Every SRE knows that the leading cause of outages by far is someone making a change to the system. Twitter isn’t shipping many new features right now or even doing much maintenance. But eventually they will have to.
So the analogy becomes, the new boss sold all the fire extinguishers and also placed a short temporary ban on cooking in the building. But eventually people are going to start turning on stoves again… and then…
This is correct, but also: a sudden decline in maintenance is a kind of change in its own right. Even automated processes have humans in the loop and manual sign-offs; there's always some cronjob or short-lived certificate somewhere that a human was dutifully maintaining.
Those things aren't going to fail any sooner than they would have anyways, but they're going to fail a lot harder due to the loss of institutional knowledge.
Except that he at the same time demanded that people invent an entirely new dish by the end of the week, and now they are scrambling to try to figure it out. Already the DMCA auto-takedown bot is apparently broken and people are posting entire movies on Twitter. I would expect other peripheral systems to start breaking down as nobody is maintaining them even as other parts of the system are being changed.
I interpreted the GP's comment less as a moral claim ("the DMCA bot is good") and more as a claim that the DMCA bot's failure is a strong indicator of internal instability (given that it sits directly at the intersection between Twitter's profit interests and microservices architecture).
Put another way: being unable keep a little bot running, one that keeps an entire industry happy, doesn't bode well for other components of the service.
It seems self-evident that the bot was considered low priority, since it isn’t working anymore. But nobody is disputing that: they’re saying that the fact that it is low priority does not bode well.
If it was a prerequisite to land $100M ARR from all the media properties’ marketing budgets to advertise the multi-billion dollar pipelines of the movie and entertainment industry, that lil’ bot was the gate to $11,415 per hour of revenue at risk if its uptime failed to sufficiently please the attorneys and auditors from those customers.
I mean, does Twitter want to be a party to a copyright lawsuit? If not, following legitimate looking DMCA notifications (and legitimate looking DMCA counter-notifications) and responding to suponeas as necessary gets you an affirmative defense for copyright infringement.
You may not like it, but having a bot do that probably saves a lot of legal hassle.
Hm? Intellectual property is explicitly carved out of 230, and even if it wasn’t: it isn’t user generated. Content providers are regularly found liable for infringement on their platforms, especially when the plaintiff can demonstrate willful negligence (which in this case would include discontinuing a seemingly effective scanning system.)
> Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or expand any law pertaining to intellectual property.
If section 230 from the CDA of 1996 provided immunity from copyright claims, there would be no reason to include procedural requirements for processing claims in the DMCA of 1998.
Many jurisdictions take an even harsher line when it comes to being complicit in intellectual property abuse. We saw this famously with The Pirate Bay, Napster etc.
Well, Disney won’t care why their copyrighted material is publicly available, noone likes this sort of copyright, but if Elon wants to avoid huge fines he better (make someone) fix it ASAP.
Given that Twitter already offered premium API access, they've got billing in place, so now they add a new form that, once your credit card is verified, flicks a boolean on an account that was previously flicked by another process.
It’s more than that. For one it’s not an existing boolean, there are now two different kinds of blue tick that are presumably stored separately. Blue is also supposed to give the user fewer ads (while making them more relevant) as well as additional weight in feed ranking algorithms. It’s also intended to be offered worldwide which adds a lot of complication to things like payment flows.
I’m not saying it’s going to bring the site down tomorrow but that one feature touches on a lot of services.
Clearly worldwide payments is an issue otherwise they’d have rolled it out worldwide day one, and they didn’t. There must be something holding that back.
Plus I really don’t think you can compare B2B payments for premium API access to end user payments. Not least because they aren’t going to be going the same route: a huge number of them will be via Apple or Google in-app purchasing. Ask anyone who works with those systems, it isn’t a quick plug and play job.
In general though, a new subscription tier, feed algorithm changes, UI changes… if these aren’t, what is a big change in your book?
So the analogy becomes, the new boss sold all the fire extinguishers and also placed a short temporary ban on cooking in the building. But eventually people are going to start turning on stoves again… and then…