Twitter C/D

Numbers off a cliff for someone with 30k followers.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, December 13, 2022 3:44 AM (nine hours ago)

in my mind i demarcate old twitter and current twitter by when tweets started getting way more retweets/favs than 1k. in the old days, having a 1k retweet / 1k liked tweet was a pretty big deal. tweets just didn't do numbers, everybody had a chronological timeline, everybody was pretty silo'd to only the accounts they followed and only got exposure to new accounts through retweets. i think you could check for the most popular tweets on favstar, and there weren't really very many tweets that were able to do 10k plus engagements.

at some point twitter introduced the algorithmic timeline and also started putting tweets liked by the people you follow into your timeline randomly. i kind of hated it but no question that seemed to exponentiate user engagement and i associate twitter's current iteration with all the stuff they've done to increase engagement, make sure you're looking at stuff outside your bubble.

anyway hopefully all those engagement stims are breaking and twitter will itself collapse and sink into the ocean.

That platformer quote is good on how sour the whole thing feels now.

yeah theres some idea that people will quit on principle when really the more likely scenario is they just stop coming back because they dont like it anymore

like i never quit facebook i just stopped looking at it

there's something very satisfying about deleting, but I've only done it with FB and twitter

yeah theres some idea that people will quit on principle when really the more likely scenario is they just stop coming back because they dont like it anymore

― lag∞n, Tuesday, December 13, 2022 11:33 AM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

seems like people are posting less and some solid peeps i follow arent posting anymore? idk the feed feels different of late.

Like I’ve been saying the posting era is over as a mass phenomenon, it’s all niche posts from hereon out

posters returning to the essence

back to basics, just four posters in a room

It's pretty amazing how thoroughly he's broken the thing so quickly. I think we (or I, anyway) underestimated his need to be the main character — it's like if David Zaslav's whole goal was to make and star in his own HBO show.

Yeah I’m not gonna “deactivate” I’m just gonna lose interest because Twitter is way less fun now. So many of the good accounts have just…stopped

Like, this is getting promoted into my timeline. And I don't even follow Musk. Just seems pathetic.

Does anyone else get livid when they get on Twitter only to find out people have different opinions? @elonmusk has turned this into a dangerous chamber of free thought, reason and logic. I’m deleting my account next year.

— Chef Andrew Gruel (@ChefGruel) December 13, 2022

Like, this is getting promoted into my timeline. And I don't even follow Musk. Just seems pathetic.

🐦[Does anyone else get livid when they get on Twitter only to find out people have different opinions? @elonmusk🕸 has turned this into a dangerous chamber of free thought, reason and logic. I’m deleting my account next year.
— Chef Andrew Gruel (@ChefGruel) December 13, 2022🕸]🐦

ah, So u persecute Jared Fogle just because he has different beliefs? Do Tell. (girls get mad at me) Sorry. Im sorry. Im trying to remove it

— wint (@dril) November 1, 2015

god bless dril

musk being the main character every day is totally missing the point of the main character (new weird guy every day)

this is how you know it's over

BREAKING: Since Many have asked for this, I'm releasing the DRIL ARCHIVES in 4 distinct Flavors. Click for Links https://t.co/9nJ93UKpa4 pic.twitter.com/2689IehZCB

— wint (@dril) December 12, 2022

i wonder which one is best

like i never quit facebook i just stopped looking at it

Yeah this. Don't know if I ever actually "quit" myspace either.

Even when I leave Twitter I'm gonna keep my account active just so no one can zombify it.

like those accounts where it's just retweets for the last two years

people don't even clap back at the comical misunderstanding of 'free speech' by Elon stans any more because most like me are exhausted and no longer want to read the toxic filth of that sect of Twitter, so it gets more and more accepted as if literally you didn't get your 9600 baud modem hung up on in the 90s for calling someone a "stank heifer" in the message board of Legend of the Red Dragon

good luck twitter

If Twitter ends up forcing you to hand over your location and other data to continue using the platform, I'm done. This reporting by @ZoeSchiffer and @CaseyNewton is behind a paywall, but it's at least worth signing up for a free trial to read. https://t.co/3SiwLyC9Fs pic.twitter.com/VkdYCan8WX

— Nick Martin (@nickmartin) December 14, 2022

The stuff uncovered in the Twitter whistleblower report is much crazier than anything in the "Twitter files" but it's much less politically/tribally salient so it got no attention. Going to do a thread on some of the craziest things, in no particular order.

— Avid Halaby (@AvidHalaby) December 12, 2022

What filing is he reposting

ah whistleblower thing i guess nm

seeing posts on mastodon that Ukrainians can't use a local phone number to confirm their account and that the Ukraine country code isn't an option when trying do so.

got my first earned block today for pointing out a Palantir ghoul's history of sexual assault

Ah, but consider the perils of not properly knowing the users' location!

https://i.imgur.com/5K3T4LW.png

(fixed now)

Like, this is getting promoted into my timeline. And I don't even follow Musk. Just seems pathetic.

I think one of the things that crystallised my desire to stop using the platform was how depressing I found the endless sea of chuds who would defend Elon's every fuck-up with the most obvious bad faith bullshit. I spend a lot of my life pretending that the general human instinct is less stupid and craven than that, otherwise I can't get through the day, but a quick trawl of Twitter would leave me thinking pretty much everyone was a racist transphobe who would willingly prostrate themselves for a tongue of Musk's billionaire prostate.

yeah I totally understand that. that was something that got me to scale Facebook way back too. someone you know would hit like on a story about vaccinations and you'd view the comments and like 85% of them would be about how Fauci needs to be waterboarded. you have to remind yourself that anyone who isn't brain damaged by the internet just isn't commenting on this stuff.

as always, never read the comments

Never read the bottom half of the internet, as they say. Unfortunately Twitter doesn't seem to have a top half to start with.

yeah i mean i read the comments lol theyre not good

this is not evidence that twitter has no idea how to do engineering and is reckless, which is presumably the implication. it's evidence the person making it is either not an engineer, or has never worked at a big company before (both true of the author).

Twitter does not have separate development, test, staging, and production environments. At least 5,000 employees had privileged access to production systems. pic.twitter.com/rEBJtaOm9Q

— Avid Halaby (@AvidHalaby) December 12, 2022

that's the mudge report.

(from the whistleblower thread)

mudge mad

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388261391i/920785.jpg

lol caek, I read that and was like “wait, isn’t this extremely common in microservice architectures, like want there a massive push in the industry to do this because it was more accurate and easier to manage than trying to wrangle five different never-in-sync environments”

I kept wanting to post “feature flag much” in response

yup. also running a "test instance" (lol) of twitter.com with any fidelity would cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

wasn't there an employee-internal one tho

employees see some features that are behind feature flags when they visit twitter.com.

In a bid to make the site even more shit, in the sidebar they've replaced LISTS (useful feature, often used it) with TWITTER BLUE (which I will never click unless brain damaged).

https://i.imgur.com/8qBrTUg.png

prompt: blue retro throwback bumper 80s twitter logo

(useful feature, often used it)

I navigate twitter primarily via lists

For now it's still there, apparently, buried under the three dots

yeah it moved under the dots a couple of months ago, pre-Blue

For me it was still in the side menu until yesterday.

I’ll give Mudge the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s talking about data rather than services. It’s bizarre Twitter supposedly gives all employees access to production data.

there are permissions, LDAP groups, etc. it's all very normal principle of least access stuff.