Twitter C/D

Don't really get the people who go on about what a horrendous cesspit Twitter is - surely you only follow the people you want to follow. It's like saying books are terrible because some terrible books get published. Well you only read the books you want to. Have to say I find Twitter really good for following my niche interests, better than anything else I've found and I'll be sad it it dies.

Not to sound like musk here, but how many people do you really need to keep it running?

(I honestly have no idea)

How many people does it take to keep ILX running? Multiply that number by the ratio of ILXors to Twitter users.

I'm with Zelda.

i don't think its going to die completely but it has already "changed much" in terms of workforce and revenue and those changes will start to manifest on the actual site

on the one hand, it used to run with a headcount smaller than the current headcount, so why not.

on the other hand, it's a more complicated system than when they had 1000 employees, and it's not really designed to run with that many people any more, and the people who understand (and no how to make it simpler or fix it if it breaks) it are exactly the people who've left.

(left in a hurry without writing anything down or training replacements)

Yeah like cmon this is absolutely an experiment in how long a complex pile of services can keep running when nobody who built them is left

Like operating this stuff at scale is a complicated dance that generates incidents on the regular and requires frequent operator intervention even when nobody is changing shit. If they’ve got any hope of getting through the next couple months until they can onboard a bunch of overseas contractors and babbling Musk sycophants it’s because they’re in a full on code freeze. But if the wrong infrastructure component goes screwy, none of the people who knew how to fix it work there anymore and the consequences are likely uncharted

I would expect that death will be temporary rather than a Friendster/Myspace permanent demise, it comes back with fewer users after Musk is forced to step away or the equity partners/debtors take it away from him completely.

Like evidently literally none of the engineers who worked on the service that served tweets are still there.

Yeah I mean it’ll have some hilarious outages, maybe they’ll be chapter 11 in a few months, some lenders will impound it and try to make advertisers like them again

Like our overly-domineering and high on his own supply former colleague who left over three years ago left us with some hot garbage we don’t understand. It hasn’t completely stopped working but it fucks up a lot and we have to manually restart things to avoid a cascade of failure. This is one service in a university IT shop! When the people who know how the thing works leave you are kinda fucked

Shit at AWS breaks spectacularly 4 times a year because some service in us-east-1 runs out of numbers

Time for RSS to make a big comeback

never stopped using it via Feedbin, which is excellent. When I've made efforts to not waste time looking at twitter, the few people I really wanted to follow I follow just be reading them in Feedbin.

And to people who complain that Facebook is just shitty relatives and high school friends, I just don't get it. Hide and unfollow a few people. I keep saying this. I see none of that. Instead I have great discussions with interesting and likeminded people. If the company itself wasn't evil I'd probably have no problem with it.

Don't really get the people who go on about what a horrendous cesspit Twitter is - surely you only follow the people you want to follow.

I mostly have a good time on twitter but this is surely not true - even if you turn off seeing the likes and retweets of the people you follow you also get tweets recommended "based on your interests" (dubiously).

You don't see those if you just use Latest Tweets though

No one under 35 uses Facebook. That may be largely true of Twitter but at least music Twitter isn’t all so long in the tooth.

I also find it very hard to engage with strangers in a meaningful way on FB (same with IG really). It really takes digging to find someone who wants to have a discussion with a random on those massive Meta sites where so much of the engagement is merely manufactured.

Echoing these thoughts on Samuel Delaney’s idea of socialization based on random contact vs networking:

Okay all of your final tweets made me finally realize why I love Twitter so much. It's kinda serious but bear with me for a sec. It's these two ideas that Samuel Delany calls contact vs. networking. I'll try to explain it in a quick thread.

— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) November 18, 2022

This doesn’t seem great

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23465274/hundreds-of-twitter-employees-resign-from-elon-musk-hardcore-deadline

not now, we’re signing twitter yearbooks https://t.co/CJ9EBsM9yV

— whitney medworth (@its_whitney) November 18, 2022

banks in 1929: well look at how many people want to visit our banks right now pic.twitter.com/cn0TSM5Nom

— Ken Cheng twitch.tv/kenchengcomedy (@kenchengcomedy) November 18, 2022

twitter is good because its a cesspool, cant imagine trying to use it in a *extremely nerds voice* i have curated a perfect feed way

Wish it would just die, frankly sick of hearing about it

someone should be building an even more chaotic replacement

but i hope it doesnt die theres a lot of stuff on there, think of the stuff, think of the stuff people

You can’t even grow hair nevermind understand how to keep a social media company operational

— T M (@Chusetts) November 18, 2022

yeah this should work

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fh2XuGuWIAAnWbS?format=jpg&name=small

It’s still working fine

Tik tok it is xp

I assume twitter is holding on code releases, which should buy them some time; but the expected traffic spikes with the world cup could cause some real issues since, as I understand it, Twitter is not in a cloud infrastructure so I suspect it doesn't autoscale for traffic; I don't know this for sure though. And even if services are being orchestrated through Kubernetes, there is usually some amount of human involvement in setting and changing scaling thresholds based on traffic, and if no one is around to do that, that would cause slowness and possible outages. Someone here said "if this were true then sites would go down over christmas" and as someone who worked on ecommerce sites during black friday/cyber monday I can assure you that this used to happen all the time. You deal with the traffic on the CDN layer all the way down to how many instances of services you run on the backend.

but I seriously doubt the site is going to like, go down hard and never come back up.

Twitter is not in a cloud infrastructure

!! I find this hard to credit

apparently it isn't. it could be in what you'd classify as a 'private cloud'; I've read a few comments that things are 'on prem' which could mean a number of things.
also, does anyone know if the majority of backend services are still in scala? because it's significantly more difficult to hire scala engineers than java engineers. this is going to really limit their ability to hire more people, since they fired a good portion of the scala community already.

I think we’d all be better off if none of the existing social media sites were around, but I realize my Ludd tendencies in this regard are not looked well upon

I never would have got tickets for the last autechre gig if I hadn't been checking twitter during a work meeting - and nor would three of my colleagues when I had to fess up. Thanks for nothing, warp and ae mailing lists!

this thread has about 40 entirely realistic scenarios that could fuck up twitter in a variety of ways.

I've seen a lot of people asking "why does everyone think Twitter is doomed?"

As an SRE and sysadmin with 10+ years of industry experience, I wanted to write up a few scenarios that are real threats to the integrity of the bird site over the coming weeks.

— Mosquito Capital (@MosquitoCapital) November 18, 2022

Say what you will about Elon’s management style, but before he took over all you guys posted was “ugh another day on this hell site” and now you’re all like “ah twitter the extraordinary place where I met all my best friends, started my career, had sex for the first time”

— Sam Adler-Bell (@SamAdlerBell) November 18, 2022

Twitter’s core services are housed in its own datacenters, not a public cloud provider, yes

someone just pointed me to this. https://twitter.com/romabysen/status/1593632173629706240?s=20&t=RPH5ltwuWHzfifME09Iufg

weird

https://knowtechie.com/twitter-moves-to-aws-expanding-twitter-to-the-public-cloud/

no idea how far along in this process they are/were. in fact if some of this stuff was still being worked on, that's yet another huge risk area

fwiw we just had this conversation on the musk thread and a recent twitter worker said:

almost all of twitter is in private datacenters. ml experimentation (not serving) and data science stuff is the big (and expensive exception).

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, November 17, 2022 6:26 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Elon Musk

> As an SRE and sysadmin with 10+ years of industry experience

noob

the mosquito capital thread is startling and some of its scenarios are p dark -- but i have to say that (grim outcomes and social benefits to one side) it also reveals that what was constructed just as a working piece of machinery, on a semi-chaotic, learn-as-you-go, ad hoc basis, is fucking amazing and fills me with admiration at what humans can do

time to be nicer to coders

No if you’re not their management you can still be mean to coders, a lot of them are libertarian freaks

oh no

the stuff that thread went into that most people dont seem to be thinking about is the intersection of legal and tech aspects, if youve just thrown a company into chaos by say firing half the workers and alienating most of the rest into quitting both your tech and legal depts are unlikely to be functioning well which makes them really unlikely to be able to coordinate well between each other

yeah that thread's more just a good reminder of the insane amount of logistics necessary to run a social media platform at that scale