Twitter C/D

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.

Twitter down right now. Must be the rush to buy the Trump NFTs.

It's back. But hope springs eternal.

All my mentions are gone again, also they banned It's Going Down.

They = Elon and Andy Ngo, presumably

It appears that a number of mainstream journalism are suddenly getting their accounts suspended this evening.

more and more people are tagging #sendelontomars

Something of a Thursday night massacre going on

Starting to think dismantling twitter as we know it was part of the plan all along (or at least after he was forced to buy it).

night of the gone wives

— PEZ 🍬 (@Senpezeco) December 16, 2022

I logged in earlier to see what was up and I couldn’t scroll my timeline past 8 hours ago it just didn’t load

i've been pretty checked out of twitter for a few years and i don't have a mastodon account at the moment, but now i'm at least trying to go through people i follow and grab mastodon handles for anyone that might be hard to find if twitter goes down/their accounts get banned.

lol, also, if i follow a link to someone's mastodon twitter has been throwing up a "Warning: this link may be unsafe"

15 of the top 20 by follower count are porn. The top non-porn personal accounts are the UKIP Gamergate guy and a Bolsonaro supporter who recently got Elon Musk’s attention with claims of election fraud. https://t.co/LQ5XJfPQ7c

— Travis Brown (20-30% parody) (@travisbrown) December 16, 2022

this site seems so dead right now. I follow a number of bot accounts like "Good Faces" or "hourly Nancy comics" or "random King of the Hill frames" and I swear it's like half my TL right now because so many people have just stopped posting. the site itself is buggy, all the ads I'm getting are strange, I'm getting a ton of crypto scams in my DMs and replies, and the only thing people are really talking about is Elon ruining Twitter. can't see it ever getting back to the point where it was merely dying slowly

yeah i dont think its going to survive

lmao only 2000 people signed up for Blue since it relaunched? god that's just amazingly pathetic

2000 out of 18 million accounts, so like a 0.01% signup rate?

so before elon takeover, twitter claimed it had 238 million MDAU, which means maybe 26,000 people have signed up? so, that's like $2.5 million a year in total revenue at $8 a month? lol

Guess who's not getting any more Twitter Files.

The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem. I oppose it in both cases. And I think those journalists who were reporting on a story of public importance should be reinstated.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 16, 2022