microservices and simplified their architecture since that was stressed a lot fr

I'm inclined to believe that they consolidated their code across a lot of their microservices and simplified their architecture since that was stressed a lot from the moment Musk acquired Twitter. But we also can't really verify or disprove it. I'm a bit confused about their so-called improvements to video recommendation quality and bot detection. I've seen a lot of sentiment from people that they see more bots, hate speech, and irrelevant content on their timelines. Maybe what I'm hearing is just anecdotal evidence or stories in a bubble? The Sacramento data center migration to Portland is an entertaining story detailed here[1]. Here's the Hacker News thread on it[2]. They have a GPU supercompute cluster?? It seems like they have the capability to do training and inference with state-of-the-art algorithms at massive scales then. Why have Twitter's recommendations and ad revenue (even before the acquisition) been so poor then? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/elon-musk-moved-twitter-servers-himself-in-the-night-new-biography-details-his-maniacal-sense-of-urgency.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/elon-musk-moved-twitter-serv... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37470110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37470110

marcinzm 3y ago
>They have a GPU supercompute cluster?? It seems like they have the capability to do training and inference with state-of-the-art algorithms at massive scales then. Why have Twitter's recommendations and ad revenue (even before the acquisition) been so poor then? In general, assuming you are in some sort of decent state better ML doesn't make your revenue 50% better. It makes it 5% better per year.
JohnFen 3y ago
> I'm a bit confused about their so-called improvements to video recommendation quality and bot detection. Let's not dismiss the possibility that they're just lying. I don't think they're trustworthy enough to be given the benefit of the doubt.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  They're just running most of the bots in-house on the GPU supercompute cluster now, and billing Putin for it directly, now that the middleman Yevgeny Prigozhin is out of the picture.
abledon 3y ago
love how those comments in [2] have aged haha
MichaelZuo 3y ago
70000 hard coded references to the data centre in Sacramento... At Twitter scale, 700 quick hacks would be excusable, 7000 iffy, 70000 just makes the old engineering team look like bozos. Maybe it's embellished?
murphyslab 3y ago
> I've seen a lot of sentiment from people that they see more bots, hate speech, and irrelevant content on their timelines. Maybe what I'm hearing is just anecdotal evidence or stories in a bubble? 1. Note that they do not unambiguously define bots; it's "bots and content scrapers" lumped together: > Blocked bots and content scrapers at a rate +37% greater than 2022. On average, we prevent more than 1M bots signup attacks each day and we’ve reduced DM spam by 95%. 2. I suspect it's a matter of signal-to-noise. Yes, the absolute bot count could be down, but how does it compare to the number of humans using X/Twitter and the volume of content which they are contributing each day? I've tried to find reliable statistics on this, but to no avail. My anecdotal experience is that fewer people I've followed are still regularly using X/Twitter since the Musk acquisition. Some are over at Post.News, some at Threads, some have shifted to Mastodon. It's a very fragmented experience now.
- antifa 3y ago
  Sometimes I click a link to twitter, get log-in-walled or see the head of a tweet thread that's missing the rest of the thread. I wonder if they measure that as a successful "scrape bot blocked"?
viraptor 3y ago
> that they see more bots My go-to here are the scams advertising support for metamask problems. Those still appear every day and are trivial to identify. I'm not sure I consider Twitter having a bot detection success until trivial issues like that are solved. They're still below the level of "text match and auto ban" solutions.
antifa 3y ago
> I've seen a lot of sentiment from people that they see more bots, hate speech, and irrelevant content on their timelines. Maybe what I'm hearing is just anecdotal evidence or stories in a bubble? TBF, this is my year-over-year experience on all social media platforms.

marcinzm 3y ago

>They have a GPU supercompute cluster?? It seems like they have the capability to do training and inference with state-of-the-art algorithms at massive scales then. Why have Twitter's recommendations and ad revenue (even before the acquisition) been so poor then? In general, assuming you are in some sort of decent state better ML doesn't make your revenue 50% better. It makes it 5% better per year.

JohnFen 3y ago

> I'm a bit confused about their so-called improvements to video recommendation quality and bot detection. Let's not dismiss the possibility that they're just lying. I don't think they're trustworthy enough to be given the benefit of the doubt.

DonHopkins 3y ago
They're just running most of the bots in-house on the GPU supercompute cluster now, and billing Putin for it directly, now that the middleman Yevgeny Prigozhin is out of the picture.

abledon 3y ago

love how those comments in [2] have aged haha

MichaelZuo 3y ago

70000 hard coded references to the data centre in Sacramento... At Twitter scale, 700 quick hacks would be excusable, 7000 iffy, 70000 just makes the old engineering team look like bozos. Maybe it's embellished?

murphyslab 3y ago

> I've seen a lot of sentiment from people that they see more bots, hate speech, and irrelevant content on their timelines. Maybe what I'm hearing is just anecdotal evidence or stories in a bubble? 1. Note that they do not unambiguously define bots; it's "bots and content scrapers" lumped together: > Blocked bots and content scrapers at a rate +37% greater than 2022. On average, we prevent more than 1M bots signup attacks each day and we’ve reduced DM spam by 95%. 2. I suspect it's a matter of signal-to-noise. Yes, the absolute bot count could be down, but how does it compare to the number of humans using X/Twitter and the volume of content which they are contributing each day? I've tried to find reliable statistics on this, but to no avail. My anecdotal experience is that fewer people I've followed are still regularly using X/Twitter since the Musk acquisition. Some are over at Post.News, some at Threads, some have shifted to Mastodon. It's a very fragmented experience now.

antifa 3y ago
Sometimes I click a link to twitter, get log-in-walled or see the head of a tweet thread that's missing the rest of the thread. I wonder if they measure that as a successful "scrape bot blocked"?

viraptor 3y ago

> that they see more bots My go-to here are the scams advertising support for metamask problems. Those still appear every day and are trivial to identify. I'm not sure I consider Twitter having a bot detection success until trivial issues like that are solved. They're still below the level of "text match and auto ban" solutions.

antifa 3y ago