zlacker

>>ZacnyL+(OP)
I think we're about at the point where the people who predicted chaos at twitter after Elon basically fired most of the experienced engineers have been proven correct. The duct tape is all coming apart at the seams now.

It isn't quite as decisive as a submarine imploding, and ceasing to exist, but it has turned into a brightly burning tirefire.

>>lamont+yx
I have to disagree. If you honestly take the emotion and politics out of this and evaluate on merit alone, what do you think?

Twitter wasn’t healthy before Musk bought it. It wasn’t a thriving business, it was a very old, very large startup still struggling to find market fit and loosing a lot of money.

Also, it wasn’t a thriving product. It was stagnant.

Since Twitter was purchased, the amount of features they have shipped has been impressive. They’ve shipped a lot of features and extended the platform a lot. To your point they have also done this with far less engineers than before.

Regarding any downtime, everyone has downtime. Google, Amazon, Meta… the best of the best still have it regardless of money or manpower.

Considering what that team has done with less resources, I think the achievement still pretty good. What do you think?

>>shon+9E
The company was not thriving but the product itself was rock solid.

It’s hilarious to think it is at all acceptable to kill public access, and drastically limit authenticated access, because of a few scrapers. There is no way Twitter prior to Musk’s acquisition would have had to do so.

> What do you think?

I think you are not looking at the situation objectively.

>>snowwr+uN
Regarding the product, it was solid as in reliable, but stagnant.

I don’t pretend to know all of the motivations behind the policy moves.

That said, I’ve got some experience with scraping; got sued by LinkedIn in 2014. We were using AWS Spot Instances to hit it hard for very little money. It was not uncommon to accidentally take large services down.

Scrapers can and do add very significant load. We also scraped Twitter back in the day as well.

>>shon+tT
Sites that wish to be ubiquitous must handle scraping in a way that is transparent to valuable users. It’s not like scraping is a new or complex threat to availability. This is table stakes for large services in 2023.

Twitter was very good at this, and their new-found inability is a glaring sign that their engineering is slipping.

>>snowwr+2j1
Really? I disagree. Running a ubiquitous service that is good for users does not require that you allow every random person to scrape your site and incur that cost.

You simply setup API deals with those who you want to have your data, those that benefit your business, aka Google etc…

Then you close everything else up. This saves cost and complexity and real users, the target of your advertisers, don’t even notice.

This isn’t a sign that engineering is slipping.

It’s a sign that a in a company which struggles to make money, someone is paying attention and trying new things to fix the money problem.