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> Translation: They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online. Is it though? Any time there's a Twitter link, clicking on it has at least a

by Zanfa 3y ago

> Translation: They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online. Is it though? Any time there's a Twitter link, clicking on it has at least a 1/3 chance of seeing "Something went wrong. Try again?".

cryptoz 3y ago
I mean, that was 100% before Elon took over though, not 1/3.
- vdaea 3y ago
  I understand why this is happening, but the current technical problems of twitter are way, way overstated. Twitter has always been very buggy. It is indeed correct that for the longest time every time you clicked a twitter link and it opened in your browser you had to refresh the window to see it. This was pre-Musk. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20471601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20471601 If this happened now you would see dozens of articles saying that twitter is melting down. But now, it turns out Twitter ran perfectly before! I can't help but scoff.
Pmop 3y ago
Twitter as a non critical application can afford to malfunction for a couple of minutes or maybe hours even. I think they're not understaffed, for now. They're delivering new features and fixing most bugs. A understaffed engineering team usually struggles with that.
- karlgkk 3y ago
  One of the orgs that Elon cut the hardest was the trust and safety and spam team. He had strong condemnation for their "suppression" of "free speech". Maybe he had a point. Maybe he didn't. But what is clear is that spam and fraudulent traffic on Twitter has exploded in the past year, to the point where it's causing serious problems.
glimshe 3y ago
I don't experience many problems with Twitter, not visibly more than before the layoffs. But still, let's assume the reports are true and there was nontrivial reduction in reliability... It was a very extreme engineering cut for a service which is still "generally working". I believe that tech executives are simply assuming that Twitter's decline has a lot more to do with Elon Musk's controversial persona than the service's reliability. While an 80% cut might be too much, they think, a 20% cut would work just fine.
greatgib 3y ago
There are so many bugs now but we live with it as it is free. Also, most of the time, video will not play if you open the post directly. The play button will have no effect.
Nextgrid 3y ago
To be fair, this is entirely a result of having too many front end developers and needing to find busywork for them. So instead of the tweet data being sent by the server in HTML, you load megabytes of JS that (if the stars align and it doesn’t “go wrong”) will then request the tweet from the server and display it.

by Zanfa 3y ago

cryptoz 3y ago

I mean, that was 100% before Elon took over though, not 1/3.

vdaea 3y ago
I understand why this is happening, but the current technical problems of twitter are way, way overstated. Twitter has always been very buggy. It is indeed correct that for the longest time every time you clicked a twitter link and it opened in your browser you had to refresh the window to see it. This was pre-Musk. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20471601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20471601 If this happened now you would see dozens of articles saying that twitter is melting down. But now, it turns out Twitter ran perfectly before! I can't help but scoff.

Pmop 3y ago

Twitter as a non critical application can afford to malfunction for a couple of minutes or maybe hours even. I think they're not understaffed, for now. They're delivering new features and fixing most bugs. A understaffed engineering team usually struggles with that.

karlgkk 3y ago
One of the orgs that Elon cut the hardest was the trust and safety and spam team. He had strong condemnation for their "suppression" of "free speech". Maybe he had a point. Maybe he didn't. But what is clear is that spam and fraudulent traffic on Twitter has exploded in the past year, to the point where it's causing serious problems.

glimshe 3y ago

I don't experience many problems with Twitter, not visibly more than before the layoffs. But still, let's assume the reports are true and there was nontrivial reduction in reliability... It was a very extreme engineering cut for a service which is still "generally working". I believe that tech executives are simply assuming that Twitter's decline has a lot more to do with Elon Musk's controversial persona than the service's reliability. While an 80% cut might be too much, they think, a 20% cut would work just fine.

greatgib 3y ago

There are so many bugs now but we live with it as it is free. Also, most of the time, video will not play if you open the post directly. The play button will have no effect.

Nextgrid 3y ago

To be fair, this is entirely a result of having too many front end developers and needing to find busywork for them. So instead of the tweet data being sent by the server in HTML, you load megabytes of JS that (if the stars align and it doesn’t “go wrong”) will then request the tweet from the server and display it.