zlacker

Complex systems like Twitter don't break overnight when you lay off the talented engineers.

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.

>>simonw+(OP)
Which pieces have deteriorated?

>>qweras+E
Those who could know are working at other places now.

>>qweras+E
- Spam protection is non-existent. An NFL post showed an explicit sex act as the top response for over two weeks before it was deleted. https://twitter.com/schuh_dan/status/1657777263817940996 this was the tweet, though I don't have an exact record of when it was deleted. You can also look at https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1674876982260273152 for another example, though the porn spam has only been there for 24 hours this time.

- Outages really are common: https://twitter.com/altluu/status/1577806809217503232

>>qweras+E
I currently can't read any tweets from https://twitter.com/elonmusk because it's just said "something went wrong. try reloading" for the last 8 hours or so.

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.

>>hyperp+N1
Thanks for the reply.

The twitter post you linked to was from October of last year; I'm not sure how to draw any conclusions from it.

>>termin+z2
Parent is suggesting that gradual deterioration is occurring. I'm trying to figure out if that's what's happening, or if this is simply a bug that hit production (possibly due to the higher rate of product changes, or otherwise.)

It's hard to find nuance and information anymore. It's as if all we have to work with is politics and hatred.

>>qweras+r4
Fair enough, I'm sorry for being rude with my answer. For what it's worth, I don't think any of us outside of twitter will truly know if things have actually deteriorated or it's just a one-off bug. At this point though, I don't think there's much difference since the effect is the same.

>>qweras+E
This thread talking about twitter effectively DDoSing itself, for start...

>>qweras+E
I would imagine the checks and balances that a mature engineering organization maintains to prevent the unintended consequences of capricious management decisions.