Last week Twitter was supposed to break in a couple of days. Now it will have regulatory problems any time soon.
I'll be interested when Twitter has actual issues instead of crazy conspiracy theory of the day about the future problems that are sure to come, never to be spoken about again if the prediction doesn't turn out to be true.
Anecdotally I’ve had loads of issues with twitter these past few weeks. I had to re-block a bunch of accounts I swear I had previously blocked. (Mostly brand accounts. I had previously blocked just about every major company to stop getting their ads, and suddenly started getting ads from large brands I’m almost certain I had blocked before)
Plus suddenly I’m getting really weird “topics” or whatever these random posts are in my feed. I’ve opted out of several of them and they just keep appearing. Like “popular videos” keeps inserting itself into my feed, and if I click on it it will say “don’t worry, you won’t see more of these” every time. I’ve clicked the “never show me this” button a dozen times or so and it’s still appearing in my feed.
Not to mention just the general algorithm being bad. I follow tons of accounts. But last few times I’ve checked twitter there’s maybe a page or two of new posts, then I scroll a bit further and it’s the same stuff as yesterday. Or tweets from a few days ago that I already saw. I’ve had to manually check the pages of people I follow to find their tweets. I’m just missing lots of stuff now.
Twitter is slowly falling apart. I think it’s only a matter of time before larger site-breaking issues appear. Most of the accounts I follow are also posting to mastodon now, and at least there mastodon will show me their posts in my feed.
The issue isn't that a menu was bold, but that no one in the test chain caught it. One reason being that chain is mostly not there anymore. That suggests other less visible, and more important slip-ups are happening, and will be happening.
Or it was a known regression that was deemed acceptable because the company is now moving quickly on priorities that actually matter?
So many assumptions you have to make to get from "Twitter shipped a minor css bug" to "Twitter as a web service is going to come imminently crashing down".
> Or it was a known regression that was deemed acceptable because the company is now moving quickly on priorities that actually matter?
Shitposting and unbanning accounts?
> So many assumptions you have to make to get from "Twitter shipped a minor css bug" to "Twitter as a web service is going to come imminently crashing down".
I'm taking it as a data point together with other similar data points and building a picture. Twitter is full of weird little issues lately. Like the trends turning into a hilarious list of generic words... not signifying any trend at all: https://twitter.com/Whatapityonyou/status/159611539631859712...
You are indeed an idiot. I imagine you meticulously recording minor changes to the website and I can't stop laughing.
I'm sure your predictions of IMMINENT DOOM will materialize any day now. You should make a sign and stand in the middle of Times Square. You'd be in good company.
You assume as much. Assumptions are interesting things. They often assume too little or assume too much, and are based on subjective beliefs instead of objective facts.
There are people at Twitter now that think the entire thing can be built and operated by just "20 amazing engineers" [1] . That is so beyond stupid that if Elon thinks the same way the company is absolutely doomed. This isn't some WordPress blog.
> There are people at Twitter now that think the entire thing can be built and operated by just "20 amazing engineers"
Thing is - you can absolutely build and operate a site that allows people to post things and have other people follow them with just "20 amazing engineers".
What you can't do with just "20 amazing engineers" is operate a safe, harassment-limiting, CSAM-free, ad-friendly, legality-following, privacy-preserving, FTC consent decree'd site.
Twitter is rife with porn and links to onlyfans and famous for its mob justice and crypto-scamming. I think you're overselling what engineers can accomplish.
I was part of a team that built Houseparty, a video chat application that had millions of concurrent users, and it had, at peak, about 30 great devs.
Twitter can survive Musk's cuts. It might not be pretty, and I think he's an ass in many ways (and I've interviewed with him!) But he's not wrong that it was bloated.
Yeah, no. I also worked at Google and also understand what real traffic is. Houseparty had millions of users, Google had millions of QPS. Twitter probably has millions of QPS, but our backend dev lead was from twitter, and Houseparty had more real load.
I won’t disagree that Twitter was massively bloated, but part of that is because they had so many different business areas of focus.
People like to oversimplify what it does, if it was only sharing tweets and images, sure you could get by with 20 or 30 engineers. But they are a self service ad network, a video upload site, a live streaming service, an analytics service and I’m sure I’m missing others.
Now, if you figure 20 engineers per service, plus moderation staff, sales, g&a, etc… you can easily hit hundreds (if not thousands) of people necessary to just keep things going.
PlentyOfFish was run by one person for years. Moot ran 4chan with the help of 1 part time engineer. Whatsapp has 55 employees and over 2 billion monthly active users.
I get that Twitter has some unique challenges like handling tweets from celebrities with millions of followers, but there's no reason it needs thousands of employees.
PoF was orders of magnitude less complicated than twitter is in 2022. It’s also much more complicated than whatsapp was prior to acquisition by FB too.
Off the top of my head, twitter has multiple media types like video, live streaming, an ad exchange, data analytics tracker and embeds in websites.
I have seen nobody say that twitter will break in days.
What I have seen is people say the service will have degradation, which I have definitely observed first hand. I have also noticed the quality of ads have gone from major brands using it, to what I would consider much lower quality ads. Additionally, for some of the few mainstream ads I have seen, there have been ads I have seen directly above/below NSFW/NSFL content, which is a major brand safety issue.
Being blunt, they have saddled themselves with massive amounts of debt, their revenue sources are fleeing quicker than they can replace, some of their core user bases are actively trying to find a different platform and they have hemorrhaged employees they want to keep. Couple that with the current leadership at Twitter being very impulsive and doing stuff like unbanning everyone’s accounts (do people remember when ISIS was recruiting on Twitter), ad buyers (where almost the entirety of their revenue comes from) don’t see things getting better soon.
Even someone who is blinded by Elons charisma can add 2+2 and realize as a company that Twitter is in murky waters. MySpace didn’t disappear in a month, neither will Twitter.
If Musk somehow failed to predict that his decisions were going to drive off advertisers, it's absolutely fair to blame him. Small children may get a pass for assuming the world is the way they want it to be instead of the way that it is; multinational CEOs are held to a higher standard.
> It's not fair to blame Elon for a few marketing firms telling all of their clients to stop advertising on Twitter because they don't like Elon.
Uh, people in the ad industry for the most part don’t give a fuck about political or personal views, nearly all the concerns about placement with publishers revolve around brand safety, ease of use and success rates.
It’s absolutely fair to say that Elons decisions have made Twitter very unattractive to both brands and agencies, which will take years to build trust back.
Twitter has been having actual issues. I have routinely been seeing “this tweet is unavailable,” and have to refresh once or twice to get the tweet to load. The old Twitter kept on top of those kinds of issues because having a reliable app is key to keeping ad money rolling in.
New Twitter hasn’t had a major outage yet, but the degradation in various services kind of suggests that the remaining SREs/ops people are overwhelmed, since they can’t even keep up the full functionality of the site.
> Last week Twitter was supposed to break in a couple of days.
The "it was supposed to break in a couple of days" meme is an often repeated strawman by Elon's defenders. Can you point to any ex-Twitter employee claiming Twitter is supposed to break in a couple of days?
Most said the system is built to be resilient, as long as THERE ARE NO CHANGES MADE TO IT. And no significant outages, hacker attacks, and so on challenges.
You tell me, can Twitter coast indefinitely without changes? How do they plan to monetize it without changes? And without advertisers?
The problem is Elon and his goons are randomly shutting down things in attempt to "remove the bloat" and then they don't know how to turn them on. So things have been breaking in the last few weeks.
Any way you look at it, Twitter is on a course to disaster. But like the Titanic, it takes a bit to get there.
The parent comment which I replied to said, verbatim:
>> Last week Twitter was supposed to break in a couple of days
> I did not see anyone make any such statements. Who are you referring to?
So I answered that poster. I provided the parent comment with some avenues for witnessing a small sampling of the lies and fear-mongering about Twitter. For example, if you spend some time at my last link, a Twitter search page, you'll find one possible search query that results in statements of the kind the parent comment asked for. For example:
> Staying on twitter until it breaks, but make no mistake— it will break (World Cup tweets alone…).
> If no big news story breaks this weekend I suspect Twitter will crash on Monday, sometime after 8am when England scores their 1st World Cup goal. I read that Twitter staff would have watch parties for WC traffic & pray for no goals so there'd be no cascading server failures.
> Twitter will break next week. The World Cup is the #1 driver of social media posts - by ALOT - and would stress a system at full functionality. Twitter is going down faster than Neymar.
> I don’t wanna stir fear but a site like Twitter having a skeleton crew running it means that 100% shit will break. Oh and the Qatar World Cup is coming soon, Twitter may not be able to cope with that (if Steve broke Twitter then the World Cup for sure will)
> Predictions are that the World Cup traffic will likely “break” Twitter.
> The World Cup is gonna kill Twitter
> The World Cup will break Twitter, probs
And from the first link I posted, a news article:
> the 2022 FIFA World Cup over the weekend. It has historically been one of Twitter's busiest events, when Tweet surges heavily stress its systems. "It does look like he's going to blow up Twitter," said Robert Graham.
> "I can't see how the lights won't go out at any moment."
Again: *etc.* There's plenty more out there.
---
> Your comment says people said it should break by now. That isn’t the case.
Wrong. My comment does provide evidence of people saying it should break (have broken) by now; it gave the parent commenter the exact information they requested: people saying it should break "by now"--days prior to the world cup.
Also, I said nothing about what "most people" are saying. Although, now I would expect you to provide evidence for your assertion. I'd like to see evidence that "most people" are saying it "may" break in the "near future."
I expect goalposts to continue to move, so your comment is not surprising.
> Why do you have loyalty to someone who doesn’t care about you — Elon.
Whoa. That one came out of nowhere. I'd like to know what you imagined I wrote in my first post that signified I'm "loyal" to Twitter's new owner.
Goalposts don’t have to move. Of course you’re going to find some people saying dumb stuff. There’s memes around this concept. Being something some people say on Twitter means nothing.
It's only not sound if you want to grow and sustain the business rather than turn it into your own personal $44 billion rage room for pointless glass smashing.
Yet it still running, and cutting costs is a necessity for profitability when costs exceed revenue.
Incredible how bloated that company was before Elon took over.
Complaining about Twitter still running for their public presence is a testament to how much solid automation and infrastructure the previous SREs put in place than anything. If you look you can find comments about how it is already deteriorating in their ad portal. Complaining about a website being up is like asking what the IT person at your org does all day, and then getting angry when they get fired and things start going down a month later.
After 15 years of existence Twitter was 2B dollars in the black. That's more than 100M$ for every year that Twitter has existed.
The business is now in the red in the excess of 10B dollars because Elon put a 13B dollar loan on the company's books.
The company was running fine even after the market crash until Elon took over. It's in the red now, not because of bloated employees- but because of Elon Musk.
It wasn't really that bloated, it is just a stupid business to run because it requires a massive investment and delivers only twits.
I'm a bit shocked that no-one "acquihired" twitter to make another real tech company without hitting all the barriers and filtering even an infinite blood-money funded startup will hit. They threw out the baby, but the bath water is still there, and cloudy and a bit cold.
I wonder how much of this is actually due to employees leaving/being fired and how much is just due to increased regulatory interest due to Twitter having new owners? As we've seen a lot of the content issues are due to organizations attempting to get twitter in trouble since Elon is perceived to be "anti-establishment" by many https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1595630109116989440, and GDPR has a reputation for not being enforced equally. One has to wonder whether things have actually changed or if they're just getting regulated differently now
> how much of this is actually due to employees leaving/being fired
Pretty much every position named in the FTC consent decree appears to have left which means they have no-one to handle that and, apparently, there's an audit due in January. This is not "just due to increased regulatory interest due to Twitter having new owners" - it's the existing consent decree they have to work under.
The EU recently passed the Digital Service Act which expecting regulates very large platforms, like Twitter. Curious to see when Twitter gets the first "dark pattern" fine.
The way twitter was run, the job was probably being done by 5 workers and 16 managers who mostly played corn-hole and 'relaxed' during much of the day. A team that met only for 2 hours after lunch everyday to "knock out some projects" and then wind-down in the smoothie room. I don't know why everyone thinks they can run a large organization better than a man like Elon Musk.
I'll be interested when Twitter has actual issues instead of crazy conspiracy theory of the day about the future problems that are sure to come, never to be spoken about again if the prediction doesn't turn out to be true.