It's hilarious how Twitter 10x'ed the amount of ads they push yet you can't follow the occasional promoted account even if you legit want to. Somebody should tell advertisers they are wasting all that money.
"folks" is non-gendered, but it does not have the virtual signaling properties of "folx" which is all about increasing inclusivity to heights that were previously unheard of.
I got an error that I can't follow any more people (I follow around 3000 people), never got this before. Twitter is becoming an absolute shit show of product and company.
That's a wild exaggeration. I would experience occasional hiccups once or twice a year. I'm usually pretty active, tweet or reply a few hundred times a month.
It's February though, and we've seen at least two outages in the past 3 months, and arguably a lot more generally buggy instances where specific features have been broken (very often without postmortems or any kind of acknowledgement).
I don't think people are surprised to see a website go down; they're surprised to see a website go down often enough that it no longer seems like a particularly noteworthy event. I opened this thread to see what people were saying about the policy change and instead saw people complaining about a service outage, and my response was not, "huh, what on earth is going on at Twitter?" It was, "eh, seems about right."
Twitter always struggled with outages, but they shouldn't be the expected result whenever new features/changes are launched.
I would argue more than two. 2FA was broken globally for a bit, AIUI, and in some geographies is still broken. That’s effectively an outage for 2fa users. There’s also a lot of general flakiness which you wouldn’t call and outage, but are very much a return to the Failwhale Era.
Yep, and the event today certainly counts as an outage. I'm being charitable and only counting today's outage and December's (so two), but there's a strong case to be made that I should also be counting things like:
- Spaces going down
- 2FA breaking for a nontrivial number of users and (as far as I know) never getting fixed
It's silly for anyone to claim that Twitter hasn't been less stable over the past few months than it usually is.
----
What makes an "outage" harder to define now is that Twitter basically gives no statements about them and no postmortems. There hasn't been any acknowledgement from Twitter about pretty much anything stability-wise since Musk took over. Which is another way that Twitter today is tangibly different from how it used to operate, but:shrug:
The end result is that "outages" end up being a lot more blurry, and we get conflicting reports from Musk and from other workers about what happened, if we get reports at all. A system breaks and stops working randomly? Twitter's head of safety says it's temporarily down as part of a planned migration. Musk lies and says it never went down at all. Either way, you're not getting a record you can look up later on an uptime page.
But the site does seem to be struggling more often than it used to.
Uh, yes. That's pretty much an outage by definition. Everywhere I have ever worked (and to be clear, that list includes AWS, Dropbox, and Microsoft -- not tiny startups -- amongst others) would consider that to be an outage.
We're squabbling over definitions that change nothing about my main point. If you're arguing that an "outage" means that Twitter needs to go totally down for everyone, then outages are pretty rare. A fair number of the articles above being linked to prove that pre-Musk Twitter had the same problems mostly don't qualify as outages under that definition -- Twitter's 2020 outage didn't result in the entire site going down for everyone. The 2019 outage mostly centered on the US and Europe.
So whatever you want to call that; if you want to say that those events were "disruptions" -- fine, but it is still the case that Twitter has been experiencing "disruptions" at a higher rate than it did in the past, and that those disruptions have involved less communication with users both during and after the events.
Whatever words you want to use for that are fine, I don't really care about that debate. It's still the case that Twitter as a service has been running into technical issues more often than it used to.
We're comparing a world where Twitter being inaccessible for a single hour was viewed as its worst service failure in years, and the current world where people can be blocked from sending Tweets for an entire day and that's not viewed as really all that newsworthy of an event.
> but it is still the case that Twitter has been experiencing "disruptions" at a higher rate than it did in the past, and that those disruptions have involved less communication with users both during and after the events.
Twitter is under scrutiny more now than ever. If so much as an icon doesn’t load first attempt then people can it form or broken.
In the fact before musk bought Twitter. If it didn’t load for 10 minutes in singapore but it did every else no one really cared. Now people are like. OMG ITS DOWN!!!
So no we aren’t squabbling over words. You just can’t redefine outage because you’re upset at Twitter being owned by a twat.
> Twitter is under scrutiny more now than ever. If so much as an icon doesn’t load first attempt then people can it form or broken.
It's difficult for me to point out concrete statistics to refute this because Twitter's current monitoring of disruptions/outages/whatever is fairly abysmal, and Musk has started transparently misrepresenting/lying about them. Unfortunately this means that much of the reporting/monitoring that we're getting is only second hand. But this strikes me as wishful thinking; frankly I don't believe that pre-Musk Twitter had this number of issues.
Is it possible that there's increased scrutiny, so more people are reporting problems on Down Detector? I guess, it's not impossible. But again, this gets back to what I was mentioning above -- we shouldn't have to rely on Down Detector for numbers, but we do because Twitter has basically completely abandoned self-reporting its own stats.
I can't completely disprove or dismiss the theory that users are just reporting issues more often now, but I don't think it's the most likely explanation available, and I don't see a ton of evidence to back it up -- the simpler explanation is that people are reporting more issues because there are more issues.
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Secondly, I do think we are squabbling over words. It is still the case that if you define "outage" as a worldwide global site unavailability, the majority of the previous links listed above as evidence that this is nothing new don't quality as outages.
We've shifted from saying, "Twitter had outages in the past, this is nothing new" to "okay, the stuff happening now isn't an outage (but somehow the past events still count)", to "actually, things were much worse in the past than you remember and you just never noticed."
But... again, I just don't buy it. Look, 10 minutes of downtime is not the same thing as the private API going down across a substantial portion of the US for an entire day (at least a day, we still don't know for sure if the problem is fully fixed because, again, communication is nonexistent).
Twitter went down for an hour pre-Musk and the media reported it as the worst outage the site had suffered since 2016. Like... come on, it's obvious the site is having issues more frequently than it used to. My opinion of Musk is irrelevant to that observation, the guy could be a saint, and it's still obvious that the site is less stable.
- Free API continues until Feb 13 instead of sunsetting tomorrow
- $100 paid tier grants access to Ads API, which is where promotion and scheduling of Tweets happen. So this will become a necessary but minor expense for brands, influencers, and third parties that cater to them.
- Free API access will continue to be available but users will be limited to 1500 tweets/month.
This actually strikes me as a rational compromise that will bring in a few million $ a month in revenue with significantly disrupting the development/research/comedy bot ecosystem. Bad for spammers and shit-tier brands, both of whom deserve to suffer anyway.
> This actually strikes me as a rational compromise that will bring in a few million $ a month in revenue with significantly disrupting the development/research/comedy bot ecosystem.
A few millions a month is peanuts compared to what Twitter actually needs, which is measured in billions per year. Was it worth the negative publicity and reinforcing the image that Twitter is unsteady and that policy is changed day to day by a flailing attention-addicted teenager? The end result might sound reasonable, but the process to get there was anything but.
100$/Mo is a lot for most and Twitter is relatively easy to scrape and script.
I'd imagine this move will probably not earn Twitter any considerable amount of profits as Twitter is weirdly heavy app and new lazy web scrapers/bots will drain all of those 100$ sales.
For some context, currently there are two ways to scrape/automate twitter outside of the official API since it's a heavy JS-only web app:
- run a real script-controlled browser (using something like Playwright/Selenium/Puppeteer).
- reverse engineer their backend graphql API.
The former is super easy to do but since it runs a full web browser it's expensive resource-wise as it loads everything a normal web user would load (unless configured explicitly not to). The latter is much more efficient but not accessible for most developers as Twitter's backend is pretty complex.
Not necessarily. There are so many ways to obfuscate it and generally public facing graphql endpoints have introspection and all of those convenience features disabled.
To add, Twitter's backend has a bunch of layers on top of it. I did a bit of reverse engineering for my blog article on scraping Twitter [1] and there's a bit of magic token/header generation involved.
Good resource if you'd like to learn more about how the whole backend works is Nitter [2] which implements most graphql functions in Nim (it's very readable even if you don't know Nim).
As a regular lurker, Twitter hasn't really changed in the last few months besides launching a few new features and doing a fresh start on some banned accounts.
I'm just curious but what is that unchanged state to you? Because I have a twitter account that I never use and I tried using it a few weeks ago only to be greeted by spam robots, malware robots, "sexy women" sending cryptic messages that want me to do something.
I saw very little human engagement in my few minutes on twitter.
I'm not sure what to say. I've used Twitter since 2010 and can't recall ever seeing any of that. The only spam I've seen in the last 1-2 years is when I search for a recent news event and sort by latest. Then there have been nude photos. Unfortunately, search on Twitter has never been any good.
My feed consists of 200 people and _most_ tweets seem to get around 5-20 replies. The closest thing you can come to spam are "fake" accounts that comment on political posts. It became big news a few years ago when it was revealed that the largest political party in Sweden were behind some of them. I don't think there's much you can do besides block them since they are real people with fake accounts. But it's only on political posts so I rarely see them.
Maybe that's the problem, that I never used my account. So I get whatever twitter is trying to recommend to me to get my feed started. And it's mostly shit.
Twitter appears to be adopting a mindset of "move fast and break things", which includes testing in production. Some of the new features eventually turned out fine, but they definitely didn't get everything right on first try.
The Twitter before last year seemed more careful about changes that could disrupt users and businesses, as is appropriate for a company with millions of users. The current Twitter don't seem to mind as much.
I'm seeing this accidental glimpse into a future where the only content on Twitter is paid content as a gift. I've had trouble quitting Twitter, but it looks like Twitter's got no problem quitting me.
DMs are erroring for me, and the Android native app just tweets into the void. This issue seems to be roughly aligned with the announcement that paid accounts will have a 4000 character limit. As expected, status.twitter.com suggests Twitter is, in green-colored text, operational.
Same for me, I wasn't "addicted" to Twitter, but I did spend an amount of time on it that I often regretted.
Elon managed to completely cure this in a few months. Between the constant bugs, the erratic changes, the slowness of the site, getting logged out randomly and being banned at one point for what I can only see as me tweeting a link to my mastodon account, I don't even have the site in muscle memory anymore.
I got a weird message about "you are following people too much, only 4000 allowed" . I think I follow like 30 people or so lol. They are definitely looking into limiting people who aren't cash cows. They are overlooking the thing that makes twitter twitter, but keep accelerating that spiral.
A lot of non-knowledgable folks expected twitter to immediately collapse after firing half their engineers. Instead, this is what that kind of failure looks like. Functionality starts to become flaky, some non operational entirely. You can't rely on the status page anymore. Innovation rapidly plateaus. Quality of service suffers on the whole.
The claim that Twitter would collapse immediately never made any sense. Most engineers tend to design software so that they can take holidays. There might be a handful of Ops people who may be need to be available 24/7 but even in a website the size of Twitter those probably number fewer than a few dozen.
People who claimed to be senior SREs wrote long Twitter threads about how it was going to look like a post-nuclear wasteland within a week of the purchase.
At first, it might even increase stability because deploys are a big source of outages, and now there are a lot fewer deploys happening.
But the risk of a major outage -- one that the remaining engineers are ill-equipped to handle -- grows. There are way fewer people paying down tech debt, and the ones still trying to deliver features are now doing so in a minefield.
not everybody reading the word play would know the reference, it's useful to tell them.
and while plays on words are great, when they're counterfactual it gets confusing what is mean, and becomes unclear if the author knows what's being said, and Rome did fall in a day, 6 times
It's like quitting smoking. If you're very good at quitting smoking, because you already quit 6 times, it means the first 5 times you haven't really quite. If Rome fell 6 times it also means at least 5 times it didn't fall for good and thus it took more than a day to fall for good.
If you want to make the case that Rome did not fall in a day, that's fine, you may have even made the case in your comment. I was just commenting on using the stock phrase wrong and expecting it to resonate.
For example, I can say "An apple a day sends you straight to the doctor." If I said that, most people would recognize that I had twisted the original phrase, and could decide if they wanted to engage with what I wrote. But if I wrote, "just like an apple a day, gluten every day will send you to the doctor", I'd expect more pushback from people, "hey, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense"
That wasn’t the fall of Rome, though, not really. There’s a reasonable argument that the fall of Rome started in the first century BC, when the Republic destabilised, culminating in Marius, Sulla, Caesar and friends, and ended in the 15th century AD or so.
Too many bonuses and SLA contracts depend on the “status” for it to be a reliably self reported metric.
When I was in one of these positions, I negotiated bonuses to allow for some failures specifically to avoid this type of conflict of interest. I think it’s also mentioned in the seminal SRE book published by Google.
Of course they are picky, because they have SLAs that say outages cost them money. This speaks to the need for independent monitoring/auditing to ensure that companies are being honest about the metrics that they provide. Right now, no one can hold them accountable for lying on their status pages, because every customer must make their own case that there even was an outage. Worse, there’s no truly independent party to make them accept such evidence, so you are ultimately dependent on them deciding to come clean.
One of the worst things about the "new Twitter" is that the "old Twitter" provided so much surplus to the world in terms of the open source work their engineers did, all the design frameworks, the neat technical blogs, the sponsored events and whimsical nature of the company. It felt very much in the original spirit of Silicon Valley. It was a fine, if slightly underperforming company who had ~infinite runway to fix things as they had billions of dollars in the bank and were roughly break-even profitable.
"New Twitter" feels like the worst version of private equity LBO capitalism. Suddenly the rationale for every decision is entirely extractive finance; load the company with debt to juice your shareholder returns, fire everyone who can't be proven to be profitable, break your leases, close your offices, kill all perks, cease all meetings of your employee affinity groups, make sure nobody is working on projects that don't have a straight-line to revenue growth, squeeze every dollar out of your users, monetize any surplus that you were previously providing while relying on inertia to keep your users through the much worse user experience.
Elon-era Twitter is basically 2000s-era Sears -- and man is it depressing that people are cheering it on.
The constant politicization of things was not wise for Dems. Twitter was comfortably status quo, now Elon is pushing tweet suggestions to the right of the political spectrum. It's interesting, though, to see a major social media platform that goes in a different direction.
What in the world does the Democratic party have to do with anything? Musk was forced to execute the contract that he signed, but that was the Delaware Court of Chancery's doing, not Joe Biden's..
Musk has agency.. he chose to overpay, he wasn't forced to. To avoid squeezing the shit out of Twitter, he could have just not made a binding contractual offer to buy the company for $44 billion. It's like saying that of course these ghoulish private equity companies have to squeeze the shit out of the nursing homes they buy in order to make their money back.
They could just not do the first part and avoid making everything around them shittier?
My mom used to license and regulate nursing homes. When in a licensing action for a particularly bad one, the owner cried poverty, blah blah.
During the hearing where his license was getting revoked, he literally requested an emergency recess, during which closed on a deal where he bought an assisted living/nursing home complex, with his son as the license holder for the nursing home.
I really dislike seeing (mega-) corps usurping the public domain, and find it highly offensive and dangerous to democracy.
Twitter isn’t the public square, it’s a private revenue stream for Twitter. It shouldn’t be allowed to sway people into believing it’s a free speech platform, nor should it be used as the public space for official announcements by governments and other authorities.
> A lot of non-knowledgable folks expected twitter to immediately collapse after firing half their engineers.
AFAICT at the time, that was more a strawman crea5ed by Musk defenders than the normal criticism/expectation of people who viewed the actions as unwise.
I think a lot of people maybe conflated “immediately become broken” (which it did, pretty much) with “immediately literally vanish” (which was never likely).
Do we count turning on something half-baked, finding bugs, turning it off, it wasn't really off, turning it back on later with 3/4th the promised feature 5-6 feature releases?
Or maybe we're counting a feature that was developed but not released for N (reasonable) reasons, now discounting those N reasons and releasing it anyway as a signal that there's some sort of innovation occurring?
Like the emergency kill switch that shut down all of Twitter Spaces for the entire platform when Elon was asked a single pointed question he didn't want to answer.
I'm pretty sure you're wrong even just going by (edit: pre-2022Q4) features listed on the wikipedia page[1], and that appears to leave out a number of cool and useful things such as polls and the extensive support for image alt-text.
So innovation is just shipping new features? Don't really believe that's a great metric to track something so subjective, I believed innovation had a bit more weight than "let's do something and ship it! Whatever!".
That said, I don't know what bar for "feature over the last 6 months" is actually meaningful. The problem with Twitter was never the user-facing product, it was the thing that actually made them money - the ads. Twitter usage exploded under the Trump years while revenue lagged. The product that Twitter should be innovating isn't user facing.
They just added ads in the tweet replies (as opposed to just the main feed) and will be giving a percentage of the revenue to the person starting the thread.
If Twitter has issues it’s because Musk is a foolish billionaire who fired too many people. If it doesn’t have issues then it’s just a testament to the brilliant engineers before his tenure. In other words he can’t win. I expect Twitter will have it’s wins and losses (both technical and fiscal) over the next months but I expect that “knowledgeable” folk will continue to have the same conversation each time there is a loss.
Or you could take a step back and rationally access the situation as Musk's ego causing him to be locked into a doomed to fail deal, and his desperate attempts to turn Twitter around failing spectacularly as he almost immediately alienated advertisers.
Instead we have a false dichotomy and more Musk cult of personality.
I don't see what is false about what I said, the conversation has played out literally over and over. One call fails and Musk is an ego-maniac that ruined Twitter, nothing happens for a week and it is "all praise the great engineers he fired". There is such intellectual dishonesty. I have zero loyalty to Musk, I will criticize his mistakes and laud his successes, can you say the same? Calling any pro-Musk sentiment a cult of personality is just another trick to stick to your dogma.
Moments after Musk took charge, he enabled the Edit feature. Entire feature length movies where then uploaded to twitter via this feature.
He pushed forward buying twitter blue, essentially making twitter verification useless as a feature.
As I already said, advertisers pulled out almost instantly, causing his financial situation to be practically unsolvable.
The website is still up and running, yes, because servers don't magically explode the next day, but to treat this as intellectual dishonesty is cult of personality. Musk has only hurt Twitter since acquiring it. If all you are capable of is straw manning about the one person you read who meme'd the site would fall down the next day because they've never written a server before, then fuck off.
im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman although im sure some of the HN history buffs could correct me.
the whole saga still gobsmacks me to this day. one of the wealthiest men in america tantrum-spends 44 billion dollars on a website, then goes through an agonizing six months pretending he didnt have to buy it and is eventually forced by a judge to complete the acquisition. next, said oligarch fumbles the execution so badly the company basically winds up firing everyone it can and accidentally lock themselves out of the headquarters for the weekend in the process. Eventually the man himself, Musk, desperately pleads for "anyone who writes code" to meet him in the dead of night on the tenth floor of his now empty office only to wind up with midlevel managers pledging their fidelity as the vichy scramble to find their place in the new order and various services begin to fail. Finally, mercifully, Musk is hauled back to Tesla where share prices are tumbling almost as quickly as twitter users are jumping ship, but not before unshackling a prison full of reprobates and racists to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts.
I'm not focusing on a single "hitman" taking down Rome. Who really knows but it was a multitude of factors. My point here is that large systems don't typically acutely fail. It's more of a gradual process of rust and decay that accelerates them into irrelevance.
Your point about what a total mess this was is absolutely spot on though. It didn't have to end like this. This was a tragedy of blunders.
The funniest thing to me is how the Billionaire railed about a lack of free speech, but then tried to turn free speech into a commodity that could be purchased for his own opportunistic profit.
Every day is a day closer to when Twitter will vanish, curing public addiction to and dependency upon it. Something else will come later, and slowly be corrupted again as well.
It would have been easier and much less costly to just have made an app from scratch and to have left Twitter to it's prior dysfunctional obscurity.
>I'm not focusing on a single "hitman" taking down Rome. Who really knows but it was a multitude of factors. My point here is that large systems don't typically acutely fail. It's more of a gradual process of rust and decay that accelerates them into irrelevance.
I think a lot of people with experience understood this fundamental concept but the issue is that it seems difficult to convey this into a headline grabbing series of news articles.
Therefore, it seems as if the whole hubub at the beginning of this saga was this concept but massively overinflated(OMG twitter is going to collapse overnight). In fact I guess you can argue that it was so overinflated that it was lying but thats the standard we have to live with for now.
> It's more of a gradual process of rust and decay that accelerates them into irrelevance.
precisely. entropy tends to increase in this universe. humans are special because our phenotypical effect of creating order is unparalleled in scale, precision, and sophistication.
Yep totally. Kind of like the "broken window" phenomena with a building/neighborhood where if one broken thing doesn't get fixed everything else goes pretty quickly
It’s a hypothesis, not a phenomenon. Several studies and statistical analyses shown that regression to the mean and external factors were better explanations for the decrease in crime than the zero-tolerance policy. The theory itself is based on a presumed correlation with no real proof of causality.
Something I find interesting are the parallels from current day billionaires to dictators and depots throughout history. I was recently listening to Behind the Bastard, where they spoke of Nicolae Ceaușescu [1]. Among the terrible things he did, he also constructed the largest civilian government building in the world, the Parliamentary Palace. It's sits at 30% capacity today; because it was built not to be used, but to fan his ego.
I remembered always being told growing up that capitalism was superior to communism because it intelligently allocated resources based on the market. But by giving a few people billions of dollars, we're seeing them do the same things communist dictatorships did; throwing money blindly into vanity projects. Like The Line [2], or Telosa [3]. I have to wonder if the modern billionaires are creating a similar instability in society, even if it is lessened by their not being the head of government.
I might be misremembering but it didn't actually end up as a judge's decision, did it? I remember that they were starting discovery, lots of amusingly embarrassing things old Elno did/said were coming out and he said "OK NEVER MIND I'll buy it then" which suspended the court case pending him actually doing that (which, as we all sadly know now, he did.)
> The Delaware Chancery Court judge has given Mr. Musk until Friday to close his long-promised, $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter. If he doesn’t, Chancellor McCormick will preside over a trial in November that could end with Mr. Musk being forced to make good on the deal he made with Twitter in April.
This might be semantic quibbling, but although it never came to decision, everybody with any legal knowledge whatsoever knew that the decision would be in Twitter's favor, and I assume eventually Elon's lawyers got it across to him that he had no chance of winning the case. IMO it's likely that, rather than discovery, prompted the surrender - if I could avoid paying $44 billion for Twitter with a couple embarrassing text leaks, I'd take that deal. So in that sense I don't think it's inaccurate to say he was forced by the judge, albeit indirectly.
Yea, he weaseled out of the trial like he does everything. I wish the judge would have instead forced the trial to move forward no matter what, making him pay both financially and politically/socially.
>im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman although im sure some of the HN history buffs could correct me.
The imperial administration never really recovered from Commodus (who had a bunch of high-ranking officials murdered), although there were plenty of good emperors after him (e.g. Diocletian, Constantine, Justinian), but their achievements tended to be lost by their successors.
>im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman
Probably not, but Crassus did live in the time of Rome's centuries-long inflection point.
It's hard to use a phrase like "richest person in the world" in an age where living standards and currencies varied so much, but he was extremely, notoriously, extravagantly wealthy.
He cornered the housing market by showing up to burning buildings with a fire brigade, and offering to put out the fire only if the owners sold the property to him at a steep discount. If they didn't, he let the property burn.
He was eventually killed in a war with the Parthians, and legend has it that they found him so repulsive, they poured molten gold down his corpse's throat as a message.
Purposefully didn't focus on "whose fault it is". A long chain of bad decisions led to this situation. Twitter's board shares a fair amount of the blame too, for example. So does Jack Dorsey for not giving twitter much attention during his reign as CEO.
Wait, why does Jack Dorsey deserve blame? He took a failing company and conned an idiot into paying 2.5x market value for it. Measured by shareholder value, he's one of the most brilliant CEOs in history.
15 years ago it wasn't clear whether Facebook or Twitter was going to be the winner (or if they'd both just be another MySpace).
Jack is responsible for Twitter losing.
It always felt like Twitter co didn't actually understand what Twitter was and almost all of the product innovation came from the community rather than twitter itself.
Twitter's only failure is that it never returned a profit. When you look at the social landscape, it's hard to argue anyone has succeeded other than Facebook.
Twitter's product is great and it didn't need to be as large as Facebook. It shouldn't need to twist itself for the greatest common denominator users who required immediate gratification via algorithmic feeds and short memes.
TikTok is private, but is said to be losing money. Snap is in the same boat as Twitter as being largely unprofitable. It is unclear if Twitch is profitable either.
And they still believe it! He's an unparalleled genius and every single breath he takes directly contributes to saving the world. Unfortunately there's a queer globalist Hollywood blue tick pizza trafficking Democrat conspiracy making it look like Twitter is a massive dumpfire, trying to make him look bad despite every single one of his decisions being unquestionably perfect and logical.
I can't figure out which takes you're talking about. I have to assume they're the takes that twitter is closing up shop and that everyone is moving to Mastodon, and that Mastodon is scalable enough to accept those people.
Journalists Remain on Twitter, but Tweet Slightly Less
> only a small handful have deactivated their accounts
This is a bad metric. Twitter takes the dubious position that it's a good idea to allow usernames to be re-registered when people delete their accounts (this one can't be blamed on naughty ol' Mr Car; it's a _vintage_ design flaw). So deleting your account, particularly if you're prominent, is a bad idea as it allows for impersonation.
A better metric would have been how many accounts went silent, but they don't seem to have done that one.
Elon Musk is never going to be able to buy twitter
oh wait maybe he got the deal, but he'll never pay for it, the whole thing is just a stunt
oh wait maybe he got the deal, but he's so stupid, he'll never be able to pay for it, but he'll be forced to buy it anyway, bankrupting him in the process!
oh wait I guess he just bought twitter. well it's going to fall apart immediately next week now that he fired everyone who kept the lights on!
Nice fanfic, but no one ever said he wasn't able, just that he was not willing. I think this is pretty clear by the fact that he tried to wiggle out of it and had to be forced by the court. No one was ever doubting that he didn't have the money to buy twitter, just that he wasn't stupid enough to go through with something so dumb just because he got triggered.
nah, people did say that. there was a lot of hyperbole. what's important is whether there were folks who who said all those things, and as to whether they were worth paying attention to their opinion in the first place.
When someone calls essentially half the population as "reprobates" and "racists", then please explain how my tone and my response is inappropriate? It is more than appropriate! It is far past time to call out that the actual demons are those who spend their time dishonestly demonizing others.
Not even in the most feverish reactionary vision of America does anybody seriously think that 50% of Americans believe the drivel that comes out of Twitter's racist peanut gallery.
Put another way: you may or may not believe it, but the overwhelming majority of people do not. Plenty may find it entertaining or even cathartic (given preconceptions about their own political tribe), but that's a far cry from agreeing with it.
Who are the censored racists that got freed under Musk? Did you view the links in my posts? Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is not a racist. Neither is the Babylon Bee. Neither is the attorney general of Texas. Neither is Jordan Peterson. These peoples' views represent mainstream conservatism, and their censorship was dissolved under Musk.
Now, point me to the throng of racists Musk also unshackled. I'm guessing you can't, because not a single person in this comment thread can be bothered to come up with a spec of evidence supporting their claims.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
This is far from the “strongest possible interpretation” of that comment. You’re not ChatGPT; stick to what’s written not a hallucinated interpretation.
It is not even remotely far from the "strongest possible interpretation" at all. It is a mainstream belief of the democrat party that Republicans are racist reprobates. Someone who won the popular vote for presidency of the United States has said as much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables
Whenever anyone makes a blanket statement about a group of people being racists and has zero evidence of said alleged racism, it is a very plausible interpretation that they are blanket-insulting conservatives en masse.
Regardless, My criticism stands even without this interpretation. He claimed a bunch of racists and reprobates got unshackled on Twitter via Musk. He has provided zero evidence to back that up despite me challenging his claim and calling his behavior reprobative.
I don't give a shit what the "mainstream belief" is. I don't give a shit what the house minority leader said. I don't give a shit what you think the parent commenter said. Stick to what was actually said and the best possible interpretation of it. The parent commenter did not talk about any of that. They did not bring it up. You are entirely the one that brought this whole 50% topic in here when it wasn't being discussed, and then hyperfixated on it instead of what was actually being talked about.
> He claimed a bunch of racists and reprobates got unshackled on Twitter via Musk. He has provided zero evidence to back that up despite me challenging his claim and calling his behavior reprobative.
Great, focus on that instead of something that just plain wasn't said in this comment thread.
You also never "challenged his claim". You straight up said you don't believe him based on one sentence, and then immediately flew off on a tangent based on something that wasn't said. At no point did you stick to the topic being talked about. That is the antithesis of that HN guideline, plain and simple.
As I previously said, you're not ChatGPT. Don't hallucinate things into this thread that wasn't said and then fly off on a tangent based on those.
I don't really care what you care about either. I directly challenged one of his claims. That is extremely obvious in my post. I only brought the 50% up later in response to another person's comment. So OP didn't even need to address that directly. You are the one now not taking people's words at face value, and therefore violating HN guidelines based on your own intepretations.
> Great, focus on that instead of something that just plain wasn't said in this comment thread.
That was my focus. How well did you read my original comment?
> You also never "challenged his claim".
I certainly did. I said I no longer trust him because of his claim. How much stronger of a challenge could you get than that?
> and then immediately flew off on a tangent based on something that wasn't said
False.
> Don't hallucinate things into this thread that wasn't said
If you think mainstream beliefs held by people in society who make similar statements isn't relevant context to an Internet discussion, then you and I probably aren't going to agree on much.
> When someone calls essentially half the population as "reprobates" and "racists",
Half the population wasn't banned from Twitter before Musk bought it.
Half the population doesn't consist of people like Andrew Tate and Donald Trump, and Andrew Anglin (Shout out to him and his boys at the Daily Stormer for getting their megaphone back), and Alex Jones (Although that last one's still banned.) Why do you think that it does?
Because the twitter bots says so. Twitter amplifies extreemist views. In this case it has agin amplified extreem opinions, convincing someone that an extreem is actually a norm. That person then amplifies that in anohter froum, where a twitter bot or ai will no doubt pick it up, returm it to twitter and repeat the cycle.
Right wingers: "Liberals are so closed minded, they should read more than just their side and should find ways to agree with other people, there's more opinions out there than just your MSNBC/reddit echo chamber"
Also: "You said something I disagree with, all your other arguments are invalid and I can entirely stop listening to you"
Did I say they were invalid, or that I no longer trust him and would need to corroborate with other sources? I swear people on the left either have really bad reading comprehension, or just make a habit of twisting and distorting other peoples' words as a default tactic. I'm leaning towards the latter explanation at the moment, though I go back and forth.
Sorry, but saying I don't trust your paragraph of claims because I know at least one of those claims is grotesque and false doesn't shut down debate. More importantly, the point needs to be expressed. No one should get away with a statement like that unquestioned.
I feel again like you're not comprehending what I wrote, and I'm going to assume you're not intentionally being dishonest in doing so.
> without mindlessly discarding everything else the person said.
It's a good thing I didn't do that.
> That will be a very successful way to never have to challenge any of your opinions since nobody is infallible.
Funny because I don't have a strong opinion either way on how badly Musk has behaved relative to the Twitter acquisition, so there is no opinion of mine to even protect. Again, you don't seem to understand what the following statement means: "I don't trust what you're saying and will have to corroborate it with other sources". Because it definitely doesn't mean what you think it means.
The only people mindlessly, and without evidence, calling others racists for the past 30 years are Democrats in reference to Republicans. My inference is not even remotely a stretch or controversial and is likely 100% correct.
Furthermore, did you look at any of my links or read any of what I said? Twitter was extremely left-biased and the internal docs prove it.
He only talked about reprobates and racists? What does that have to do with conservatives, unless you believe that these groups are equal? That is quite the self report.
So brave of you to stand up for racists's sensitive feelings and god-given rights to not have their beliefs questioned or feelings hurt. They're the real victims here, not the people they consider less than human and exercise their absolute free speech to tell everyone that.
The only people today who see others as less than human are the same people who falsely demonize others as racists. The whole point of demonization is to enable you to view your opponent, not as a human, but as a demon. The evidence can't be any more obvious.
Riiiiight, because racism doesn't exist any more, now that we've had a black president (even though he was born in Kenya, as our orange president went to so much effort and expense to made sure everyone believes).
>"America is one of the least racist places overall in recorded history." -PathOfEclipse
And then you went on to demonize your opponent (without even having your own facts straight), which is just fine for you to do apparently, just nobody else:
>"It is still a very evil thing to defame someone with such a horrible accusation when you couldn't even be bothered to take two minutes to get your facts straight! ... which is even more evil ... significant evil in my book ..." -PathOfEclipse
Now that America's racism problem has been solved, is that why you put so much time and energy and commitment into fighting so hard against reverse racism, by linking to the writings of Thomas Sowell, who has literally claimed that Black Americans were better off during slavery than they are today, and has defended Trump against charges of racism?
Are you also a huge Kanye fan, too? Obviously we no longer live in a racist society, now that black people can love Hitler, and Trump owns his very own black friend who he invites to Thanksgiving dinner along with his Neo-Nazi White Supremacist friend. The Great American Melting Pot.
Yeah, I'm not going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you have terrible reading comprehension. You're probably just a very dishonest person.
In my comment, I said "[racism] is something we can always improve on", and you framed it as "Riiiiight, because racism doesn't exist any more." I don't know how to paint it more clearly that you're either very dishonest or not a careful reader.
> And then you went on to demonize your opponent
No. More incredible dishonesty from you.
> Now that America's racism problem has been solved
More dishonesty from you.
> by linking to the writings of Thomas Sowell, who has literally claimed that Black Americans were better off during slavery than they are today
Wow you're incredibly dishonest.
> has defended Trump against charges of racism?
Trump is many bad things, but racist is not one of them. But, you're behaving so dishonestly, I would guess you probably even know that already.
> The Great American Melting Pot.
Race relations got significantly worse under Obama. It turns out, when you put people in power who are race grifters, they'll actually fracture society through their demagoguing. That's what leftists have been doing for decades now. The melting pot may fail, and it's through deliberate action from people probably a lot like you.
Qanon right-wingers view "the other side" as literal, baby-eating, satan-worshipping demons. You had Alex Jones saying that Obama and Hillary "reek of sulphur".
I don't know anything about Alex Jones other than that he is on the fringe. People on the fringe can mostly be ignored unless they become dangerous, and they do so be acquiring significant power and influence. The difference between the extreme right and the extreme left is that the former has virtually no political, cultural, or other power in our society, while the latter is ascendant and yields vast amounts of power today.
Hillary Clinton called middle America the "basket of deplorables" and "racist", "sexist", "homophobic" "xenophobic", "Islamophobic." Hillary is not on the fringe. She has ties to some of the most powerful people in the world! She almost become the President of the United states. And, her opinion is frankly mainstream in the Democrat party. Alex Jones's opinion, however, is shared by no one with power or influence. He really is on the fringe. The comparison is not remotely apples to apples. The extreme left is the greatest existential threat to our society today. The extreme right is a joke.
Wait, do you actually think Hillary Clinton is part of the "extreme left wing"?
Have you even like, talked to someone who is moderately left wing like say a Bernie Sanders supporter about how they view Clinton?
And you're aware Bernie Sanders lost because the Democrats considered him a threat from the left?
And that every single person in the Democratic party is to the right of him?
And that theres significant amounts of political thought to the left of him?
Like go ask anyone living in a country with actual left wing politicians what they think about Hillary Clinton's politics and they will tell you shes a center-right politician.
Do you actually think real extreme leftists like communists or anarchists are Hillary Clinton supporters?
Do you really think anything left of very slightly center-left is even included in the overton window in the US?
How do you expect anyone to respect your opinions on politics when you very clearly don't even understand what the terms like left and right wing that you are using mean and seem to lack any understanding of what the actual full landscape of political theory looks like?
You're right in that Hillary is fairly mainstream leftist, and her views are absolutely awful and inline with the original comment I responded to. It only gets worse as you go even further left! And that's my point. The extreme right poses not even 1% of the threat of the extreme left. Your criticism really only strengthens the evidence I've presented.
> How do you expect anyone to respect your opinions on politics when you very clearly don't even understand what the terms like left and right wing
Hillary may be mainstream, but she takes her cues from the extreme left. Starting with the Marxist movements of the 50s and 60s, she knows that she can get votes by dividing people into various oppressor/oppressed categories and riling up the alleged oppressed into activism. You don't have to be hard left to be influenced by the hard left and to operate under their rules and frameworks and further their agendas.
At the end of the day, I've articulated my points more than well enough for an open-minded person to gain something from it. I'm sorry if that doesn't describe you as a person.
Do you really have to lie so transparently? You're not fooling anyone that you don't know anything about Alex Jones, because we all know you haven't been living under a rock for the past 10 years, because you are parroting so many current talking points that there is no way you never heard anything from or about Alex Jones. You sound exactly like Trump trying to deny he knew anything about the latest White Supremacists he retweeted or invited to Thanksgiving dinner. Everybody knows he's lying when he denies knowing somebody like that, and everybody knows you're lying too.
We all certainly know you're lying you when you claim that despite not knowing anything about Alex Jones, you just happen to know that nobody takes him seriously. How can you not know anything about him, yet know who takes him seriously and not? You certainly do know who takes him seriously and embraces him, and that includes you, despite your denials, and Donald Trump, who has given Jones interviews, invited Jones to speak at his rallies, and praised him with flattery like "Your reputation is amazing". Trump even invited Alex Jones to BROADCAST FROM INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE. That proves you're totally full of shit about nobody taking Jones seriously, and you know it.
So stop feigning ignorance and pretending that everyone doesn't know you're lying through your teeth. If you don't want people to know you embrace and take Alex Jones seriously, then stop parroting him and spreading his lies and covering for him.
How Alex Jones was embraced by Trump, Rogan years after Sandy Hook lies
In roughly 10 years since he declared the deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history to be a “giant hoax,” Infowars founder Alex Jones has been denounced and de-platformed by tech giants such as Facebook, YouTube and Spotify, and faced significant financial blows. The latest came Thursday when a jury ruled that Jones had to pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages to the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting after he created a “living hell” for the family.
But as Jones’s false claims and rants launched him into the national political dialogue, his ascent has arguably been solidified, thanks to Donald Trump and Joe Rogan embracing Jones and endorsing his ideas to online audiences of millions of people in recent years.
Jones’s 2015 interview with Trump offered a window into some of the future president’s talking points at his rallies.
“Your reputation is amazing,” Trump told Jones at the time.
Tell the White House: Don't welcome Sandy Hook deniers!
Alex Jones and his colleagues at Infowars have spent years insulting and dismissing the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School as a “hoax” and the work of “crisis actors.” They’ve propagated conspiracy theories aimed at dismissing the pain of parents who have lost their children. And they’ve pushed other theories which have led to actual incidents of gun violence perpetrated by fanatical listeners and viewers.
Any one of those things should be enough to keep Jones and Infowars out of the White House briefing room. Together, they are unimpeachable evidence that they don’t belong.
But Donald Trump’s White House press office still issued them a pass, legitimizing the offensive and frankly dangerous rhetoric Infowars spreads. And on Monday, Infowars broadcast from inside the White House.
Join us in calling on the White House to deny any future applications made by Infowars for press passes and credentials which would allow them access to the White House.
Alex Jones and Donald Trump: A Fateful Alliance Draws Scrutiny
The Infowars host tormented Sandy Hook families and helped elect President Donald J. Trump. His role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack is now of growing interest to congressional investigators.
Alex Jones speaking on the East Front of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as rioters breached the building.
WASHINGTON — The day President Donald J. Trump urged his supporters to “be there, will be wild!” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Alex Jones spread the message to millions.
“This is the most important call to action on domestic soil since Paul Revere and his ride in 1776,” Mr. Jones, the Infowars broadcaster, said on his Dec. 19, 2020, show, which airs live online and on a network of radio stations. Mr. Jones, whose lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting fueled years of threats against the 26 victims’ families, urged his listeners to take action.
A little more than two weeks later, Mr. Jones joined his followers at the Capitol as a behind-the-scenes organizer — a crucial role in the riot that is under increasing scrutiny by congressional investigators.
Notice how you didn't address the fact that you know very well that Trump supports and embraces Alex Jones, yet you lied about it.
Edit: You certainly know that now, whether or not you were totally ignorant about it before (which I simply don't believe), because I just proved it to you with several citations and quotes so you don't have to take my word for it, and now you are incapable of countering that proof, so all you proved was that you're not arguing in good faith by simply calling me a liar and not bothering to say what I said was a lie, or refute any of my arguments.
Your Sgt. Schultz "I Know Nothing!!! Nothing!!!" Defense doesn't convince anyone, and just beclowns you and amuses me.
If you can refute any of my arguments, then do so, but by refusing to address and counter any of my specific points or provide any proof of your insanely ignorant claims, and just arguing in bad faith and calling me a liar, you've just proven my point.
You're not going to convince anyone that all those videos of Alex Jones at the January 6 Insurrection Rally were computer generated and he was just sitting at home all that time.
But don't bother trying, because as histrionic and incoherent and disingenuous as you are, there's no chance in hell you can win this argument you've already lost many times over in every thread, since you're simply and absolutely wrong, foaming at the mouth batshit crazy, and nobody could possibly believe you. You need to get help for your mental and emotional and honesty problems, not spend your time screaming and lying at people on the internet.
> Notice how you didn't address the fact that you know very well that Trump supports and embraces Alex Jones
I didn't know that and I still don't know that. I certainly wouldn't take your word for it. You have to be the most dishonest person I've engaged with in a long time, and that's really saying something.
I don't know anything about Alex Jones other than that he is on the fringe. People on the fringe can mostly be ignored unless they become dangerous, and they do so be acquiring significant power and influence. The difference between the extreme right and the extreme left is that the former has virtually no political, cultural, or other power in our society, while the latter is ascendant and yields vast amounts of power today.
The comparison is not remotely apples to apples. The extreme left is the greatest existential threat to our society today. The extreme right is a joke.
I mean, from my point of view as a passive Twitter user whose life has been unaffected by Elon taking over, I read this just as another repeat of the same ‘Anti-Musk narrative’ that keeps getting tossed around like a football. I don’t care either way, I’m not a Musk apologist, but I would just ask why this whole ordeal upsets you (and others) so much?
Okay he immediately fired a ton of people from a company that was notorious for setting money on fire. Is that really surprising, that he guts his newly acquired company, so he can rebuild it the way he sees fit? Especially considering every single other huge tech company has laid off enormous amounts of employees in the last year? Are you just as mad at them as you are Elon?
Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad? Elon is going to do Elon things, and if it bothers you so much maybe try blocking him on Twitter, and ignoring any news you see about him. It’s not worth the stress. Especially if it causes you to take time out of your day to write such a rage filled post. Just go about your day, and don’t worry about how Elon chooses to run his companies. I doubt everyone cared this much about how Twitter was run before this, just go back to that and we’d all be happier.
Elon was just unnecessarily cruel with the layoffs imo, if he had been more professional and less political I think people would have had a different reaction.
The anti Elon group grew pretty massively when he laid off people in the way that he did.
Anecdotally, I was neutral of Elon before the layoffs but that changed when I saw the way he conducted himself.
> I would just ask why this whole ordeal upsets you (and others) so much? ...
Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad? ...
> I doubt everyone cared this much about how Twitter was run before this
There are two very separate issues. Some people are upset and mad (so good question, and I bet you get some good answers). Other people, including me, are not at all upset or mad BUT we think it's extremely interesting. And important.
Quite the patronizing tone to say basically nothing.
But I’ll add: tech forums (like this) are built for discussions about tech stuff (like twitter), so of course you’ll hear people floating their opinions about these topics. That doesn’t mean they care more/less than you.
We get it, you’re above such petty discourse, but many tech employees see a difference between market layoffs and the richest man in the world buying a company on a whim and firing people over printed code reviews. Does holding that opinion mean that they’re stressing? Probably not. I’d bet most are just replying on the toilet.
It's because a lot of people have invested time into curating their little social sphere on Twitter and Mad Car Guy has set the company on a path to utter destruction. People don't like to have their things taken away.
You may think Twitter "set money on fire" before Musk but objectively they were approximately breaking even and now they clearly are not.
For someone that says they're not a Musk apologist or to ignore Musk, you seem to have a rather long history of coming out specifically to defend Musk. You realize your immediate comment history is apparent, right?
I guess you got me? You pointed out comments that came from one particular issue/ thread. That’s not a ‘rather long’ history. And as I said in those comments it had nothing to do with Elon. That was doxxing, plain and simple. And my mind hasn’t changed on that. Doesn’t matter If it’s Elon, Taylor Swift, or my next door neighbor. It’s wrong. Mind you, a high profile celebrity’s convoy got attacked right after all that happened, supposedly because they thought they were getting Elon. My point is just move on with your lives. It’s just recreational outrage at this point.
>Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad?
The people who are mad are the type of people who were used to having the illusion of influence, or thought they had the social currency to do/get what they wanted with Twitter.
They've lost that perceived control, and are suddenly anxious that they're addicted to a service they cannot influence or use for social power. They get happy for being able to drill in Musk's failure. To them, Musk is a convenient "rich" that they can finally apply "eat the rich" to.
I am for instance not and have never been a twat and have disliked most of the discourse there and certainly resented the disproportionate amount of attention the twats got.
However, I had and have little reason to trust that Musk won’t make twitter into simply a different kind of hell. He certainly said as much with all his (ultimately) fake “free speech” stance.
Basically just because a thing is bad doesn’t mean it can’t get worse.
If Musk manages to make twitter irrelevant though I’ll thank him for it.
I mean, from my point of view as a passive Twitter user whose live has been unaffected by Elon taking over, I read this just as another repeat of the same ‘Anti-Musk narrative’ that keeps getting tossed around like a football. I don’t care either way, I’m not a Musk apologist, but I would just ask why this whole ordeal upsets you (and others) so much?
Okay he immediately fired a ton of people from a company that was notorious for setting money on fire. Is that really surprising, that he guts his newly acquired company, so he can rebuild it the way he sees fit? Especially considering every single other huge tech company has laid off enormous amounts of employees in the last year? Are you just as mad at them as you are Elon?
Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad? Elon is going to do Elon things, and if it bothers you so much maybe try blocking him on Twitter, and ignoring any news you see about him. It’s not worth the stress. Especially if it causes you to take time out of your day to write such a rage filled post. Just go about your day, and don’t worry about how Elon chooses to run his companies. I doubt everyone cared this much about how Twitter was run before this, just go back to that.
I’d wager a great deal of SpaceX’s success is down to competent management and a lot of people who believe in the mission and are willing to work very hard to make it happen.
I’d also wager that a not insignificant amount of time and effort is spent insulating Musk from anything important, rather like how an oyster coats an irritant in layers of nacre.
Twitter’s problem is that they no longer have competent management. Plus they’ve never needed the kind of organisational immune system that can deal with something like Musk before and are therefore wide open.
What's with people constantly inventing myths about SpaceX?
It's all out in the open, Musk played an important role in getting it going and still plays an important role in running the R&D side of the company, leaving the 'operational' stuff to Shotwell. There are plenty of testimonies from current and previous employees showing this.
It's pathetic to be inventing stories just because you can't accept that someone you dislike has been successful in some things.
Not sure why you’re quite so personally upset by this idea.
Think about it - if you’re someone who wants to continue making cool rockets you’re going to tell the person with all the money anything they want to hear, including “Oh yes, you’re so smart and your R&D contribution is so important, thank you for thinking of these things, how would we have managed without you.”
The last thing you want is the person with all the money to stop giving you money because their notoriously fragile ego has been bruised.
No - no he is not. Since he bought Twitter it seems as though he hasn't stepped foot in it judging by his private flight records[1].
It has been no secret at all that at Musk's company's significant management resources are dedicated to managing Elon Musk, and when he gets his hands into the rest of the company things tend to go wrong[2,3].
Musk is the money and was the hype man. By all accounts he was an absolute disaster of a manager, and the goal of dealing with him was to keep him as away from regular employees as possible. It's just in the case of SpaceX everyone is committed to the big lie because they all want to build spaceships - if you're smart enough to do rocket science, you're smart enough to do almost anything else and make bank. At Tesla it's the same - people wanted to build environmentally friendly, self-driving cars (Autopilot might be increasingly a catastrophe, but it's not hard to see why people would want to work on it).
Gwynne calls the shots because Elon put her there.
"Surely this next success is ALSO due to luck" - the loser comforts themself on the sidelines. "Surely, this is simply the 14th time they have gotten incredibly, improbably lucky."
> A lot of folks aren’t open to change and see change and experiments as frightening yielding biased conclusions.
> It’s fine to have opinions but drawing bold conclusions is best done with factual data over a longer time horizons.
Not sure if you've heard of the McNamara fallacy, but it's something I see a lot on HN.
Point is, the twitter saga is happening now. I'm sure a retroactive analysis of twitter's financials, user growth, activity, etc. would be fascinating ten years from now... but at that point it would have become an academic curiosity. Perhaps a curiosity we can learn from, but in that timespan the tech industry might be totally different.
It's thus silly to brush away obvious qualitative observations and dismiss conclusions from them as irrelevant. Worth noting their limitations, sure.
A bit silly to call this whole saga an "experiment" either. Musk didn't even want Twitter. He decided to axe a good chunk of the folks arbitrarily. By many accounts, a good chunk of the folks left don't want to be there either. Is it an experiment? If so, it's one of the least controlled and poorly set up experiments I've ever seen.
I've had a bug on Twitter iOS for nearly a year where if I'm on cellular network it cannot connect. I can go to the website fine using desktop user agent but the app will not load tweets. All other apps work fine. The app starts working again when I get on a wifi network.
If you are on iOS there is a per-app setting where you can disable cellular data for a particular app. It's possible you inadvertently turned that on for Twitter - Its a mistake I've made before and convinced myself I had a bug in my app.
Could it be something OS config related? I recently migrated phones without "upgrading" (I do this every other upgrade) and realized I put in some draconian lockdowns on my old phone that prevented me from seeing Twitter at all in the browser. New phone worked fine.
I believe that they have a number of internal systems that were relying on the ability to consume the public API "firehose" and now that it's been turned off, they're failing.
No it's the opposite, it's exactly what you should do to exercise your public API. If your API isn't good enough for you it isn't good enough for your external integrators.
Shameless plug: I created a browser extension to help transition to Mastodon[0]. If you don't yet feel like you can leave twitter.com, but want to explore alternatives it's a great way to get started. Essentially it injects Mastodon posts into your Twitter timeline, so you can retain your existing Twitter following while getting exposed to Mastodon.
This isn't because of some policy, it's some sort of error. I can't even post on an account (via the app) I haven't been active in in months but unlike the web browser it simply fails. DMs also don't load.
Sure. Or it could just the kind of mistake that is being made all the time. I remember for example facebook taking itself offline[0], or cloudflare taking itself offline[1]. And of course pre-Musk twitter is well known itself to regularly have had significant incidents.
This new twitter incident could well be a result of layoffs and the resulting loss of institutional knowledge, but that's hardly a foregone conclusion.
They've pretty obviously had an increase in service problems since the culling. Most services this size very rarely have outages. You had to go back to 2021 for facebook. Twitter has had several major outages since Musk's purchase.
Twitter also has made a lot of changes in the past few months. I don't recall a time in recent history where they've made so many changes so rapidly. Arguably not all for the better but "move fast and break things", right?
Twitter had a code freezenfrom the time of culling until January roughly. They appeared to make a lot of changes due to botched launches, e.g. they released checkmarks for sale, reversed it and re-released it. Does that count as 3 changes, or one half-baked one?
It could all be part of Musk’s plan. Make people upset that they can’t use the website properly, and then offer a paid service that provides them with a working version?
As of today I'm getting a message saying that I can't follow more people. I'm only following ~2000 people and have more followers than following. I've tried unfollowing a number of accounts but still can't follow more.
Twitter is starting to feel very broken in ways that seem counter productive to growth and daily usage.
Twitter is probably toast, which really is too bad. It was a huge source of joy and friendship and learning for me over the years. But stuff like this is leaving the door wide open for others to figure out how to do real time + video + micro blogging.
Dear brilliant tech-obsessed entrepreneur…this could be you.
Hmm... It's interesting that it's not particularly clear whether this is a failure or policy change. Twitter's intentional changes don't look a whole lot different than outages. (And their communication is so poor we can't tell from that either.)
Whenever you are about to post something, anywhere in general, ask yourself: Why? What are you trying to get out of that? Are you adding meaningful information? Are you trying to advance a particular cause (which can just be a small personal one, but at least any cause at all)?
Note that I'm obviously not saying any online discourse is for naught.
But during and after your "social media experience", for lack of a better term, do you feel better or worse, and if not better, did you at least accomplish something?
Conversely, as long as you're not someone who regularly finds yourself being a jerk, it's okay to just experience social interactions. Most of my internet posting could accurately be described as "shooting the shit", and I feel okay about that.
True, if it really is social interaction. But especially on Twitter (when I still bothered using it), I saw so many stream-of-consciousness dumping of thoughts on there, which mostly only managed to gather a few irrelevant likes, that I seriously wonder whether the poster really gets anything out of it, or is just used to shouting out every little thought that they have into the void.
This also goes for answers to tweets, where even on highly technical, niche topics, a pretty large share of the replies seem either performative ("I'm going to ask a question to impress OP, the answer does not really matter!"), or useless (some tired meme, if it was ever funny), or just plain nonsense ("I don't really understand the technical matter behind that, but here's some nonsensical technical question that seems vaguely related").
I think in face-to-face social situations, most people would be much better at weighing whether their interjection is worth the effort and the attention.
I was about to Tweet for the first time in many months when I ran into this and looked up what was going on, bizarre timing. Good thing though, stopped me from coming back!
Tweetdeck is also down if you're set to the non-preview interface, stuck in a loop of login and instant logouts.
The Tweetdeck Preview works (and you can access this by clearing all cookies) but keeps hitting a rate limit.
I hope the rumors of TweetDeck becoming a premium feature are not true - I could never hope to catch everything without use of all those columns at once.
Can confirm. "Legacy" TweetDeck is unreachable. "Preview" TweetDeck works... sorta. It's slow as molasses and it's a torture to use it on an i7 laptop with 16 GB RAM and an SSD. I can't imagine how that would be in a 4GB Celeron craptop.
Can Musk please stop actively killing twitter already.
I know people say just move away, but for certain communities (I'm not even talking about small communities: like in Japan, all the people from individuals to companies to artists post and only post all the updates on Twitter), Twitter is the only place to follow the news. I don't need anything fancy I just need it to work.
Is there a version of this which shows a plan like in The Producers, where Elon appears, in good faith, to ruin Twitter until it goes bankrupt, absolving him of having to pay them back?
Wasn't working earlier, now it appears to be working now. I saw a rumor this morning that they were making TweetDeck Blue only, and I wonder if some sort of Twitter update regarding that move broke things.
Ditto yesterday after a few tweets. Assuming this is bug, as others have noted similar even with only two tweets. So one has to assume a bug, or perhaps some other issue where they felt they had to manually temporarily limit the number of tweets drastically to help avoid some larger failure. Ironically, I and most presumably wanted to post about but where unable to because of the nature of the bug.
They started limiting how many people I could follow in a day. Very suddenly today. I could follow zero people at all, the one person I wanted to follow was too many. For no apparent reason. They linked me to a 2019 policy explaining this, and none of the reasons listed apply. I just… can’t follow a person today for some reason.
I only noticed because it didn't have the constant "(20)" text injected in the titles for once (I never look at that tab anymore because it's always "recommended tweets" spam and it immediatelly fills it with more notifications if I open it to clear the number).
I have a few friends who use Twitter DMs as chat, and 500 seems low for that purpose. Plus, I'd figure that a 1:1 message is a lot easier and lower load than trying to consistently share something globally....
That's been the limit since sometime between November 29 [1] and December 13 [2]. The daily tweet limit has been 2400 since at least 2018-01-03 [3]. I'm not sure why the DM limit was reduced.
I could not add a new follow with the Twitter app on iOS. Message was that I reached a limit.
First time I really felt a change since Twitter moved. Strange feeling to be limited for no reason and anticipating the future with payment required for everything.
Seeing how Twitter was up for months while being proactively destroyed by an incompetent doofus, I would say this is a testament to solid resilience and scale engineering that was.
Well it seems like a typical message for anti-DDoS rate-limiting, probably something incorrectly started attributing the clock or counter for ratelimiting.
Article replaces "Twitter" with "Elon Musk." Reads like comedy. "Elon Musk starts limiting how many tweets you can post per day." "I couldn't login to Elon Musk." This kind of idolatry makes me laugh, because people typically are unaware that they're doing it. Something about that is incredibly comical to me. Anyone else find this hilarious? I'm curious if there is some evolutionary purpose behind it. Being that it's subconscious behavior, I suspect there is.
I ran into that as well. Despite having used the platform since 2007, I was unable to follow more than 5000 users (also despite having ~1400 followers). Considering the platform has some hundreds of millions of monthly active users, it was completely mind-boggling to me that I can't follow more than ~5000. Especially when you consider how many official orgs like local police, fire, emergency, road/traffic, news, school district, companies you are interested in, bands you like, etc... it's basically inevitable to hit that limit, especially after having used the service for 15+ years.
In another part of the world, people are being curious how it precisely coincided with Nintendo Direct show (of all things). That could be a wrong kind of curiosity.
how can one possibly tweet more than 2400 times a day? Surely this cutoff was chosen because people do but...how do you even live your life outside twitter at that point? Bots I guess?
> His vision has been to create a more healthy town square for dialogue by protecting speech rights.
Regardless of what he pays lip-service to, his actions indicate that neither a "healthy town square" nor "protecting speech" are a part of his vision. It's actually kind of unclear what his vision actually is. Entirely possible he doesn't really have one.
Well one of the best predictors of the future is the past and he has a pretty incredible track record of both success and vision and staying true to that despite huge market/social/technological headwinds. That was great when he was in energy and space travel, but suddenly not so great.
Think you're just missing the obvious: much of the tech scene is simply not pro-neutrality or pro-free speech, they are pro their specific values having dominance and anti any platforming of counter discourse.
This is actually more true of everyone in general than many think, it is just that left of center social/cultural values are ascendant in all big corps and tech cos so any challenge to that is going to generate a big push back from those supportive of the status quo.
Ya that could be, I'm in tech so I see it all day, but I tend to be [sometimes] pleasantly surprised at the libertarian ethos that still floats around Hn.. moreso than other platforms that just devolve into flame wars.
Obviously Musk has done some controversial stuff and it's going to piss people off, but do we believe that he has a vision for free speech (not anything goes but free speech as in classic ACLU values free speech) or not? How often does he not say exactly what he thinks?
Pretty straight forward. Townsquares are owned by the public, not by mentally unstable billionaires. On townsquares people make laws concerning conduct democratically through their representatives. Any townsquare would escort people from any venue if they behaved half as crazy as the average banned twitter user.
Musk buying himself a media company because he was upset by what he read about himself in the news isn't "creating a healthy townsquare". It's letting the arkham asylum inmates loose on his newfound political enemies.
No it's not straightforward. This isn't a literal physical town square, obviously. This is a platform in which a major type of online discourse takes place that has carved a pretty significant and influential place in history, no matter what happens to it. "escorting people off of it" needs to be taken extremely seriously, with transparency, and with a clear separation from those that set our federal and state policy. This wasn't happening as now proven by the trove of Twitter files.
This is 100% in response to Turkey banning twitter in the middle of earthquake response, and Elon Musk bowing down to the terms of the authoritarian government. Instead of applying it locally, they applied it globally.
Doesn't matter, Erdogan just blocked Twitter again because people were asking why was the government not being competent and where were the funds from the special earthquake relief tax.
You're aware that this has affected Turkey and Syria, in Turkey affected 10 cities, basically erased half of them from the map, right?
This is not any disaster. This is the disaster after 99.
Plus, please do not assume that people are only trying to use Twitter. They post addresses of loved ones to anywhere they can find: Twitter, Instagram, FB, Tiktok, local social media etc. and surely Whatsapp before all these.
However, the very nature of posting openly in social platforms are different than platforms which are predominantly used for private communication. People cannot think of building massive groups through Whatsapp. Plus, there's a barrier to reach hub people.
>You're aware that this has affected Turkey and Syria, in Turkey affected 10 cities, basically erased half of them from the map, right?
Yup! And they squandered it.
See comment here:
Imagine if the money had been spent on seismic retrofitting so that fewer buildings would collapse during an earthquake? Los Angeles spent $1.3 billion to retrofit more than 8,000 of their most vulnerable buildings. With much lower cost of labour and a $30 billion pot, Turkey should have been able to retrofit far more buildings.
What’s the limit? Depending on that it could increase signal to noise. It would only affect accounts that is at tail end of the bell, ie bots and some extreme accounts that usually annoys the crap out of me.
Which is that there is a common thread between Facebook, Instagram, Shopify, Fox and Twitter that doesn't cause outages at lots of other sites like a network link down or routing table misconfiguration would cause.
I wish I was surprised at the pettiness that seeing Twitter clearly having some internal issue - the willingness of people who consider themselves adults to drink it up as hate fuel against the bad man they think switched "teams".
Imagine the most incompetent and yet overconfident person you've ever worked with. Imagine them taking full credit for everything they've worked on despite making the people they work with miserable. For some reason people love them despite the fact they are an obvious fraud.
Now imagine the satisfaction you would get when they very publicly reveal that they aren't a super genius, just a huge rich asshole.
This is why people are enjoying the Musk Twitter saga.
I think this is a write/posting outage/incident.
Firing everyone seems to be working out well for stability.