I don't think Elon Musk would be ELON MUSK RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD without Twitter. Its disappearance might be a boon for Bill Gates (who won't have to be confronted with Epstein jokes) but Musk (like Trump) depends on public recognition for his entire ecosystem of scams.
― papal hotwife (milo z), Friday, 18 November 2022 03:38 (one year ago) link
Where's the thinkpiece on what this means for the Trump campaign.
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Friday, 18 November 2022 03:39 (one year ago) link
All the people on my timeline are bidding emotional farewells and I can’t help thinking it’s going to be like passengers on a troubled plane making declarations of love to one another before an embarrassing failure to crash. Meanwhile, I don’t know if I’m just a sicko but after 15 years with few exceptions I couldn’t care less if I never hear from any of these people again. Beatles Twitter is nice though, and that one guy who posts threads of old newspaper articles.
― Alba, Friday, 18 November 2022 03:42 (one year ago) link
nobody declared their love for me, fuck
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Friday, 18 November 2022 03:54 (one year ago) link
i don't think it will actually go down permanently, but that might just be a failure of imagination on my part. more so than other platforms, twitter has its own rhythm, its own language, which is maddeningly meta-referential and all that but still capable of produces flashes of insight, humor, and even a weird kind of poetry.
― treeship., Friday, 18 November 2022 03:56 (one year ago) link
it is also an incredibly harsh and unforgiving space. definitely not a good platform for discussion. more just its own thing.
― treeship., Friday, 18 November 2022 03:57 (one year ago) link
It may or may not have excruciating outages within days as a result of nobody working there anymore but if it does make it through this employee bottleneck event they’re just gonna completely fuck it up so tomato tomato
― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Friday, 18 November 2022 04:01 (one year ago) link
It may burn but at least
https://linktr.ee/drilreal
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 18 November 2022 04:13 (one year ago) link
eephus! i like you pretty well!
hope this helps
― mookieproof, Friday, 18 November 2022 05:18 (one year ago) link
i bet twitter doesn't die and doubt it will change much
― flopson, Friday, 18 November 2022 05:19 (one year ago) link
okay
― mookieproof, Friday, 18 November 2022 05:21 (one year ago) link
it's never died before, has barely changed in 15 years, and was consistently run by weird asshole dudes. i'm betting on continuity
― flopson, Friday, 18 November 2022 05:29 (one year ago) link
has it lost thousands of employees in 2 weeks before?
― ciderpress, Friday, 18 November 2022 05:30 (one year ago) link
Don't really get the people who go on about what a horrendous cesspit Twitter is - surely you only follow the people you want to follow. It's like saying books are terrible because some terrible books get published. Well you only read the books you want to. Have to say I find Twitter really good for following my niche interests, better than anything else I've found and I'll be sad it it dies.
― Zelda Zonk, Friday, 18 November 2022 05:32 (one year ago) link
Not to sound like musk here, but how many people do you really need to keep it running?
― FRAUDULENT STEAKS (The Cursed Return of the Dastardly Thermo Thinwall), Friday, 18 November 2022 05:33 (one year ago) link
(I honestly have no idea)
How many people does it take to keep ILX running? Multiply that number by the ratio of ILXors to Twitter users.
― Jaime Pressly and America (f. hazel), Friday, 18 November 2022 05:39 (one year ago) link
I'm with Zelda.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Friday, 18 November 2022 05:40 (one year ago) link
i don't think its going to die completely but it has already "changed much" in terms of workforce and revenue and those changes will start to manifest on the actual site
― ciderpress, Friday, 18 November 2022 05:41 (one year ago) link
on the one hand, it used to run with a headcount smaller than the current headcount, so why not.
on the other hand, it's a more complicated system than when they had 1000 employees, and it's not really designed to run with that many people any more, and the people who understand (and no how to make it simpler or fix it if it breaks) it are exactly the people who've left.
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, 18 November 2022 05:41 (one year ago) link
(left in a hurry without writing anything down or training replacements)
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, 18 November 2022 05:42 (one year ago) link
Yeah like cmon this is absolutely an experiment in how long a complex pile of services can keep running when nobody who built them is left
― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Friday, 18 November 2022 05:50 (one year ago) link
Like operating this stuff at scale is a complicated dance that generates incidents on the regular and requires frequent operator intervention even when nobody is changing shit. If they’ve got any hope of getting through the next couple months until they can onboard a bunch of overseas contractors and babbling Musk sycophants it’s because they’re in a full on code freeze. But if the wrong infrastructure component goes screwy, none of the people who knew how to fix it work there anymore and the consequences are likely uncharted
― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Friday, 18 November 2022 05:54 (one year ago) link
I would expect that death will be temporary rather than a Friendster/Myspace permanent demise, it comes back with fewer users after Musk is forced to step away or the equity partners/debtors take it away from him completely.
― papal hotwife (milo z), Friday, 18 November 2022 05:54 (one year ago) link
Like evidently literally none of the engineers who worked on the service that served tweets are still there.
― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Friday, 18 November 2022 05:55 (one year ago) link
Yeah I mean it’ll have some hilarious outages, maybe they’ll be chapter 11 in a few months, some lenders will impound it and try to make advertisers like them again
― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Friday, 18 November 2022 05:56 (one year ago) link
Like our overly-domineering and high on his own supply former colleague who left over three years ago left us with some hot garbage we don’t understand. It hasn’t completely stopped working but it fucks up a lot and we have to manually restart things to avoid a cascade of failure. This is one service in a university IT shop! When the people who know how the thing works leave you are kinda fucked
― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Friday, 18 November 2022 05:59 (one year ago) link
Shit at AWS breaks spectacularly 4 times a year because some service in us-east-1 runs out of numbers
― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Friday, 18 November 2022 06:01 (one year ago) link
Time for RSS to make a big comeback
never stopped using it via Feedbin, which is excellent. When I've made efforts to not waste time looking at twitter, the few people I really wanted to follow I follow just be reading them in Feedbin.
And to people who complain that Facebook is just shitty relatives and high school friends, I just don't get it. Hide and unfollow a few people. I keep saying this. I see none of that. Instead I have great discussions with interesting and likeminded people. If the company itself wasn't evil I'd probably have no problem with it.
― dan selzer, Friday, 18 November 2022 06:29 (one year ago) link
Don't really get the people who go on about what a horrendous cesspit Twitter is - surely you only follow the people you want to follow.
I mostly have a good time on twitter but this is surely not true - even if you turn off seeing the likes and retweets of the people you follow you also get tweets recommended "based on your interests" (dubiously).
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 18 November 2022 10:46 (one year ago) link
You don't see those if you just use Latest Tweets though
― bain4z, Friday, 18 November 2022 10:52 (one year ago) link
No one under 35 uses Facebook. That may be largely true of Twitter but at least music Twitter isn’t all so long in the tooth. I also find it very hard to engage with strangers in a meaningful way on FB (same with IG really). It really takes digging to find someone who wants to have a discussion with a random on those massive Meta sites where so much of the engagement is merely manufactured.
― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg), Friday, 18 November 2022 10:57 (one year ago) link
Echoing these thoughts on Samuel Delaney’s idea of socialization based on random contact vs networking:
Okay all of your final tweets made me finally realize why I love Twitter so much. It's kinda serious but bear with me for a sec. It's these two ideas that Samuel Delany calls contact vs. networking. I'll try to explain it in a quick thread.— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) November 18, 2022
― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg), Friday, 18 November 2022 11:00 (one year ago) link
This doesn’t seem great
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23465274/hundreds-of-twitter-employees-resign-from-elon-musk-hardcore-deadline
― The Triumphant Return of Bernard & Stubbs (Raymond Cummings), Friday, 18 November 2022 11:01 (one year ago) link
not now, we’re signing twitter yearbooks https://t.co/CJ9EBsM9yV— whitney medworth (@its_whitney) November 18, 2022
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 18 November 2022 12:31 (one year ago) link
banks in 1929: well look at how many people want to visit our banks right now pic.twitter.com/cn0TSM5Nom— Ken Cheng twitch.tv/kenchengcomedy (@kenchengcomedy) November 18, 2022
― ex-McKinsey wonk who looks like a human version of a rat (Eric H.), Friday, 18 November 2022 12:39 (one year ago) link
twitter is good because its a cesspool, cant imagine trying to use it in a *extremely nerds voice* i have curated a perfect feed way
― lag∞n, Friday, 18 November 2022 13:00 (one year ago) link
Wish it would just die, frankly sick of hearing about it
― after several days on “the milk,” (gyac), Friday, 18 November 2022 13:02 (one year ago) link
someone should be building an even more chaotic replacement
― lag∞n, Friday, 18 November 2022 13:03 (one year ago) link
but i hope it doesnt die theres a lot of stuff on there, think of the stuff, think of the stuff people
― lag∞n, Friday, 18 November 2022 13:04 (one year ago) link
You can’t even grow hair nevermind understand how to keep a social media company operational— T M (@Chusetts) November 18, 2022
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 18 November 2022 13:23 (one year ago) link
yeah this should work
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fh2XuGuWIAAnWbS?format=jpg&name=small
― lag∞n, Friday, 18 November 2022 13:29 (one year ago) link
It’s still working fine
― jel--, Friday, 18 November 2022 14:22 (one year ago) link
Tik tok it is xp
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 18 November 2022 14:23 (one year ago) link
I assume twitter is holding on code releases, which should buy them some time; but the expected traffic spikes with the world cup could cause some real issues since, as I understand it, Twitter is not in a cloud infrastructure so I suspect it doesn't autoscale for traffic; I don't know this for sure though. And even if services are being orchestrated through Kubernetes, there is usually some amount of human involvement in setting and changing scaling thresholds based on traffic, and if no one is around to do that, that would cause slowness and possible outages. Someone here said "if this were true then sites would go down over christmas" and as someone who worked on ecommerce sites during black friday/cyber monday I can assure you that this used to happen all the time. You deal with the traffic on the CDN layer all the way down to how many instances of services you run on the backend.
but I seriously doubt the site is going to like, go down hard and never come back up.
― akm, Friday, 18 November 2022 14:49 (one year ago) link
Twitter is not in a cloud infrastructure
!! I find this hard to credit
― Tracer Hand, Friday, 18 November 2022 14:54 (one year ago) link
apparently it isn't. it could be in what you'd classify as a 'private cloud'; I've read a few comments that things are 'on prem' which could mean a number of things. also, does anyone know if the majority of backend services are still in scala? because it's significantly more difficult to hire scala engineers than java engineers. this is going to really limit their ability to hire more people, since they fired a good portion of the scala community already.
― akm, Friday, 18 November 2022 15:00 (one year ago) link
I think we’d all be better off if none of the existing social media sites were around, but I realize my Ludd tendencies in this regard are not looked well upon
― poppin' debussy (the table is the table), Friday, 18 November 2022 15:16 (one year ago) link
I never would have got tickets for the last autechre gig if I hadn't been checking twitter during a work meeting - and nor would three of my colleagues when I had to fess up. Thanks for nothing, warp and ae mailing lists!
― ledge, Friday, 18 November 2022 15:18 (one year ago) link
this thread has about 40 entirely realistic scenarios that could fuck up twitter in a variety of ways.
I've seen a lot of people asking "why does everyone think Twitter is doomed?"As an SRE and sysadmin with 10+ years of industry experience, I wanted to write up a few scenarios that are real threats to the integrity of the bird site over the coming weeks.— Mosquito Capital (@MosquitoCapital) November 18, 2022
― akm, Friday, 18 November 2022 15:35 (one year ago) link