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Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

• brazzy 12y ago
  This is why I could never figure out why anyone could possibly want to do anything with Twitter... I keep hearing how it's great to keep up to date with whatever you're interested in - but I just can't see it.
  • vog 12y ago
    I believe that small blogs and RSS/ATOM are a good answer here. I can't and don't want to follow high-volume streams, be it Twitter or "news" blogs. However, if you combine 20 interesting but low-volume blogs in your feed reader, you will always know when something interesting happened, without having to check all those sites by hand. (Of course I also have high-volume sites in my feed reader, but that's more for "news" / skimming though, not for keeping in touch.)
    • phaer 12y ago
      But what's Twitters advantage over good ol' RSS or ATOM for this use case?
      • mischanix 12y ago
        It's much simpler to publish on Twitter than via RSS.
        • phaer 12y ago
          How exactly? In the time it takes you to register an account on twitter.com you could as well register an account on wordpress.com and publish via RSS. The main difference is that longer content is possible, that you could find even easier/faster/whatever alternatives because its federated and that your communications are not dependent on the policies of a single private company - which for non-us-citizens like me is operating under foreign law, a law I don't know as well as the local one.
          • VLM 12y ago
            I don't watch much TV, but what little prime time TV I've seen recently, seems to pimp their twitter acct and semi-relevant hashtags constantly both intro and exit to the program and even believe it or not, during the program they pop hashtags on the screen. Only about 1/30th the population watches survivor so this is probably news to most HN readers.
          • untog 12y ago
            One of the biggest things is that there is one, singular Twitter app. There are a million RSS readers, but it's difficult to know which one to get. And, of course, it's a reader, not a publisher - you need a separate app for that.
      • qznc 12y ago
        Non-techies understand it.
        • phaer 12y ago
          There were plenty of "non-techies" who used Google Reader before it shut down. And at least in my circles there are plenty of non-techies who say that they don't get the concept of twitter. EDIT: Both, Twitter and RSS, have their own terms and concepts which need some kind of introduction for most, especially non-tech people. For Twitter its hashtag, TL, DM, etc for RSS its stuff like Feed, Reader, etc
      • williamcotton 12y ago
        Blogs are like an archipelago of privately owned islands. Twitter is a whole continent. RSS and Atom allow for people to tell the people on the other islands about what they wrote but it's a one-way message. For an interaction to occur someone has to go over to the private island. With blogs the entire process of publishing, reading and responding is privatized and fragmented. Twitter is a centralized location that unites publishing, reading and interaction in one faux-public location. There is utility in these kinds of social networks. The issue is that they are not public places. Twitter controls how the information is written and read. Twitter optimizes for their own private interests that have nothing to do with intelligent discourse. In the early days, Twitter was an open platform with a large number of competing clients. Early users and developers invented the core interactions that we see now see on Twitter. Hashtags and retweets were not invented by Twitter. Twitter has since put their API on lock down. They alone have the right and ability to make clients. As a publicly traded company they're now required by law to create products that increase shareholder profits. The evolution of the platform is out of the hands of anyone but the managers of a private company. I hope it doesn't come as a surprise that intelligent public discourse is not as profitable as the cheap and simple thrills that seem to be the core of social interactions on the Internet these days.
  • chton 12y ago
    It depends a lot on how you use it. For me, it's a firehose of information (I follow around 2000 accounts). You drink from it when you feel like. If the fire hose is big enough, there's always something interesting to read. It could be the latest news, and it often is, or it could be someone just tweeting something they learned or how they think about things. Twitter enables that with the 140 character limit per tweet, it means the information is very condensed and you can ingest an enormous amount in a short time.
  • pjc50 12y ago
    It's great as a feed for links and for light entertainment. Commenting along to live TV (national or even global events) is good fun.
• veidr 12y ago
  Yep. Incidentally this is the exact same reason why I can't have conversations by shouting out the window of my car as I speed past people on the street.
  • fla 12y ago
    This a very good (and fun) analogy !
    • shangxiao 12y ago
      And hilarious - try imagining @antirez explaining average vs 99th percentile to someone on the street as he drives by while keeping a straight face ;)
  • HeshamA 12y ago
    Exactly.
  • notastartup 12y ago
    I wonder how you can successfully advertise to such people. The only tweet they read is probably their own.
  • 72deluxe 12y ago
    This is a great analogy and has brightened up my day no end, thanks.
• chton 12y ago
  There are conversations that work on twitter, and ones that don't. In general, twitter conversations are quick back-and-forth affairs. If you need more than 2 tweets to express your thought, you're either using the wrong medium or thinking too far. If that conversation model doesn't fit you, that's perfectly fine, but that's not the fault of twitter. It's just a bad match-up. In that case, it's perfectly fine to respond to a tweet with a link to a medium that does support your model better. If you do get roped into a conversation where you need more tweets to explain, here's a few simple guidelines: - Don't split sentences over tweets. People will only read one part. - If you really must, use "(cont.)" on both tweets (end of the first and start of the second), so it's obvious there was another part. I know that reduces your character limit, but it's worth it to be less ambiguous - Make each continued tweet a reply to its predecessor. You can reply to your own tweets. It facilitates following the conversation on most clients. - If it's more than 2 tweets, consider using twitlonger. In general, that should be a last resort, though. Without trying to make it sound high-handed, there's something of an art to smooth twitter conversations. Terseness is the key. I find them rewarding because, when done right, they have an enormous density of information in a short time.
  • 01Michael10 12y ago
    Conversations on Twitter? I use Twitter as read-only for information to see what certain people and groups are up to in near real-time.
    • chton 12y ago
      There's more than one way to Twitter. If you know some people on it personally, you're more likely to engage in conversations.
      • 01Michael10 12y ago
        There are people I do know on Twitter but do not converse with them on there. I email, text, or IM them. Always use the best tools that are available...
• ayrx 12y ago
  Like any high volume channels, you have to ruthlessly curate your Twitter feed. Be picky about who you follow and block the trolls. Twitter is a pretty useful source of information after that. I usually see hints of upcoming vulnerabilities before the details get publicly released. That's pretty useful.
• epaga 12y ago
  When I want to write something over multiple tweets, I use a simple syntax to make it clear that each individual tweet is meant to be read in context with the others: I simply suffix all tweets except the last one with ">" and prefix all tweets except the first one with "<". Additionally, I make sure each tweet is a reply to its predecessor. Here's an example: https://twitter.com/epaga/status/510316379833393152 https://twitter.com/epaga/status/510316379833393152
  • unwind 12y ago
    I don't think I would have understood that, since the tweets in the middle look like "< this >" which is used for a bunch of different purposes (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket#Uses_of_.22.3C.22_and_.22.3E.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket#Uses_of_.22.3C.22_and_....).
  • eksith 12y ago
    It's not often I write long, connected replies, but I prefer the (1/4) method after writing the whole thing out in notepad or something.
    • tempestn 12y ago
      Agreed; this seems like the most explicit way to do it. Of course it means you have to actually take the time to form the whole argument before firing the first tweet out there, but that's almost certainly a good thing.
  • simias 12y ago
    Isn't it a bit silly in this day and age to use that kind of ad hoc hack in order to express a more complex point? I mean I understand that's how twitter works and probably part of what made it successful, but it baffles me that it's seemingly becoming a "serious" way of communications. Politicians are expected to have a twitter account, serious news organisations often quote twits directly in the body of their articles etc... I don't understand why so many people chose to de-facto standardize on such a poor medium for communication, especially since you have a billion alternatives without such limitations.
• resca79 12y ago
  I think the context has important role in technological issues and it needs to be explained. Twitter is very useful when you need some quick answer, with no premises. While a tweet with a post link is enough, one tweet is just buzz
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• hpaavola 12y ago
  TWTR is no good for conversations because there is no way to explain something new or controversial in 140 chars. Yes, this fits in a tweet
  • phaer 12y ago
    I am quite skeptical about twitter myself but I never understood this argument: What stops you from explaining your new or controversial argument in (n * 140) chars, or multiple tweets?
    • ColinWright 12y ago
      The fact that people won't take time to piece together the separate parts, and will take each out of context. This is the whole point of the original submission.
• lotsofmangos 12y ago
  I think part of the problem is that Twitter is optimised for machine processing, more than it is for human conversation.
  • golemotron 12y ago
    I think it was a beautiful "what if." What happens when we limit a message to 140 chars? The character of conversation changes - so do people's use patterns. The most wonderful thing about twitter is that you can't get lost down the rabbit hole of a three paragraph email. And there's pressure to reply quickly to stay part of the conversation. It's a genius example of design thinking.
    • lotsofmangos 12y ago
      What happens when you set a message limit of 140 characters is you end up with a database that is perfect for training computers about semantics. It is a genius example of design thinking, I'll grant you, but twitter's priority as a business was to build a database for analysis and that was the design constraint which resulted in a 140 character limit to messages. It is a communication platform, but only in as much as it fulfills its main purpose of generating datasets.
      • SamReidHughes 12y ago
        Um, what? I'm pretty sure text message limits were the design constraint there.
      • deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      • kalleboo 12y ago
        > twitter's priority as a business was to build a database for analysis and that was the design constraint which resulted in a 140 character limit to messages This is the first time I hear about this. Do you have any source or did you make it up yourself? Twitter's original function was group SMS messaging among friends, the 140 char limit was the 160 character SMS limit + an 18 character username.
• staz 12y ago
  I don't think this is due to the limit of 140 characters (even if it doesn't help) but much more due to the audience of fanboys and crow cheered during a fight. There is the same problem on Google+ where there is not 140 characters limit. Any discussions with Linus or any other "celebrity" in it and the comments thread will be full of : "+1", "M. Linus you are so smart, you are my hero", "Well said, ripe him a new one" etc... Which drown any constructed argument and render any constructed debate impossible.
  • bhaak 12y ago
    I agree that this is not a problem that only affects Twitter. Most of the current discussion platforms are way behind what was standard in Usenet or in your average Usenet client. No threaded discussions, no filtering (not for the one who comments and doesn't want to read those +1 post and most often also not for the OP), not even blocking of people you don't want to read.
    • comboy 12y ago
      Hell yes. I don't know how we got there. Mailing lists can be ok with proper client but it's a step back. I found some subreddits useful (with RES) but even then it's hard to track new replies in threads that you are interested in. HN has quality discussions but these are just about some links and it's hard to get back to some thread to see new replies (and preferably prioritize those from people who I value). I too miss Usenet.
      • bhaak 12y ago
        Every reddit thread has a separate RSS feed so you can drop it into your favorite RSS reader. I'm using a IRC bot with an RSS plugin to not spam my normal RSS feed aggregator. But this doesn't solve the issue of being notified of replies to subthreads. Reddit threads up to 100 messages tops are manageable that way but anything larger isn't. Compare that to usenet threads were you could easily handle thousands of messages in one threads, this is really a shame.
    • ams6110 12y ago
• _yosefk 12y ago
  The average thing I publish on the Internet is thousands of words long. There was never a shortage of people taking some of those words out of their context, and arguing against what those words supposedly say. And I'm likely to have done it myself to someone else's writing. Certainly I pay attention to some things more than others when I read, especially if I come with some prior knowledge and opinions. I can easily fail to notice important things when scanning something quickly. And the longer it is, the more likely I am to be scanning quickly, actually. On the other hand, shorter messages and less context result in things simply being omitted, even if you do read carefully. Maybe Twitter is worse than average, but it's pretty bad with any medium.
  • personZ 12y ago
    There was never a shortage of people taking some of those words out of their context, and arguing against what those words supposedly say. Long ago I learned that if you want to have "viral" success, even on a more informed site like HN, avoid making more than one statement or claim in a piece. "Modern Java application servers offer surprisingly high performance" (followed by details of performance improvements, etc), for instance, is okay: everyone who agrees will forward and agree and post, while those who might not agree or care will remain ambivalent and disengaged. Change that up slightly, though, and conversationally add "...which might allow you to deploy on fewer servers than a similar solution built in Ruby" and you'll instantly gain armies of very motivated detractors who will go forth to denounce everything you've ever said, declare everything you've written stupid and misinformed, etc. Not based on objective disagreements, but based on a knee-jerk opposition that, much as with politics, can't be on a point or issue (e.g. "agree to disagree"), but has to encompass everything. People who might agree or yield value skip the piece after seeing endless criticisms and complaints. The crux being that it's very hard to gain agreement, easy to gain enemies. If you state ten things, people who disagree with but one of them will often fall in the latter camp. Not that this changes how I personally write -- where I'll load pieces with things that people can disagree with -- but I see it constantly as stories tread the bottom of the front page, the detractors who find that one tiny thing they disagree with and blow it up to be all-encompassing, and it gets flagged to oblivion.
• raverbashing 12y ago
  What is it with Postgres fans that "have to" prove they're better? I don't want to use Postgres. I want to use Redis. Postgres IS NOT the solution for a lot of things. Yeah, feel free to call me stupid for not knowing every nook and cranny of PGSQL. I don't care "I love to argue, but this is just a futile exercise." Very wise words
  • davidw 12y ago
    I can't speak to Redis, because I don't use it, and mostly see it as being fairly distinct from Postgres, but with Mysql it's always frustrating to know that you could be using a tool that's generally better, but can't, because initially someone chose Mysql because they "heard it was fast" or "that's what the hosting company provided", and now they're stuck with it.
    • raverbashing 12y ago
      Yes, I agree with you, but comparing Redis to PGSQL is an Apples to Oranges comparison. Too bad 99% of Redis users use it as a glorified cache, because it's more than that.
      • davidw 12y ago
        I've been friends with antirez a lot longer than Redis has been around, and have a lot of faith in his abilities as a programmer. It irritates me to see the snark directed at him on Twitter. But for most of what I do - smallish bootstrapped things - I want to build on Postgres, because I know I can take it a lot of different directions, as needs be. Unless I'm 100% sure that it's a bad fit for SQL and a great fit for Redis or something else, I'm going to consider Redis as a later optimization, not something to build on from the start. Like you write though, I mostly view Postgres and Redis as Apples and Oranges that could probably work together quite well in the right circumstances. Most of my ire is directed towards Mysql :-)
        • antirez 12y ago
          Moreover, I can't remember a single time PostgreSQL folks have been unfair... PostgreSQL is definitely good both as a product and as developers culture.
• Confusion 12y ago
  The more visible you are, the higher your standing, the likelier it is that people try to catch you in a mistake to improve their own visibility and standing. They are not aware that this is the motivation for their behavior.
• tmaly 12y ago
  it would be great if there was a resurgence in the usenet
• throwawayaway 12y ago
  twitter is less RSS for humans and more IRC for casual users, with no moderation.
• marban 12y ago
  Just as ridiculous as companies offering support via Twitter; and its customers expecting structured answers from it.
• baldfat 12y ago
  Twitter = Information. Google+ = Conversations
• adamconroy 12y ago
  Correct. And because I can't have conversations on twitter I find it very tedious.
• moron4hire 12y ago
  Isn't this why twitter supports links in tweets?
• jpswade 12y ago
  You can't expect Twitter to work like email when it works like text messaging.
• eksith 12y ago
  When trying to get through what appears to be a brick wall of myopia, the liberal use of the block feature is more productive. Seriously, I don't even try to have arguments anymore. A sane and relatively productive one is nearly impossible with some people. I don't know if it's the brevity of speech or the even shorter attention span, but the Online Disinhibition Effect seems to be an order of magnitude greater when it comes to certain topics.
• burn 12y ago
  You should try out a service called Jot. It has a twitter feel, but is built around conversations.
• yetanotherHNacc 12y ago
  If you can't have a conversation on Twitter you may be doing something wrong. Thanks to the peers on the network we've found all sorts of interesting things. Things like the location of rockets associated with sarin attacks in Syria[0] placed squarely on Mezzeh military airbase in Damascus. The rockets at the time were thought to be Iranian Falaq but more evidence showed them to be part of their own distinct program. The discussion did not stay entirely on Twitter but was the main venue for it. Without being able to rope millions of random peers you may not know you will converse with later into one IRC channel, Twitter works for wide broadcast fast paced discussion. Blocking people helps sure, but I think many people's problem seems to be a perceived lack of interesting peers. [0] http://wikimapia.org/29357078/Falaq-2-Launch-Site http://wikimapia.org/29357078/Falaq-2-Launch-Site
  • jameskilton 12y ago
    Sure sounds like you're blaming antirez for people on Twitter taking his tweet out of context and running with it. It's also completely unfair to say "Twitter was awesome in this very explicit situation so you obviously did something wrong in your situation".
    • yetanotherHNacc 12y ago
      No, that is on the people who did that. If anything I would blame antirez for getting flustered enough about this non-Twitter specific problem to write a blog post.
      • WhitneyLand 12y ago
        He is not to blame at all. He made a good faith effort to communicate which did not work and openly reasoned about the challenges of a relatively new platform that many people are still trying to make the best use of. I'm glad he posted.
• ianstallings 12y ago
  The older I get the more I ignore. I'm not missing out on anything by not following twitter and it's really just a distraction from my goals. I sink way more time into HN than other social media, and I don't spend that much time here. My goal is to be completely off in my own world a decade from now, focusing strictly on what is important to me. Now if I can just kick my HN habit..
• nickpresta 12y ago
  Original source is down. Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://antirez.com/news/82&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
• notacoward 12y ago
  Maybe if antirez doesn't want to read others simplistic responses on Twitter, he shouldn't make simplistic statements on Twitter. It's clearly a medium that doesn't convey nuance very well. There was a great deal of misinterpretation and talking past one another on all sides including his. This was actually a continuation of a conversation that has been going on for several days, starting with an issue even more serious than 99th percentile latency - data loss due to a broken replica-repair strategy. Some very clueful people have pointed antirez at useful literature on the topic, and made specific suggestions to avoid the problem, only to be met with silence or excuses for why throwing away data was actually OK. Is it any wonder that they're frustrated with him, and ready to interpret an ambiguous statement like "the 99% percentile is bad" in a more negative way than he intended? For him to cherry-pick one exchange and present only one side only continues his own pattern of making constructive conversation almost impossible. It's not a Twitter problem. It's a people problem.
  • dangerlibrary 12y ago
    This whole little teapot tempest may be a people problem, but many of the issues brought up in the article - removal of context, selective re-tweets, general nastiness - are Twitter problems.
    • annamarie 12y ago
      I think they are people problems. Everyone likes being right + feeling important. Everyone is lazy. No one wants to be called out on it. If you are forced to keep it <140 char then no one can fault you for being lazy with your replies and critiques. Of course people are going to jump in and offer their brilliant opinions. Think about the low-cost high they can get.
      • dangerlibrary 12y ago
        This is a bit of a false dichotomy, I think. Of course there are good (and valid!) psychological explanations for the behavior patterns exhibited on Twitter. When I say something is a "Twitter problem," I mean that these patterns are less prevalent on other platforms. I mean that Twitter has created a scaffold for communication that encourages certain bad behaviors. One example: If I were to pluck the middle sentence from your response and criticize you for saying that "Everyone is lazy" here on HN, I'd be down voted into oblivion because I am obviously being a jackass. Twitter's structure can make it very hard to see when someone is being misquoted or their views misrepresented. It's the Fox News Soundbite version of online discussions.
• jlouis 12y ago
  May I recommend using percentiles over the average? Reporting the 50th, 75th, 90th, 95th and 99th percentile is much better at describing the situation. Even better is to report a histogram or a kernel density plot of the the observed values. Averages tend to be a notoriously bad indicator on their own because they don't describe anything about the distribution. This is obviously not a normal distribution, and even if it was, you need to report some kind of variance measurement as well. Otherwise it is hard to say anything about the shape of the distribution, let alone make tests for statistical significance.
• kyro 12y ago
  Twitter is terrible for meaningful conversation and debate. And I say that as an avid user. Networking, sharing links, tidbits of insight, short messages, and Q&As all work really well. I've learned quite a bit from the curated articles and reports tweeted by those I follow. And if you follow the right people and engage appropriately, Twitter can open up a lot of opportunities. But anything beyond that is a waste of time, and can border damaging. In fact, for all the good Twitter has facilitated (protests, revolutions, etc), I think it's having some negative impact. It is by far the most popular platform where individuals of all backgrounds, beliefs, and opinions congregate and interact, but it's built in a way where it is absolutely not conducive to meaningful debate, and so when the huge opinionated masses clash, the bite-sized arguments volleyed by either side are taken without context and nuance, further igniting and polarizing people. I'm seeing this happen with issues like feminism and Islam, where someone will tweet a very distilled version of a larger and more thorough opinion, it will be taken at face-value, someone will retweet it with a snarky comment, it snowballs into a food fight with enraged people retweeting/replying, and the original tweeter trying to add context but not being able to keep up with the reactionary domino effect. And because Twitter has almost become the official sounding board for many people, their tweets and reactions to those tweets contribute to their public image, reputation, and online presence, all damaged by death threats, accusations of sexism, bigotry, racism, etc, often thrown around unwarranted by people taking things out of context and who feel antagonized or polarized because of the way Twitter is structured. And that's why I avoid tweeting about religion, politics, and databases.
• rdtsc 12y ago
  I don't use Twitter. Never signed up, never read it, unless someone I know posts a link to some insightful 140 character piece of text, which is rare. It might be a good news headline spreading medium but not for conversations.
• lhnz 12y ago
  This is unfortunately a case of Twitter biasing technical discussions to highly literate, careful people. Good tweeting requires almost Orwellian control over writing. It needs to be extremely terse and explicit. You need to be the kind of person that will write a tweet, read it and if it could be misunderstood in any way delete it, before rewriting it several times. You need to do this until you are able to fit each inalienable component fact into 140 characters. This kind of writer is often careful to form only one idea per tweet, considers using mathematical notation if it requires less characters, and will finally consider placing a [...] on the end of sentences which leave their argument hanging. Though when you have to do a lot of these things, it's often because you have not fully analysed the concept to a point where you understand it well enough to say simply.
• davidw 12y ago
  BTW, this also brings to mind another thing I've come to believe over the years: > "You have clearly not understood how the math works or why tail latencies matter in dist sys. I think we're done here." If, when you write something, it sounds like it's coming straight out of The Simpsons' "Comic Book Guy", you should probably rethink it unless you really mean to be a bit of a jerk.
• icedchai 12y ago
  the problem is twitter isn't for conversations.
• dilap 12y ago
  Small elements of Twitter's design really exacerbate this problem. In a strictly time-ordered tweet view, you'd see one or another of antirez's tweets, be be curious, and go back into his & other respondents timelines to see the full conversation, w/ whatever context was originally there. But how Twitter works right now is you get what appears to be a full conversation neatly tied together, but it's actually been selectively edited by an algorithm maximizing (I'm educated guessing) engagement, which ends up basically being an automated filter to create misunderstandings and controversy.
• hardwaresofton 12y ago
  Isn't that essentially the entire internet? I absolutely think that you should only use twitter to post links to blog posts and mailing lists emails. That way, people who really care will read, others will not, and they likely won't comment without reading. Complex thoughts don't often fit in a tweet.
• Mc_Big_G 12y ago
  My 16 yr. old daughter explained to me two days ago why Twitter conversations are broken, how to fix them and that maybe we should design products together since we can do it better than Twitter or that maybe she should send them her idea. My response was, if you want to develop products together, let's do that. Second, Twitter probably has 50 product people who have all sat around and discussed her solution in detail and come to the conclusion that, for some reason we won't understand but that is probably better for Twitter, they shouldn't implement it. Most likely it has something to do with more views. Then I welcomed her to the shitty reality that once a company gets the market share, they stop caring about a better experience for users and more about the bottom line OR maybe they're just stupid. After all, Twitter didn't have a single backup for something like the first year or two of existence.
  • streblo 12y ago
    Don't just leave us hanging. What's the problem and how would she fix it?
  • specialp 12y ago
    Not sure they are not caring or stupid. Perhaps they decided that Twitter is NOT a platform for conversations. I use Twitter as a real time platform for announcements, status updates, and just general sentiment. I do not really want to read debate there or conversations. If someone wants to discuss things there are other places to do that. As for their engineering problems at the beginning yes it was bad but then again they grew massively very quickly and they needed to come up with novel solutions at huge scale.
• jegoodwin3 12y ago
  If only he'd called it 'the 1%' instead of the 99th percentile, he could have founded the 'Occupy EC2 movement'. #lostopportunity
• pdonis 12y ago
  How about this: "This issue is too complex for a tweet: <link to article/blog post>"
• felixgallo 12y ago
  The distributed systems community as represented on twitter is pretty shameful; discussions of any non-CA database tend to devolve into intentional misreading and jokey sarcastic pile-on bullying, with Basho folk leading the charge. Personally I get that they've lived through some pretty gruesome use cases and wars, but jesus, glass houses and stones, guys.
  • tsantero 12y ago
    hi, ex-basho here. disappointed by antirez's continued, harmful anti-intellectualism. just curious, what exactly is a non-CA database? kthxbai
    • felixgallo 12y ago
      a non-CA database is what you get when you don't have enough coffee. I meant, of course, non-AP. As far as the rest of your message: the flagrant, embellished insult; the passive-aggressiveness: you're the problem. The problem is coming from inside you. It's bizarre, because all of you guys seem very sensible at conferences, I've enjoyed examining riak, I'm a big fan of scribbs and big nosk, but there's this virulent strain of selective-quote circlejerking and self-congratulatory in-joke bullying that goes on with you, specifically and only on twitter, that is frankly cringeworthy. Salvatore can defend himself, but let's be real: he's not harmfully anti-intellectual. He's the incredibly talented author of a novel, rock solid, single-node database/cache/data structure server with very attractive performance characteristics. On distributed systems, he is frequently "wrong", in that he puts out systems with familiar-looking names (like 'cluster') that are CAP-broken. He's tried to make a call that being CAP-broken in certain ways is operationally pragmatically okay given the risks, while still maintaining Redis's high performance. Would I ever use Sentinel or Redis Cluster? No, because I don't like the idea of that tradeoff and I prefer a system I can reason about in an easier way. But as Riak 1.0 to 1.4 showed, trying to go the AP route can be a hyper confusing hard-to-reason-about clusterfuck that loses data all its own. So like I said, glass houses.
• geoelectric 12y ago
  Re: the original convo, they're stuck on the fact that arithmetic mean isn't terribly valid on a skewed distribution (and response/completion distributions are generally positive-skewed because of the firm/hard lower bound on task completion). However, I do get what you're trying to do re: identify whether the problem is related to outliers. But in general, comparing to median has a lot more validity. Median isn't as sensitive to skew, and will be closer to the peak. For your purposes it probably wouldn't be a lot different but you wouldn't have pushed the "it's wrong" button. All said, though, even comparing 50th (median) to 99th is pretty coarse. I'd probably be looking somewhere closer to 75th percentile for a comparison. Basically, you'd want to guess what percent might reasonably be affected by performance spikes and compare from there.