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[return to "Twitter Is DDOSing Itself"]
1. Topfi+Ew[view] [source] 2023-07-01 21:09:47
>>ZacnyL+(OP)
Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement.

Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof.

I can of course not say whether the people currently working at Twitter did warn that the recent measures could have such major side effects, but I would not be surprised in the slightest, considering their leadership's mode of operation.

Even as someone who very much detests what Twitter has become over the last few months and in fact did not like Twitter before the acquisition, partly due to short format making nuance impossible, but mostly for the effect Tweets easy embeddability had on reporting (3 Tweets from random people should not serve as the main basis for an article in my opinion), I must say, I feel very sorry for the people forced to work at that company under that management.

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2. goalie+PX[view] [source] 2023-07-02 00:43:23
>>Topfi+Ew
I’ll play the devils advocate here but frontend devs need to smarten up. This is basic error handling that should have been in place for years. Blocking tweets with 403 or whatever they chose shouldn’t trigger endless retries on short intervals.. ever!
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3. dimmke+011[view] [source] 2023-07-02 01:09:35
>>goalie+PX
You're right about error handling, but consider that the user who posted this was logged in. The screenshot they post is of a specific tweet, but they reference the home feed being down. What kind of API call was it making where it's asking for a list of tweets to serve to a logged in user and that call is not authenticated? It makes me think that the blocking was implemented improperly.

Unless the home feed being down is simply a side effect - the service that fetches tweets being DDOS'd by other views in the app making numerous non authenticated calls.

But I was also thinking about this earlier today. These days, everybody is so quick to say "the software is easy, it's the community that's hard" - I've even said it myself a few times in the past few weeks, but I think that might be overstated.

Building good software is hard. Keeping it good is even harder. What does the codebase look like for Twitter's front-end at this point?

How many frameworks has the base functionality been ported through? How many quick pivots from product adding features, adjusting things squashed down the ability to address technical debt or even have functioning unit and regression testing?

The fact that this 1. Made it to production and 2. Was not noticed and rolled back immediately (like, in under 30 minutes) is extremely concerning (and obviously very embarrassing.) If I had private data stored on Twitter of ANY kind (like DMs that I don't want getting out - a messaging system rich, famous, and powerful people have been using like email for over a decade), at this point I would be trying to get that data removed however I could, or accept that there's a strong possibility there's going to be a huge data breach and all of the data will be leaked.

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4. spixy+3f2[view] [source] 2023-07-02 14:36:05
>>dimmke+011
I see status 429 (Too Many Requests)

that is definitely frontend error

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