4 ms·

Elon fired all the people who would do QA. Something new on twitter breaks every week. It's wild.

by i80and 2y ago

patwolf 2y ago
I haven't decided if twitter is actually more buggy or if bugs are more publicized because of the extra scrutiny since Musk took over. There used to be a bug that wreaked havoc for a short time where you could force anybody to follow you. At the time I don't recall people blaming Twitter's leadership or culture--it was just a bug because software sometimes has bugs.
- CSSer 2y ago
  Since Musk took over, I’ve frequently clicked on links to tweets only to be presented with the “Something went wrong. Try again.” Error message instead of the tweet I should be seeing. I then have to refresh multiple times to get it to show up. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all, I decide I don’t care enough, and I move on with my day. I’ve also observed broken embeds around the web. This is core service reliability. I grew up with Twitter. I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring. Twitter is definitely more buggy.
  - timr 2y ago
    > I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring. Yeah, I have. On multiple occasions before Musk took over, Twitter also had bugs. Even if you think firing like 6/7th of Twitter's staff (or whatever) was a mistake, there's really no arguing that they're making more visible product changes than they have in years. That means that bugs happen. And frankly...proving that a tech company doesn't need that level of bloat is a valuable lesson for the entire software industry. If they overshot and have X% more bugs for now, that's fine. They'll still be dramatically leaner than before.
    - CSSer 2y ago
      Great. This is all completely besides the point anyway. My point is that there are more of them and I think anyone who doesn’t see that is nuts. I’m sorry I don’t have a Grafana dashboard to show you.
      - timr 2y ago
        The point is, without a Grafana dashboard, you don't have anything but a motivated anecdote.
        javajosh 2y ago
        ~90% of the comments here are "motivated anecdotes" and are quite valuable. Perhaps this is not the dis you think it is.
        billy99k 2y ago
        "motivated anecdotes" aren't valuable because they aren't accurate. It's political fuel for to shit on something you don't like. With this line of thinking, I could say climate change isn't happening because of the temperature outside my house.
        CSSer 2y ago
        I never pretended to have anything else, and “motivated” is a weird word to use here. I have no skin in this game, and from what I can tell neither do you. If Twitter survives, great. I guess some of what you noted could be an interesting lesson, but I don’t think it’s going so hot so far and I’m not willing to call it yet.
        timr 2y ago
        You have a belief that the service is more buggy, and were arguing as such from anecdote. That's what I mean by "motivated". I don't care at all, and am just reacting to the phenomenon of folks going "it's definitely worse now, and I know, because I used the product before". OK, great...I used the product before too, and don't perceive that to be true.
  - spiderice 2y ago
    > I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring This bug has been happening since the beginning of time. I saw that constantly pre-musk
- Justsignedup 2y ago
  Twitter was notorious for crashing. The fail whale was a internet meme... Then they fixed it and for about 7 years I basically never saw a problem with twitter, even in the worst internet conditions. Today the bugs are back. Things are constantly a problem. This isn't a "well all software has bugs" -- yeah true, but somehow for 7 years twitter was bug-free. Or rather the bugs were quickly caught and fixed. And now... nothing. Musk got rid of all guardrails, and now we face the consequences.
- seoulmetro 2y ago
  People keep complaining that: - Twitter staff were needed - Twitter will fail if the firings continued - He just fired all these useful people But at the end of the day, Twitter/X is still the same exact thing and runs exactly the same way. It does prove that firing all the slack can change very little but it's a good narrative to cry about Elon Musk and his "sinking soonTM ship".
maxlin 2y ago
No, more like something new on X breaks every year. The site is simple enough that that the engineering is mostly focused on optimizations and there's little more I or any other active user would even expect from the platform, outside of growing to new areas like YouTube-comparable video. I find it quite bizarre how some people still try to push some narrative about the site being broken. It's not more broken it was before the takeover outside the odd Spaces dropout (which is a new feature so doesn't really count), but is now better serving its actual mission as an actually unbiased speech platform, radical as that is in the current day. Now X just needs to stay unchanged for ten years to overcome any competition.
ttepasse 2y ago
I recently tried to reinstall the Twitter for Mac app. It was never a good app. Although a flagship for Apple’s Catalyst, since its catalysation it never got the UI love other 3rd party clients for the Mac had. But it was at least somewhat usable. But somehow it got never updated for the X'ning, neither name nor icon, never got support for longer tweets and other stuff. And now I click Install in the App Store and "something goes wrong". Simply can’t install it. There must be UIKit people remaining at X, after all they’re updating the iOS app which must share the same code as the Mac app. But for some reason they don’t update, but leave a broken, uninstallable app on the App Store.
- sandofsky 2y ago
  From day one, the Mac app was a hobby project from passionate developers within the company, at times maintained by a single engineer. With the layoffs, they likely lost everyone passionate about maintaining it.
nojs 2y ago
As devils advocate, maybe this is evidence such QA doesn’t matter as much as everyone thinks? It looks like no actual damage was done and the problem was fixed quickly once users noticed it.
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  Sure, using your users as QA is a fine business plan and instills confidence. We should extend this to other expensive industries (healthcare, law, civil engineering, etc.).
  - northhanover 2y ago
    It seems fine for social media
    - hex0x0000 2y ago
      Testing is necessary even for social media, not doing so is a big security threat for its users. Even apparently dumb bugs like this one can be exploited to steal important information. Social media may not seem as important or vital as banking or healthcare, but most of our modern society depends on it. Socials are the best tools for social engineering after all.

Elon fired all the people who would do QA. Something new on twitter breaks every week. It's wild.

by i80and 2y ago

Elon fired all the people who would do QA. Something new on twitter breaks every week. It's wild.

I haven't decided if twitter is actually more buggy or if bugs are more publicized because of the extra scrutiny since Musk took over. There used to be a bug that wreaked havoc for a short time where you could force anybody to follow you. At the time I don't recall people blaming Twitter's leadership or culture--it was just a bug because software sometimes has bugs.

CSSer 2y ago
Since Musk took over, I’ve frequently clicked on links to tweets only to be presented with the “Something went wrong. Try again.” Error message instead of the tweet I should be seeing. I then have to refresh multiple times to get it to show up. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all, I decide I don’t care enough, and I move on with my day. I’ve also observed broken embeds around the web. This is core service reliability. I grew up with Twitter. I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring. Twitter is definitely more buggy.
- timr 2y ago
  > I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring. Yeah, I have. On multiple occasions before Musk took over, Twitter also had bugs. Even if you think firing like 6/7th of Twitter's staff (or whatever) was a mistake, there's really no arguing that they're making more visible product changes than they have in years. That means that bugs happen. And frankly...proving that a tech company doesn't need that level of bloat is a valuable lesson for the entire software industry. If they overshot and have X% more bugs for now, that's fine. They'll still be dramatically leaner than before.
  - CSSer 2y ago
    Great. This is all completely besides the point anyway. My point is that there are more of them and I think anyone who doesn’t see that is nuts. I’m sorry I don’t have a Grafana dashboard to show you.
    - timr 2y ago
      The point is, without a Grafana dashboard, you don't have anything but a motivated anecdote.
      - javajosh 2y ago
        ~90% of the comments here are "motivated anecdotes" and are quite valuable. Perhaps this is not the dis you think it is.
        billy99k 2y ago
        "motivated anecdotes" aren't valuable because they aren't accurate. It's political fuel for to shit on something you don't like. With this line of thinking, I could say climate change isn't happening because of the temperature outside my house.
      - CSSer 2y ago
        I never pretended to have anything else, and “motivated” is a weird word to use here. I have no skin in this game, and from what I can tell neither do you. If Twitter survives, great. I guess some of what you noted could be an interesting lesson, but I don’t think it’s going so hot so far and I’m not willing to call it yet.
        timr 2y ago
        You have a belief that the service is more buggy, and were arguing as such from anecdote. That's what I mean by "motivated". I don't care at all, and am just reacting to the phenomenon of folks going "it's definitely worse now, and I know, because I used the product before". OK, great...I used the product before too, and don't perceive that to be true.
- spiderice 2y ago
  > I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring This bug has been happening since the beginning of time. I saw that constantly pre-musk
Justsignedup 2y ago
Twitter was notorious for crashing. The fail whale was a internet meme... Then they fixed it and for about 7 years I basically never saw a problem with twitter, even in the worst internet conditions. Today the bugs are back. Things are constantly a problem. This isn't a "well all software has bugs" -- yeah true, but somehow for 7 years twitter was bug-free. Or rather the bugs were quickly caught and fixed. And now... nothing. Musk got rid of all guardrails, and now we face the consequences.
seoulmetro 2y ago
People keep complaining that: - Twitter staff were needed - Twitter will fail if the firings continued - He just fired all these useful people But at the end of the day, Twitter/X is still the same exact thing and runs exactly the same way. It does prove that firing all the slack can change very little but it's a good narrative to cry about Elon Musk and his "sinking soonTM ship".

maxlin 2y ago

No, more like something new on X breaks every year. The site is simple enough that that the engineering is mostly focused on optimizations and there's little more I or any other active user would even expect from the platform, outside of growing to new areas like YouTube-comparable video. I find it quite bizarre how some people still try to push some narrative about the site being broken. It's not more broken it was before the takeover outside the odd Spaces dropout (which is a new feature so doesn't really count), but is now better serving its actual mission as an actually unbiased speech platform, radical as that is in the current day. Now X just needs to stay unchanged for ten years to overcome any competition.

ttepasse 2y ago

I recently tried to reinstall the Twitter for Mac app. It was never a good app. Although a flagship for Apple’s Catalyst, since its catalysation it never got the UI love other 3rd party clients for the Mac had. But it was at least somewhat usable. But somehow it got never updated for the X'ning, neither name nor icon, never got support for longer tweets and other stuff. And now I click Install in the App Store and "something goes wrong". Simply can’t install it. There must be UIKit people remaining at X, after all they’re updating the iOS app which must share the same code as the Mac app. But for some reason they don’t update, but leave a broken, uninstallable app on the App Store.

sandofsky 2y ago
From day one, the Mac app was a hobby project from passionate developers within the company, at times maintained by a single engineer. With the layoffs, they likely lost everyone passionate about maintaining it.

nojs 2y ago

As devils advocate, maybe this is evidence such QA doesn’t matter as much as everyone thinks? It looks like no actual damage was done and the problem was fixed quickly once users noticed it.

warkdarrior 2y ago
Sure, using your users as QA is a fine business plan and instills confidence. We should extend this to other expensive industries (healthcare, law, civil engineering, etc.).
- northhanover 2y ago
  It seems fine for social media
  - hex0x0000 2y ago
    Testing is necessary even for social media, not doing so is a big security threat for its users. Even apparently dumb bugs like this one can be exploited to steal important information. Social media may not seem as important or vital as banking or healthcare, but most of our modern society depends on it. Socials are the best tools for social engineering after all.