It isn't quite as decisive as a submarine imploding, and ceasing to exist, but it has turned into a brightly burning tirefire.
As much as I want this to be true, I think this sentiment is really only popular on tech-savvy forums like HN. Most people don't use ad blockers, and I've had people get mad at me when I suggest that they do (directly in response to something where they are complaining about ads).
After some pondering I think it's peoples' insecurity misfiring. They use these complicated layered and potentially risky and dangerous pieces of technology, aware they don't fully understand them, that they work as magic that could stop any moment. Trying to understand and secure them is a massive rabbit hole. So I think there's kind of a rejection to go down that hole or acknowledge the problem or, most of all, face the vulnerability and exposure.
My 100 Croatian lipa fwiw :-)
People that aren't tech-savvy don't want to think about tech any more than they already do. Having to understand something new about tech is just another problem to them. I'm not saying that as an insult - just an observation.
Engineering isn't like service positions where the lack of competent personnel is felt immediately; the debt keeps growing until your whole system collapses under it one day, how far the day is in the future depends on what system you're working on.
They deteriorate piece-by-piece, potentially over the course of many months, until the compounding effects of these problems and the growing technical debt overwhelms the team that they have left.
Twitter was previously a public company, which was beholden to shareholders, and aimed to try and increase its stock price (as far as "shareholder value" actually means anything, this is basically it). I wouldn't praise previous management (the company wasn't profitable), but they were not a complete dumpster fire.
Then Twitter was bought out, and taken private, removing the obligation to "shareholder value." The ensuing dumpster fire is one that will be marveled at for years.
I'm not saying public corporations are better than private, or that "shareholder value" is a good slogan. I'm just saying that your comment is every bit as irrelevant as the porn spam that's clogging Twitter these days. (Thanks for fixing the spam problem, y'all!).
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?
Definitely a good one to revisit.
- Outages really are common: https://twitter.com/altluu/status/1577806809217503232
It REALLY sounds like you don't understand how any of this works.
Tech products don't stop working when you fire most of the staff.
But bugs stop being fixed and problems begin to add up, until a critical point is reached,m where the whole house of cards collapses.
Thinking that "Elon was proven right" simply because Twitter didn't implode the second he announced the layoffs, makes me think you don't understand how tech and software works.
Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019.
https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...
I'd consider that deteriorated service.
also just out of curiosity while trying to find historical outage data I found this article.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/14/twitter-e...
Last july (before elon took over), the site was apparently down for 45 minutes and "one of the site’s longest outages for years". Today it's been basically barely usable for most of the day.
Does it really though? Private shareholders are still shareholders. It replaces a diffuse duty to keep a bunch of public-shareholders happen with a possibly-more-direct "do what I say or be replaced tomorrow."
> "shareholder value" is a thought-terminating cliche
I think when people use it dismissively, it's not really about shareholders per se, but about one that are focused on short-term growth at the expense of long-term growth or a sustainable business model.
Can we start to call companies with almost 18 years old just "companies" and not startup anymore?
I mean, I would expect Microsoft to do a much better job than Twitter to keep GitHub from going down every single month after acquiring it. The frequency of GitHub going down with 100M+ users using it is much worse than Twitter.
It turns out that GitHub's constant downtime for years is all fine (especially tech folks) here despite the monthly complaints anyway. The latest one here [0] But only with Twitter, the speed-bumps are exaggerated and magnified.
[0] >>36523843
The twitter post you linked to was from October of last year; I'm not sure how to draw any conclusions from it.
I mean, if I'm reading that screenshot correctly this is 700+ requests a minute.
I've tripped the rate limiter with less on other sites.
I never liked Twitter, don't have accounts, etc. To me this "dumpster fire" talk sounds like just sour grapes.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time researching this.
This 2019 article says they cut costs/Vine and jumped to video ads which boosted revenue 24% which might explain why they were profitable in 2019.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/07/tech/twitter-earnings-q4/inde...
In 2018 there is mention of a "one-time release of deferred tax asset valuation allowance,” which accounted for $683 million [of income]".
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/25/18018046/twitter-q3-2018-earn...
OP's point stands in my opinion. Twitter was/is a flagging centralized service that may not survive if it doesn't pivot.
As opposed to something like Amazon which grew and grew for nearly 20 years, always burning more cash than it made to fuel growth, but they understood the business really well and when they decided to optimize for profitability rather than growth, never never gone back.
It's hard to find nuance and information anymore. It's as if all we have to work with is politics and hatred.
I think "shareholder value" is just a distraction and a rationalization.
The driving force is the MBA-ization of management and people looking to juice short-term profitability so that they can cash out or get large bonuses and then job hop away.
"i'm favoriting this so i can come back to it, like that dropbox comment."
Delicious.
But you gotta have a very good relationship with someone to just do that I guess
Yeah, it is going great.
I see HackerNews is counterintuitively up its own ass again.
I would still recommend not using the word “shareholder value” for the concept. It’s just…having a business that you don’t want to lose money? Some people do dislike the concept of business, but I don’t think they should talk about “shareholder value”, they should just attack capitalism.
In any case, it’s still irrelevant to a discussion of Twitter. The old management was also expected to turn a profit, but somehow avoided Elon’s string of silly ideas.
I’m pretty ambivalent about advertising, but it was the only reasonable way for Twitter to make money, so I would not have bought Twitter and then chased away all the advertisers.
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.
Not really, our team maintained a reverse-proxy that fronted all requests that came into amazon. And whenever we would have a self-ddos event, we'd get a request from the backend team whose service was getting self-ddos'd to shed traffic before it reached their service hosts to prevent it from browning out. In many case ddos's were coming from kindle devices which were not even easy to update so deploying a "fix" wasn't even always an option.
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.
Companies that behave that way and have good returns on capital employed and have large growth in earnings, free cash flow, etc are good investments. Doesn't matter if they're not showing profits.
Plus there’s always technical debt and even the ‘best’ engineers at Twitter made mistakes
Maybe if the architecture wasn’t so brittle and more easily testable by these engineering ‘gods’ then we wouldn’t have this problem
Twitter was very good at this, and their new-found inability is a glaring sign that their engineering is slipping.
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.
What I said is that they must handle the problem transparently to their valuable users. That includes (requires, usually) targeted techniques to block high-volume scraping.
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life" ...
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"
fdsa
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"