[HN Gopher] Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
Author : ZacnyLos
Score : 163 points
Date : 2023-07-01 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sfba.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (sfba.social)
| ttctciyf wrote:
| > Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to
| try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest
| genius innovation is to block people from being able to read
| Twitter without logging in.
|
| It seems an outlandish claim, but then again Muskified Twitter
| has previous form for this kind of thing with that time when they
| self-derailed by locking themselves out of their own api,
| right?[1]
|
| 1: https://opuszine.us/posts/when-twitter-fails-itself
| pfisch wrote:
| Threads is about to launch and I have a feeling once that happens
| twitter will quickly become the next Truth Social.
| lapcat wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36553762
| jitl wrote:
| Bluesky feels like it's buckling under the refugee crisis load
| bengale wrote:
| Is it still invite only? I don't think I know anyone that's got
| on there yet.
| noarchy wrote:
| I've been on their waiting list for what seems like months at
| this point. Huge missed opportunity for them, being unable to
| leverage Twitter's failings.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Mastodon.social is chugging along just fine
| jtrip wrote:
| Meaning.. people prefer bluesky to mastodon?
| danso wrote:
| A lot of people who've wanted to jump ship to Mastodon have
| had plenty of opportunity to do so in the past year. Bsky
| is still invite only but had significantly increased its
| rate of handing out invite codes in the past 2 weeks. Today
| might be the day that invitees have decided to finally
| check things out
| throwawat7832 wrote:
| [flagged]
| ninth_ant wrote:
| He's the richest man in the world, and a bully narcissist who
| punches down as a hobby.
|
| He's not the unpopular ugly kid, he's the one who attacks those
| kinds of kids. And he certainly doesn't need you to defend him.
| Shekelphile wrote:
| He spent $44 billion to build a platform to attack his own
| daughter. Beyond just being a bully at that point, IMO.
| throwawat7832 wrote:
| [flagged]
| 3rdrodeo wrote:
| [flagged]
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| [dead]
| noirscape wrote:
| Twitter is a microservice hellscape. Chances are that the
| service you're loading simply doesn't have that particular bit
| of broken code pushed (yet).
| mbrz wrote:
| like this? https://imgur.com/Ru6ZlCK
| throwawat7832 wrote:
| over what period? I left my dev tools open since my original
| post (14 minutes) and and it looks like this, so 197 requests
| / 14 minutes = 14 requests per minutes, which is not a DDOS:
|
| https://imgur.com/8sxBAPt
| mbrz wrote:
| right now im at around 150 per minute
| https://i.imgur.com/qjbsQU7.png
| throwawat7832 wrote:
| Guess I take it back. I still hate seeing the mob
| mentality but maybe it's right.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| [flagged]
| predictabl3 wrote:
| This could be a really great moment for self-reflection.
| Could be.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Why did you choose to use Imgur to share this image? You could
| have just as easily tweeted it and linked to it here
| summerlight wrote:
| > Lest anyone doubt that Twitter was idiotic enough to release
| code that would cause _a race condition_ and result in its own
| users executing a DDOS attack on it
|
| Given that this is a race condition bug as stated in the
| original post, it's unlikely something reproducible in a
| deterministic way. You could probably give it a little bit more
| attention before leaving this reply...
| throwawat7832 wrote:
| Has anyone managed to replicate it? If he's claiming it's
| DDOSing twitter it sounds like it should be happening for
| multiple users
| pohl wrote:
| Yes:
|
| https://waxy.org/2023/07/twitter-bug-causes-self-ddos-
| possib...
| ceautery wrote:
| Central Services finally caught Archibald Tuttle, now everything
| is falling apart.
| southwesterly wrote:
| Brilliant reference. Absolutely zapped it. Legend.
| nwoli wrote:
| Seems like it might not even be a bug. Elon says they limited it
| to 600 viewed tweets per day which is an insane limit. Most
| people would go through that in 5 minutes of scrolling
| impissedoff1 wrote:
| Might be time to reflect on how much useless information we
| consume
| samb1729 wrote:
| I noticed the frontend hammering the backend for the past few
| weeks, so I suspect that these new rate limits are a response
| to that, even if Musk wouldn't publicly admit it.
|
| I don't doubt that Twitter saw a massive increase in traffic
| recently, but I feel at least somewhat confident that it's
| mostly self-inflicted on Twitter's part.
| iguana_lawyer wrote:
| Earlier I noticed the infinite reloading happening on the logout
| page as well
| comboy wrote:
| Anybody knows if these requests were happening before the login
| only change? Because it would be hilarious if huge scrapping
| operation was a bug in their javascript.
| globalise83 wrote:
| I can say for sure that a certain flow ("back" from Profile
| view or similar) would trigger an infinite redirecting loop on
| Firefox on my Android device, with probably dozens of requests
| over a couple of seconds until rate limiting kicked in. Maybe
| there were many of these little bugs which together looked like
| some kind of DDOS or scraping.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| Perhaps the engineers that understood how to analyze the logs
| were laid off?
| samb1729 wrote:
| I've noticed the frontend hammering the backend quite often in
| the past few weeks. It would not surprise me at all to learn
| that the "influx of scraping" was mostly Twitter's fault.
| aeyes wrote:
| This bug is very unlikely to be the reason. The rate limiter on
| the server side is cheap and the frontend bug only gets triggered
| with the rate limit active.
|
| I have seen similar bugs in the systems I oversee because network
| libraries love to retry requests without sane limitations by
| default. But I never saw them make our rate limiters sweat. It's
| slightly more annoying when they hit an API which actually does
| some expensive work before returning an error but that's why we
| have rate limits on all public endpoints.
|
| I also guess that the webapp is the least of Twitters traffic and
| the native apps probably don't have this problem.
| evan_ wrote:
| I don't think it's necessarily saying the self-inflicted DDoS
| causing a technical issue that's forced them to shut down
| access. I think it's possible that shutting down anonymous
| access caused the DDoS, which led to giant spikes in _some
| metric_ , which led them to conclude that there was an uptick
| in scraping, so they imposed the 600/tweet/day limit to punish
| scrapers.
|
| Seems like either my quota reset or they changed the policy
| because I'm able to access the site again.
| epistasis wrote:
| One thing about having leadership that is known to lie about
| anything or everything, for any sort of imagined personal gain,
| is that the very concept of truth is destroyed.
|
| I agree that this is probably not the bug at the root of it
| all. But I also don't believe the story that Musk is selling
| for why he's in effect shutting down the site. But both _could_
| be true and I 'm still thinking about other potential reasons,
| a complete waste of my time, but it's a weird mental honeypot.
|
| The book "Nothing is true and everything is possible" describes
| Putin's use of misinformation to maintain control of the
| populace and eliminate democratic types of politics, but it
| really feels like it applies here too. There will always be
| Musk fanbois who will parrot whatever he wants them to say, but
| most know it's just self-serving BS. And anybody trying to get
| to the root of everything gets easily sidetracked into
| narratives that feel right but have zero data backing them,
| like this bug.
|
| Anyway, highly recommend this book if you want to see a likely
| path for the future of the US:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Is_True_and_Everything...
| kristianc wrote:
| That's exactly it. Musk a week ago was telling us that there
| were a record number of user seconds on the site. Now he's
| telling us they're all content-scrapers. The very concept of
| truth is eroded.
| concordDance wrote:
| > One thing about having leadership that is known to lie
| about anything or everything, for any sort of imagined
| persona gain
|
| I will note that the few times I investigated claims of Elon
| lies they were not proper lies, either being misunderstood,
| misleading (which IS unethical, don't get me wrong), of
| indeterminate truth value (he said, she said type stuff),
| delusional optimism or actually true.
|
| Like journalists, Musk rarely outright knowingly makes
| literally false statements, but this does not mean you should
| take what he says at face value.
| epistasis wrote:
| I don't want to quibble about semantics, but habitual
| behavior of this sort just falls under the category of
| "liar" for me.
| lamontcg wrote:
| I think we're about at the point where the people who predicted
| chaos at twitter after Elon basically fired most of the
| experienced engineers have been proven correct. The duct tape is
| all coming apart at the seams now.
|
| It isn't quite as decisive as a submarine imploding, and ceasing
| to exist, but it has turned into a brightly burning tirefire.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I dunno. We are several months out after the major layoffs.
| Maybe some very recent bad decisions were made internally that
| pared back too far, but I think Musk has long since been proven
| correct that the core platform could function on a fraction of
| the workforce it had at the time of takeover.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| Do you think if we fired every civil engineer tomorrow, the
| bridges and the highways they built would fall apart right
| afterwards, or even in a few months?
|
| 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.
| oittaa wrote:
| Did you forget how people were saying that Twitter would
| stop working within days?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Maybe "Twitter would stop paying it's bills within days"
| was too brash a prediction and it was stepped back.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Agree. Plus it's easy to crap on Elon but it's also the poor
| Twitter architecture and quality of people they have working
| for them that caused this despite Elon's desire to require
| login to read Twitter. He didn't write the code.
| simonw wrote:
| Elon is responsible for the quality of the people who work
| for Twitter. That's what a CEO does.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I understand the sentiment. He also has managers who
| might get fired next
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| qwerasdf5 wrote:
| Which pieces have deteriorated?
| terminatornet wrote:
| 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/twitte
| r-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.
| qwerasdf5 wrote:
| 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.
| terminatornet wrote:
| 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.
| jtode wrote:
| Those who could know are working at other places now.
| badwolf wrote:
| This thread talking about twitter effectively DDoSing
| itself, for start...
| salgernon wrote:
| I would imagine the checks and balances that a mature
| engineering organization maintains to prevent the
| unintended consequences of capricious management
| decisions.
| hyperpape wrote:
| - 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
| qwerasdf5 wrote:
| 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.
| Marazan wrote:
| It is a testament to the engineers of old Twitter that their
| systems stayed standing for as long as they did.
| anders_p wrote:
| >I think Musk has long since been proven correct that the
| core platform could function on a fraction of the workforce
| it had at the time of takeover.
|
| 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.
| avl999 wrote:
| I am not disagreeing with you but self-ddos is not entirely
| uncommon. When I worked at Amazon this would happen a few times
| a year. Not on the main amazon.com website but on supporting
| services often initiated by but not limited to kindle devices.
| Having something like this slip through the cracks of even
| experienced engineers isn't uncommon.
| Tade0 wrote:
| But in such cases surely there's some kind of rate limiter in
| place?
|
| 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.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Yeah it happened when I worked at Amazon as well. I also more
| recently worked pretty closely with people at Facebook and
| knew something about the issues they would occasionally have
| (which didn't match what the headline speculations were at
| all). But twitter is repeatedly having these kinds of issues.
| terminatornet wrote:
| right? it's a shame hacker news doesn't let you reply to old
| comments, there's a few threads I'd like to follow up on from
| people who refused to believe Elon was destroying twitter
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I think it's intents like yours which is why they're not
| allowed. Shame, because there are some genuine value in
| having it too..
| Marazan wrote:
| I think I had someone do the old sarcastic "remind me of this
| in one year" under one of my posts predicting technical doom
| for Twitter.
|
| Definitely a good one to revisit.
| Marazan wrote:
| Found it, in response to me saying Twitter was dead but it
| just didn't realise it yet a poster said
|
| "i'm favoriting this so i can come back to it, like that
| dropbox comment."
|
| Delicious.
| bravoetch wrote:
| 25 years of products being honed for shareholder value, instead
| of customer or user value. We may be at peak consumer tolerance
| for anti-pattern, in-app purchase, subscription-model, ad-
| packed, data-siphoning, dopamine driven, gated experiences.
| bozhark wrote:
| AAA video game industry sure seems to be pushing this idea
| with the past years of broken, unfinished, beta projects
| being released as complete products.
| hyperpape wrote:
| This is a perfect example of how "shareholder value" is a
| thought-terminating cliche.
|
| 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!).
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Then Twitter was bought out, and taken private, removing
| the obligation to "shareholder value."
|
| 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.
| hyperpape wrote:
| If your point is that both old Twitter and new Twitter
| have people who have put money into it, and expect to not
| lose their money, you are correct.
|
| 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.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > not a complete dumpster fire.
|
| I never liked Twitter, don't have accounts, etc. To me this
| "dumpster fire" talk sounds like just sour grapes.
| hyperpape wrote:
| It's well documented that advertisers have been fleeing
| Twitter because they see the new management as bad for
| them. While Twitter has engineering and reliability
| problems, the loss of advertising revenue is the life of
| death challenge for the company.
|
| 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.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > This is a perfect example of how "shareholder value" is a
| thought-terminating cliche.
|
| 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.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Do you think old Twitter didn't have MBAs?
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| > We may be at peak consumer tolerance for anti-pattern, in-
| app purchase, subscription-model, ad-packed, data-siphoning,
| dopamine driven, gated experiences.
|
| 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).
| tough wrote:
| > and I've had people get mad at me when I suggest that
| they do. lol that's a new one, why?
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I've had someone say they want to support the content,
| which I understand. If only they knew how their data was
| being abused.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Not the op but I have that experience frequently. These
| are perceived as geeky needy techie things that are not
| for normal people (sprinkle quotations as needed). It's
| the same as people getting upset at suggestion to add
| lock of some sort to their phone (face, fingerprint,
| whatever) or backup their phone.
|
| 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 :-)
| tough wrote:
| I can see it at which point I just install it for them,
| tell them how it works and how to disable if it gets and
| the way and move on.
|
| But you gotta have a very good relationship with someone
| to just do that I guess
| [deleted]
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| Ultimately it boils down to "it should just work" but to
| be more specific one person said "I shouldn't have to do
| anything different!" and directed their anger towards me
| instead of the ads they were previously complaining
| about.
|
| 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.
| shon wrote:
| I have to disagree. If you honestly take the emotion and
| politics out of this and evaluate on merit alone, what do you
| think?
|
| 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?
| felipelemos wrote:
| > [...] it was a very old, very large startup [...]
|
| Can we start to call companies with almost 18 years old just
| "companies" and not startup anymore?
| shon wrote:
| Totally agree with you. It was only a startup in the sense
| that it was still struggling to find profitability / solid
| market fit.
|
| 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.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Didn't it take Amazon 15-20 years to blunder into AWS?
| oblio wrote:
| Amazon's retail side was almost always marginally
| profitable and that was while they were reinvesting like
| mad in retail infrastructure (data centers, warehouses,
| etc).
| rvz wrote:
| > Regarding any downtime, everyone has downtime. Google,
| Amazon, Meta... the best of the best still have it regardless
| of money or manpower.
|
| 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] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36523843
| lamontcg wrote:
| https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139180002/twitter-
| loses-50-t...
|
| Yeah, it is going great.
|
| I see HackerNews is counterintuitively up its own ass again.
| mooreds wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019.
|
| https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-
| quarter-u...
| meowkit wrote:
| After years of losing money, and then not being profitable
| in 2020+.
|
| 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-ear
| n...
|
| OP's point stands in my opinion. Twitter was/is a flagging
| centralized service that may not survive if it doesn't
| pivot.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Also, taking Elon's word at face value for a second... is Twitter
| really worth scraping for AI training or whatever?
|
| Its a hive of misinformation, disinformation and toxicity. Its
| succinct I guess, but nothing is eloquent or descriptive because
| of the character limit. And its full of repetitive "filler"
| information.
|
| Who wants that in a foundational LLM dataset?
|
| Maybe its OK for finding labeled images... But that still seems
| kidna iffy.
| TillE wrote:
| It's useful if you want your LLM to be able to generate tweet-
| like microblogging text. That does have some value.
|
| Or maybe you want to get an aggregate idea of what people are
| currently talking about in the world, stuff that doesn't rise
| to the level of capital-n News. There aren't a lot of
| alternatives for that.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Output formatting or a quick finetune/LORA can do
| microblogging very easily.
|
| Yeah, lots of general chat is unfortunately stuck in Twitter
| (or difficult -to-scrape siloed off platforms.
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| Don't write Elon off. If your goal is to create a toxic
| misinformation bot, Twitter is indispensable.
| ben_w wrote:
| The thing that LLMs bring to the table isn't factual knowledge
| -- we already had that, even some AI projects specifically
| dedicated to that -- but rather the ability to correctly
| interact with natural language.
|
| Twitter is great for examples of that, and the toxicity and
| disinformation doesn't get in the way.
|
| Conversely, a training set doesn't need to be _up to date_ to
| be useful for that.
|
| I don't know if anyone really was trying to scrape it (examples
| of Musk disagreeing with his own engineers come to mind), but I
| assume it's possible, and given the quality of code ChatGPT
| spits out I can easily believe a _really bad_ scraper has been
| produced by someone who thought they could do without hiring a
| software developer. If so, they might think they can get hot
| stock tips or forewarning of a pandemic from which emoji people
| post or something -- not really what an LLM is for, but loads
| of people (even here!) conflate all the different kinds of AI
| into one thing.
| Hoasi wrote:
| > Also, taking Elon's word at face value for a second... is
| Twitter really worth scraping for AI training or whatever?
|
| Maybe... if you build a LLM scrapping for the lulz?
| muixoozie wrote:
| I once got paid $20 as an undergrad to go through hundreds of
| thousands of tweets and convert slang into plain english for
| training data. The only thing I took away from the experience,
| aside from finally getting good with vim macros, is the average
| tweet is really low effort an uninteresting. I don't recall
| reading a single thing that I would imagine someone retweeting
| (think that's what it's called). Maybe I was given only
| replies. Anyway, not sure if there's value there for LLMs, but
| I'd be skeptical.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The effectiveness of this sort of lockdown is questionable
| anyway, because the cat's already out of the bag and there's no
| getting it back in. Same for Reddit. The bulk of the data's
| already out there and nothing these companies can do will
| change that.
| afterburner wrote:
| Maybe someone is trying to make a disinformation bot. (half-
| serious)
|
| I mean as far as uses for LLMs go that seems to me a pretty
| realistic one. Mass quick propaganda with little effort. Go for
| immediate impact, doesn't matter if people look deeper, you're
| just looking to get a swell of emotional reactions.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Yeah, I guess its a way to make an "engagement optimization"
| bot using follows/likes from posts as criteria.
|
| ... That is horrifying.
| [deleted]
| epistasis wrote:
| While there may be huge sections of Twitter content that are
| like what you describe, I haven't encountered that. Instead I
| see tons of hyper-focused discussion from very specialized
| scientists that I wouldn't see otherwise. I see lots of
| discussion if obscure housing policy, that I wouldn't see
| otherwise.
|
| Now, this has been severely degraded by the changes that Musk
| has made. The spam in direct messages is off the charts now,
| whereas in the past I would get maybe a spam per year. And when
| one of my areas of interest has a post that gets popular, I
| have to scroll past all the insipid clout-chasing replies from
| blue check marks which get floated to the top of replies in an
| attempt to reward some of the worst people on the internet.
| Also the long form tweets that need to be expanded are a big
| deflation of user experience, as reading and replying to those
| are suboptimal compared to a tweet thread.
|
| But this is also the general internet: 99% spam plus 1%
| quality. And the quality of the 1% of good Twitter is some of
| the very best of timer material out there.
|
| And since LLMs have been trained on this same mix... they seem
| to be mostly good at filtering. But they do lie an awful lot.
| michaelsalim wrote:
| Can you share some profiles/contents like this? I've been
| searching for it and failing miserably
| epistasis wrote:
| I would scroll through my timeline, but it is now
| impossible to show you the good content.
|
| Often times the best posters are not the same people
| publishing the best stuff in their field, but sometimes
| they are. Aggregators are a different category.
|
| What types of science are you interested in? Some random
| accounts that I can see right now:
|
| @ShanuMathew93 - renewable energy tech and biz and news
|
| @IdoTheThinking - California housing
|
| @TheStalwart - finance, macroceconomics, microeconomics,
| etc.
|
| @doctorveera - general genomics
| rvba wrote:
| As someone who doesnt use twitter, I dont understand how can
| you have any sort of a real discussion with a 140 character
| limit.
|
| The best discussion platform is IMHO the older version of
| reddit / i.reddit with the nested comments + possibility to
| be indexed by google + possibility to reply to old posts. The
| super-nesting comments feature is great.
| epistasis wrote:
| It's a 280 character per message limit, with replies.
|
| This is actually hugely beneficial to discussion as it
| makes people focus on the most salient point first, and
| further points go below, and each are easy to address
| individually.
|
| Longer form material goes to outside links, sometimes, but
| Twitter threads are also great for long form content. At
| least for executive summaries that link out to the detailed
| bits for each primary point. Once the UI for Twitter
| prioritized threading, it became quite easy to express
| extremely long chains of evidence.
| mkl wrote:
| Twitter threads seem awful for long form content. I have
| never seen long form content on Twitter that I could be
| sure I'd seen the way the author intended.
| avereveard wrote:
| I've a scalability problem
|
| I'll add a dedicated microservice
|
| I've now two scalability problems
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| That's not a scalability problem, that's a poor engineering
| problem, let's not start to find excuses
|
| Talents left twitter already, I wouldn't be surprised if the
| ones that took over are the ones who come from the intelligence
| industry, as opposed to the tech industry
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Apparently their 5-year cloud contract failed to renew today
|
| So, there may be a much simpler explanation for why their new
| rate limits on regular users to can-barely-scroll levels, and how
| that has all sorts of unintended consequences they weren't ready
| for
| [deleted]
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| Now I'm really tempted to create a Twitter account and start
| reading. Maybe that's 3D chess by design by the CTO to get people
| to sign up. /s
| Mizoguchi wrote:
| This kind of stuff is unavoidable with what's going on at
| Twitter. Infrastructure changes, platform changes and mass
| layoffs all at once. I'm actually impressed they haven't
| experienced more and longer outages.
| Sparyjerry wrote:
| True, the rate of improvements has been insane. I use it pretty
| often and haven't even noticed a second of unavailability even
| today and right now, not to say I use it 24/7 though. It's
| pretty obvious some people have a political bend to their
| hatred of Twitter so any second something isn't perfect they
| jump on it. It's really a sad state of affairs really.
| arghandugh wrote:
| This is absolutely preposterous. Any casual user of the
| service can rattle off a dozen failing elements going back
| for months.
| danShumway wrote:
| > a second of unavailability
|
| Being unable to look at anyone's tweets doesn't count as
| unavailability to you?
| darkwraithcov wrote:
| Its a testament to how well designed and implemented the code
| base is, if the wheels havent started falling off yet
| (shockingly). I know we're all supposed to shit on Twitter, but
| they had world class engineers working there before the mass
| layoffs and brain drain.
| jaimex2 wrote:
| So you say, but its been working fine all day so...
|
| Yeah, gonna keep using it.
| fwlr wrote:
| Oh come on. This is console.log spam. This isn't a "self-DDoS".
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| No, look closely: the animation does not show the console, it
| shows the network pane. Each line is a (presumably
| unsuccessful) request to the Twitter backend. If a lot of
| people have the Twitter web frontend open and running in this
| state, it could in fact overload the backend.
| [deleted]
| rideontime wrote:
| Keep in mind that Twitter engineers are under extreme pressure,
| knowing that their H1B visas are at stake, to implement Elon's
| whims as quickly as possible on systems they're unfamiliar with.
| I doubt many of us would perform better in their situation.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Do you know how many current Twitter engineers are on H1B? Is
| this based on some data, or just speculation?
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| You can access H1B job titles and salaries. It's public.
| morelisp wrote:
| Around 300. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7z5px/twitter-
| employees-on-...
| lolinder wrote:
| That's all employees, not just engineers.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Do you think twitter has a lot of marketers, PR, product
| managers under H1B? I don't have data, but in the tech
| companies I have worked at it engineers were the H1B visa
| holders, almost exclusively.
| alephnerd wrote:
| They absolutely have a number of PMs on work visas. I'm
| friends with a lot of them.
| booi wrote:
| I would imagine the vast majority of those are engineers.
| It's pretty hard to get an H1B in a non technical field
| and I'm not sure Twitter would even have many of those
| types of jobs.
| kibwen wrote:
| H1-B is for "highly skilled" workers, what skilled
| workers would Twitter have other than developers?
| mikequinlan wrote:
| "fashion models of distinguished merit and ability"
|
| https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b
| YokoZar wrote:
| Is the assertion here that Twitter is employing H1-B
| fashion models?
| goldenkey wrote:
| Potential trophy wives of billionaires, of course.
| bialpio wrote:
| I think that may be outdated. Searching at
| https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-
| studies/h-1b-employe... yields around 60 applications in
| 2023 (but note that I'm not sure how things are counted
| given that H-1B is valid for 3 years).
| morelisp wrote:
| The year is also only half over.
| bialpio wrote:
| IIRC the H-1B application period is some time in the
| first half of April every year (so all the ones that
| would be filed this year have already been filed), but
| IDK if renewals need to catch that train.
|
| Edit: clarifications.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| So maybe 20-30% of dev, which would be overrepresented
| here?
| bheadmaster wrote:
| [flagged]
| timeon wrote:
| > when Reddit told you to
|
| Is this projection?
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Nope, but apparenly I hit a nerve.
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| I find it hilarious Mastodon is more stable than one-instanced
| Twitter run by some madness tech-maniac.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Mastodon has had its issues, both globally and for specific
| instances.
|
| Sidekiq falling over is a big one. See:
| <https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/scaling/> and
| <https://nora.codes/post/scaling-mastodon-in-the-face-of-
| an-e...>
|
| (I have to email my own admin every few months to ckeck if
| things are OK.)
|
| And during the October Revolution as hoardes arrived from
| birdland, things got _ssssslllloooowwww_ globally.
|
| Worked out eventually, but it took a bit.
|
| Individual instances also tend to run into scaling issues, with
| Jerry Bell's Infosec.Exchange coming to mind. (Mostly because
| Jerry's discussed this a bit.) And of course individual
| instances can be shut down or fail in various ways. I've
| migrated several times myself.
|
| I will say that _most_ of the time things seem fine, and it 's
| _exceptionally_ rare for there to be truly Fediverse-wide
| issues.
|
| (I've been on Mastodon / the Fediverse since 2017, for the most
| part quite actively.)
| zagrebian wrote:
| The Elon Twitter movie will be the next Borat, I can't wait.
| hinkley wrote:
| Don't interrupt your opponent when they are making a mistake.
| quote wrote:
| One weekend Russia attacks Russia, next weekend Twitter attacks
| Twitter.
| throwaway202351 wrote:
| Don't forget when Reddit attacked Reddit two weeks ago.
| sva_ wrote:
| It is kinda funny if you consider these companies might
| consider their user data to be useful, especially with recent
| advances in LLM models. I've been thinking if you just
| exclude Reddit posts from training youll probably achieve
| much lower bullshit scores, as that seems to be what most
| posts on there seem to represent. I think data curation (by
| sources) could achieve quite a bit.
| rvba wrote:
| Spez trying to kill reddit for short term gain is nothing
| new.
|
| I really dont understand how the "investors" who will end up
| holding the bag after the IPO dont see that.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Everyone else is going to do the same.
|
| They're only holding out because they still believe the Fed
| will cut rates and they can borrow some more cheap money to
| keep the gravytrain going.
| papito wrote:
| I don't have a problem with any of the three.
| stubybubs wrote:
| The entire world now living the "hurt itself in its
| confusion" meme.
| WJW wrote:
| Only the bits living on Twitter or Reddit though. Or in
| Russia I guess.
| trexesq wrote:
| [dead]
| Method-X wrote:
| France is attacking France.
| julienr2 wrote:
| Haha I was looking for this one!
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| [flagged]
| emodendroket wrote:
| I would guess this was a reference to the Wagner incident.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| [flagged]
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Wagner, now located in Belarus, was still Russian when they
| downed 6 helicopters and a plane last week-end.
| meepmorp wrote:
| I think they're the worst single day losses in the Russian
| Air Force's history (which only goes back to the 90s, but
| still).
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| [flagged]
| kzrdude wrote:
| unlike what others have said, Twitter was very useful during
| the saturday mutiny in Russia. I follow a lot of people who
| supplied updates and thoughts.
| paganel wrote:
| We're also during the France attacks France weekend, and
| Twitter self-immolating certainly doesn't help with staying in
| touch with things down there.
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| Archived: https://archive.ph/u5kNK
| shawnc wrote:
| My 14yr old daughter sent me this screenshot the other day with
| the comment "I think that one sentence sums up twitter pretty
| well".
|
| https://capture.dropbox.com/GqgTAxRimqAXzrdo
| tedunangst wrote:
| Editor's Choice?
| furyofantares wrote:
| I see a giant circle around like 10 sentences, none of which
| feel like the sum up twitter in any way? After some
| consideration I guess maybe you're referring to "What's
| happening?"
| LexiMax wrote:
| > "What's happening?"
|
| That's a very good question.
| viraptor wrote:
| Fyi, on mobile the image doesn't load and the download link is
| broken.
| mkl wrote:
| Loads fine for me on Firefox Android (but I don't get which
| sentence is supposed to sum up Twitter).
| brigadier132 wrote:
| This is why you always use exponential backoff.
| fathyb wrote:
| And when you're at Twitter scale, sprinkle some jitter too.
| oblio wrote:
| What do you mean?
| jyxent wrote:
| Adding some randomization to the exponential backoff times
| to avoid the thundering herd problem:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| Say you have a brief network blip that caused 100,000 HTTP
| requests to hang, and you kick the node and cause them all
| to fail at once. One second later, 100,000 clients suddenly
| retry simultaneously, causing a huge spike in load which
| makes most of their requests fail. They use exponential
| backoff, so two seconds after that, 99,000 clients retry,
| causing a huge spike in load that makes most of their
| requests fail. Four seconds after that, 98,000 clients
| retry...
|
| If you introduce a bit of randomness into the retry timing
| (say, multiply by 1.8~2.2 instead of a straight doubling),
| that thundering herd will spread itself out and be much
| easier to recover from.
| globalise83 wrote:
| This is why you SHOULD always use exponential backoff. ;)
| mmastrac wrote:
| There may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to
| ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be
| understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different
| course.
|
| (thanks RFC 2119)
| stan_kirdey wrote:
| self ddos with backoff, :chef kiss:
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I wonder if exponential backoff should be the default behaviour
| for request libraries/APIs.
|
| Their default of "just go ham on that API" feels like the same
| footgun of "by default this Humongous Database is wide open."
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Certainly not good, but not all GET requests are equal. If these
| are responded to cheaply, at the point of connection termination,
| then it might be the case that no one has bothered to clean it up
| yet.
| Matthias247 wrote:
| Not exactly sure if that's what you recommend. But connection
| termination is not necessarily a good thing for DDOS
| mitigation. The reason is that the client might just retry
| immediatly - and it will do that using a new TLS connection.
| And the handshake for that connection has a huge cost. If you
| plan on disconnecting clients *after* a TLS connection had been
| established, you will also need to implement TLS handshake rate
| and connection limiting. That's possible, but I've only seen a
| tiny amount of services every implementing it.
| arter4 wrote:
| This is interesting.
|
| Judging from the screenshot, a huge amount of GET /TweetDetail is
| generated which triggers some rate limiting, as shown by the 429.
|
| If this is indeed due to the recent decision to enforce
| authentication for all API calls, it means the curlprit may
| actually be the API gateway or something similar downstream.
|
| Also, this behavior seem to never stop, which isn't what one
| would expect from an exponential backoff retry.
|
| I don't claim to be a better engineer than the folks working at
| Twitter, but it is interesting to see something like this in the
| wild, all Musk-related considerations aside.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > If this is indeed due to the recent decision to enforce
| authentication for all API calls, it means the curlprit may
| actually be the API gateway or something similar downstream.
|
| The way I understand it, DDoS is not caused by enforced
| authentication - enforced authentication is just a temporary
| measure against DDoS.
| romseb wrote:
| "curlprit" for too many GET's causing a 429 is just the perfect
| typo.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I would guess the front end was written under the assumption
| that the back end would still work without auth. Perhaps the
| backend changes (mandatory auth + rate limiting) were pushed
| without sufficient testing of the front + back?
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Could someone report the error at press@twitter.com and see
| what they think about it?
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Did Elon pay the AWS bill? That seems like a likely culprit.
| Twitter instances are being forcibly shutdown.
| amluto wrote:
| Twitter operates its own datacenters.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| "Twitter and AWS signed a five-and-a-half-year contract in
| 2020, which AWS is not willing to renegotiate."
|
| https://gritdaily.com/twitter-owes-aws-millions/
| williamsmj wrote:
| Twitter.com and the associated user-facing services do
| not run on AWS.
| stefan_ wrote:
| And yet they also host with AWS, Google Cloud and Oracle.
| Cloud people take note: this is what lock-in looks like,
| and it's coming to a place near you.
| cududa wrote:
| Yeah but they use GCS for auth, moderation, and caching.
| They apparently haven't been paying Google since April and
| the contract expired June 30th
| [deleted]
| badwolf wrote:
| Well, they haven't paid their GCP bill...
| https://theconversation.com/twitter-is-refusing-to-pay-
| googl...
| [deleted]
| DecXicon-28 wrote:
| Unlike what people imagine, the selfDDOS bug that occurs does not
| burden requests to the Twitter system, but becomes a loop for
| users requesting access.
| DecXicon-28 wrote:
| Not as people imagine , the selfDDOS bug that occurs does not
| burden requests to the Twitter system, but becomes a loop for
| users requesting access.
| wzy wrote:
| So this "unforeseen" loop now eats in the users 600 tweets per
| whatever, so now when you land and Twitter's homepage you are
| pass this measly limit with 5 rotations of your scroll wheel.
| danShumway wrote:
| I do think this probably isn't the reason for rate-limiting
| tweets so harshly; I don't know for sure, but I suspect this
| isn't a technical issue and it is legitimately Elon snapping
| and just implementing a wildly bad business decision.
|
| But that being said, a loop of users requesting access from
| Twitter's system is a thing that would burden Twitter's system.
|
| Requesting access and denying access isn't free. You can
| definitely DDOS your own website by having all of your users
| repeatedly request access to it in a loop.
| sgammon wrote:
| wow. how would one even fix this without deliberate downtime?
| you'd have to deploy and hope that the frontend will make it
| through CDNs to reduce pressure, right?
| minimaxir wrote:
| At minimum, you revert the commit/deploy to prod that caused
| the issue. But then that would likely mean reverting the recent
| policies and would make Elon look weak, so he'd never support
| it.
| avl999 wrote:
| First thing I would try is seeing if the front end has a
| different retry strategy for a different status code (say 503).
| If so I'd change the status returned for throttling to be that
| (503).
|
| Barring that, turning off server side throttling or atleast
| making it less aggressive to slow the retry storm seems the
| most reasonable.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| You first remove rate limits, then implement and release
| exponential backoff on frontend, then apply rate limits again
| (on a small segment of users first, then more). No biggie, you
| just need to be very careful. And boss needs to chill for that
| time, which is unlikely to happen.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Yeah frontend retry DDoS is not a great situation to get in.
| I've tripped it in a test env before with a websocket app
| (erroneous retries caused certain clients to open the WS over
| and over and break the server).
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| It hurt itself in its confusion!
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's not a self ddos if twitter isn't going down. You can see in
| the video twitter is properly handling the load and is returning
| HTTP 429 when the client is sending too many requests. Hitting
| the rate limiter or requesting a post is light weight. It's not
| like it's spamming login requests which require a lot of
| resources due to key stretching.
| thakoppno wrote:
| 2 Nines is sufficient at scale?
| charcircuit wrote:
| For a consumer facing surface. Yes.
| notquitehuman wrote:
| It's Twitter. A nine is more than enough for their most
| critical workloads.
| simonw wrote:
| The theory here is that this JavaScript bug caused the huge
| increase in requests which is why Twitter introduced strict
| limits on how many tweets users could access.
|
| So the result wasn't an outage, it was a radical reduction in
| functionality.
|
| I think that still qualifies as a self-ddos.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Meanwhile, I can see this very Mastadon post with no login just
| fine.
|
| And the interface is not trying to assault me. It loads quick.
|
| ...Seems like a better product than Twitter for a public feed.
| kfrzcode wrote:
| [flagged]
| teawrecks wrote:
| Why? They know.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Seeing a random stranger on the internet and assuming they
| have three friends that use Mastodon isn't really a big dunk
| on them or Mastodon
| amelius wrote:
| I'm sure the loads are not comparable.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| It's not crunching a bunch of analysis or ads in the
| background. I bet it scales wonderfully with maybe some kind
| of cache/CDN if necessary.
| dijit wrote:
| Honestly.
|
| what the fuck is this response?
|
| I hear always that centralising everything is great because
| efficiencies of scale: but then we have something that works
| as good or better and the response is; "ah yeah, but the load
| is so high!"
|
| Why do I care? I don't honestly give a shit about how much
| load you have, you could be factoring Pi on every page load;
| it means -nothing- to me. I kindly invite you to give more of
| a shit about user experience.
|
| This also goes for when "complicated" systems fail, maybe
| making them so complicated and centralised is not the way.
| jtode wrote:
| I've been arguing with Twitter emigres who seem to think
| that the UX on masto sucks.
|
| I would say that Twitter is an automatic transmission,
| mastodon is a standard.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Mastodon isn't truly decentralized. Every instance is its
| own feifdom and you have to communicate directly with them
| to exchange messages. This is unlike how Usenet, FidoNet,
| and SMTP work. They are truly decentralized as you can
| exchange data without directly accessing a peer's host
| server.
| tedunangst wrote:
| How do plan to send me an email without talking to my
| mail server?
| kstrauser wrote:
| I genuinely don't understand what you mean here. I don't
| directly access any peer's server when I want to talk to
| them.
| paradaux wrote:
| Equally, neither is the budget. Load isn't an excuse.
| hinata08 wrote:
| It withstands being one of the first link on HN, and it still
| loads comfortably.
|
| For a personal website, that's a great performance.
| WJW wrote:
| HN traffic is not nearly the DDOS people make it out to be.
| I made it to spot #2 once and that was a few dozen hits per
| second at most. Maybe not something to serve with wordpress
| from a raspberry pi, but hardly apocalyptic levels of
| traffic.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Wordpress on a raspberry pi will handle static, properly
| cached content just fine.
| distantsounds wrote:
| previous HN articles linking to instances has caused them
| to become overloaded. this instance just seems to know how
| to handle it
| vGPU wrote:
| HN itself is run on a single server. So long as you're not
| running something bloated or trying to host on a DSL
| connection, you'll be fine.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Doesn't really matter if it works?
|
| And if some massive org needs bandwidth for posts, can't they
| host their own public instance? I'm sure many organizations
| would prefer that over being at Twitter's mercy.
| redox99 wrote:
| On Mastodon simply discussing certain topics will get you
| banned, and instances that don't ban those users get
| defederated.
|
| I prefer Twitter in the sense that it's more laissez faire in
| terms of what kinds of speech get you banned.
| mastodon_acc wrote:
| Which instance? Sounds like you joined a niche instance of a
| few hundred people. I find twitter to be extremely
| restrictive, you can't have open discussions, you either get
| banned or get piled on by abusive blue check accounts.
| echelon wrote:
| > On Mastodon simply discussing certain topics will get you
| banned, and instances that don't ban those users get
| defederated.
|
| This is why P2P is superior. Federation nodes can be used to
| strong-arm collective behavior against the will of individual
| users.
|
| I don't mind being exposed to liberal and conservative
| thought. I want to consume almost the entire spectrum of
| human discourse so that I can synthesize ideas for myself and
| understand more effectively. As long as the signal is
| reasonably high.
|
| Reddit and fediverse moderators wield absolute power over
| their fiefdoms. They're intellectual dictatorships. (Not to
| mention egotistical behaviors some of them have.)
|
| P2P allows the end user to consume what they want, weight
| discussions how they want, and participate in any number of
| emergent clusters. It's the real path forward.
| kstrauser wrote:
| > I want to consume almost the entire spectrum of human
| discourse
|
| ...said no one who's ever been a moderator.
|
| You find out quickly that there are some perfectly horrid
| people out there. You absolutely _do not_ want to hear
| everything that people say. It _seems_ like you would, but
| you really don 't.
| misnome wrote:
| Then just make your own instance?
|
| Or is the complaint that you don't have the power to force
| yourself on people who don't want to read your shit?
| pessimizer wrote:
| You've figured it out entirely. Mastodon is run by the
| kind of people who are willing to put in a bunch of time,
| effort, and money into dictating the conversation of
| others. People who enjoy that kind of power.
| kelvinjps wrote:
| I think that with p2p you don't have to think of servers
| and still be decentralized like downloading a torrent
| file, peertube etc
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's a shitty monoculture mostly filled with a particular
| demographic (like most new and obscure tech things), the
| people who program computers, and the people who they meet at
| parties.
|
| This would disappear with more widespread usage. The problem
| is the software, not the culture. If the software is
| improved, or the dead ends are pruned and something else is
| created that learns the lessons from previous tries, the new
| cultures will bury the old.
|
| If building software required experts on model trains or
| K-pop, the culture would suck, too. The goal is to make that
| a stage rather than an endpoint.
|
| edit: I enjoy model trains, but I do not get into political
| or social discussions with model train guys.
| [deleted]
| mejari wrote:
| >I prefer Twitter in the sense that it's more laissez faire
| in terms of what kinds of speech get you banned.
|
| Musk literally just said that the term 'cis' is a slur that
| will get you banned.
| golergka wrote:
| Can I read more about this? What topics are banned?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| When they say "banned", they mean "if I say grotesquely
| offensive things, other people will chose not to listen".
|
| You know, just like in real life.
|
| There are plenty of instances that allow abhorrent content,
| if that's what you want, but you can't force others to
| receive it.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Some people confuse the freedom of speech with the right
| to be listened to.
| golergka wrote:
| In twitter, people can choose not to follow or mute you
| on individual basis, that's basically what "not
| listening" means. Banning somebody means preventing other
| people from listening to them, so it's not the same.
|
| Maybe it works different on Mastodon?
| vidarh wrote:
| On Mastodon, people can choose to pick an instance that
| will rarely defederate anyone and follow or mute on an
| individual basis, or they can choose an instance where
| moderators will take a firmer line.
| ploum wrote:
| The fact is that Twitter makes you believe that you are
| listened to, even if you say shitty stuff.
|
| Mastodon confronts you that if you say shitty stuff,
| nobody wants to listen to you.
|
| People complaining being banned or being on defederated
| instances are people other don't want to listen. They
| pretend to have a personal opinion while they are only
| assaulting others.
|
| LGBT is a good example: you cannot have an opinion about
| it. Those people exist. They have the right to exist. You
| have the right to not engage in any LGBT activity. But
| you don't have the right to talk about a "debate".
| There's none. If you do, I you maintain that using
| "cisgender" should be a banned word, you are simply an
| asshole and can't complain that people don't want to
| listen to your ramblings. And yes, this will get you
| banned.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Mastodon confronts you that if you say shitty stuff,
| nobody wants to listen to you.
|
| Mastodon isn't a person, you're talking about the guy who
| runs the instance.
|
| > nobody wants to listen to you.
|
| The person who runs your Mastodon instance is not
| _everybody._
| mardifoufs wrote:
| What would be grotesquely offensive stuff to you? You
| realize that grotesquely offensive to very online
| Americans is an extremely niche thing? It makes sense to
| NOT want your online presence to be tied to whatever some
| Americans think makes perfect sense, right?
|
| I don't think you'd agree that it would be weird to not
| want your social media and what you see online to be tied
| to what some, for example, Saudi dudes think is
| acceptable at the moment.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "On Mastodon" is like saying "in restaurants". There's a wide
| variety of instances to various tastes.
| jug wrote:
| Yes, but the point being made is that you then choose a
| more welcoming instance and then it's defederated instead
| because it allowed your post, so then your Mastodon
| experience sucks anyway and you only gave yourself an
| illusion of freedom.
|
| I'm not sure how common this issue is but I _can_ say that
| I've been through a defederation bullshit myself because
| the large instance did something as egregious as welcoming
| people regardless alignment to Swedish government party
| (i.e. any party with over 4% of votes in Sweden). That was
| far too much for some instances like mastodon.art to
| handle. The admin got fed up since he had neither will nor
| moderation resources of that kind and shut down the
| instance, so everyone had to migrate which is a headache by
| its own even if supported.
|
| From other stories, I swear the greatest threat to the
| Fediverse is politics and more or less childish cross-
| instance strife. I just now checked my Mastodon feed and
| this very fucking issue was discussed once more so I guess
| some drama has went down again while I was away. There's
| been trouble of this kind on Lemmy too already.
|
| People say "it's like e-mail". Yeah, if we have like 20
| major e-mail servers in the world and there's drama across
| them as we bet on the winners via Patreon.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Maybe you can make you own instance and then you can have
| all the swedish government parties you want
| jug wrote:
| And then I get defederated for having done so. Did you
| even read my post? It's an illusion freedom that does not
| exist in practice because this is Mastodon we're talking
| about.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| that's because nobody wants to hear what the people on
| your instance has to say. you think they should be forced
| to?
| [deleted]
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Freedom doesn't mean everyone gets whatever they want.
|
| Your freedom just doesn't override the freedom of others
| to avoid you. You can't force others to interact with you
| and there's nothing wrong with that.
| vidarh wrote:
| Free speech is not freedom to force everyone else to
| listen. You get defederated from those instances who
| _choose_ not to want to listen to you.
|
| Users on those instances who want to listen to you are
| free to go to instances that don't defederate you.
| maharajatever wrote:
| [dead]
| Saris wrote:
| You can hang out on an instance with like minded people,
| everyone else might defederate you but you'll have your
| space.
| hinkley wrote:
| When someone says, "certain topics will get you banned" that
| doesn't make me judge the platform, that makes me judge the
| person.
|
| People are going to assume it's something you don't want to
| name, if you won't name it.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| Why would you judge the person because some kid somewhere
| is a trigger happy moderator?
|
| What happened to thinking for yourself?
| hinkley wrote:
| > What happened to thinking for yourself?
|
| What do you think I'm doing, right now?
|
| Someone is invoking censorship as a reason not to adopt a
| new platform. No specifics, just rabble rousing. That's
| manipulation. Pushing back _is_ thinking for yourself.
|
| Or, they are being imprecise and undermining their
| position, in which case what I said works as advice on
| further conversations. Either way is thinking.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Or they're assuming good faith in their opponents. To
| _not know_ what has been censored on twitter, and that
| the recent interest in mastodon was a reaction to the
| lifting of some of that censorship, is either to be
| playing stupid or to actually not have the background to
| discuss the subject usefully.
| [deleted]
| screye wrote:
| Come on, in a lot coastal discourse it is practically taboo
| to mention vanilla opinions that are held by 70+% of the
| population.
|
| Mastodon instances are largely moderated by people from the
| other 30%. You are free to judge if you want. But don't
| pretend this is a violation of publicly accepted morals in
| the 1st world.
| chasing wrote:
| > vanilla opinions that are held by 70+% of the
| population.
|
| Ooh, ooh, ooh? Like what kind of "vanilla opinion?"
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Trans people in sports? Wanting strong borders?
| Disagreeing with stuff like drag reading sessions?
|
| Not American or white or whatever, just stating the
| obviously less widely supported stuff that may sound
| uncontroversial to the more terminally online.
| morelisp wrote:
| > Disagreeing with stuff like drag reading sessions?
|
| What does this mean? Drag queens shouldn't be allowed to
| read? Like what concrete policy are you saying they can't
| propose which isn't obviously overreach?
| antiframe wrote:
| I am having trouble imagining what you mean. Can you
| illustrate your point with an example opinion that is
| held by 70% of the population but is taboo to discuss?
| ploum wrote:
| It is funny how, in their own bubble, people assume that
| their opinion is held by 70% of the population while it
| is often the opposite (fun fact: more people voter for
| Hillary Clinton that Trump yet Trump voters believe that
| they are the majority. Same for abortion where polls
| showed that a clear majority of the US was pro-choice yet
| a very loud minority has a lot of political power)
| baggy_trough wrote:
| A trans woman is actually a man.
| murderfs wrote:
| 86% of Americans think that police funding should
| increase or stay the same:
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2023/02/03/before-re...
|
| 80% of Americans think that the southern border should
| have increased security:
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2022/09/08/republica...
|
| 50% of Americans oppose affirmative action (with 33%
| approving, 16% not sure):
| https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/06/08/more-
| america...
| jmopp wrote:
| None of those are really taboo to discuss: police funding
| has only increased in recent years, Joe Biden has been
| quietly upgrading security on the southern border since
| the start of his term, and the supreme court recently
| ruled against affirmative action.
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| _Nearly 70% of U.S. adults say transgender athletes
| should be allowed to compete only on sports teams that
| correspond with the sexes they were assigned at birth_
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/americans-
| oppose-in...
| morelisp wrote:
| This is obviously not taboo to discuss since every
| mainstream media source has been discussing it nonstop
| with virtually no reference to like, actual data, for
| over a year.
| [deleted]
| guelo wrote:
| "coastal" is ridiculous. American vs American hate is out
| of control.
| morelisp wrote:
| Americans used to literally own other Americans, while
| committing genocide against other Americans.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That didn't really count, because they all agreed that
| black people and natives weren't Americans and had no
| rights they were bound to respect. The real oppression is
| when relatively wealthy upper-middle class people get
| criticized.
| ESMirro wrote:
| It's amusing you're perfectly illustrating the OPs point.
| "Vanilla opinions" is so vague as to be completely
| meaningless.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > vanilla opinions that are held by 70+% of the
| population.
|
| Name three.
| thereare5lights wrote:
| > vanilla opinions
|
| Like what?
| redox99 wrote:
| When you name something, then it becomes a flamewar about
| that something.
|
| But generally speaking, anything that the US/"San
| Francisco" left wing ideology deems "bad" is generally
| unwelcome.
| echelon wrote:
| I'm LGBT and my spouse is trans. I don't believe you should
| silence anti-trans rhetoric. I believe you should engage
| it.
|
| The ability for /r/conservative to ban my counter arguments
| is just as harmful as Mastodon shutting down the anti-trans
| positions.
|
| Conversation is what moves us forward and is how we find
| commonality.
|
| I grew up religious and conservative. I changed a lot of my
| viewpoints through friendly conversations in the internet
| of 2000-2010, before tumblrism, cancel culture, and
| censorship took hold.
|
| If I grew up in today's world or internet, I might never
| have been exposed to different opinions in a non-hostile,
| no-judgment environment. By trying to segregate, censor,
| and ban we're only leading to intractable polarization.
| Never giving folks an opportunity to change. Never
| accepting that people are capable of growth.
|
| Please let's talk with each other. Even if we disagree.
| You'd be surprised how effective that can be.
|
| We're all suffering though this world together. Laugh away
| our differences and find the ways and the things that we
| share. We all hold more in common than you might think.
|
| Love your enemy, even if they don't love you (yet).
|
| If I could have one lasting impact on this world, it would
| be this message.
| krapp wrote:
| Mastodon isn't shutting down anti-trans positions,
| specific instances are choosing not to federate with
| other instances that harbor those positions. Those
| instances and the homophobes and transphobes are still
| there.
|
| And you're free to engage the people who want to put you
| and your spouse on a train car in conversation all you
| like. Maybe you'll deprogram one or two, but you'll just
| help spread their propaganda to exponentially more people
| than you could ever help.
|
| I have no commonality with such people and don't want to
| find any. I don't want to share a society with them, and
| I know they don't want to share one with me. I certainly
| don't want to debate the Jewish Question or "groomers" or
| race science with them on my gamedev instance.
|
| >We're all suffering though this world together. Laugh
| away our differences and find the ways and the things
| that we share.
|
| You know these people want you dead, right? They don't
| believe you have a right to exist. You and your spouse.
| Especially your spouse. We're not talking about a
| difference in belief about tax laws or support for
| opposing soccer teams here. "Laugh away our differences?"
| I'm sorry but with all due respect _fuck that._
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| They're not looking to debate you or find common ground
| with you. They're looking to eradicate you, or at the
| very least send you back to the closet.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's just monstering your enemy to justify any behavior
| towards them.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I'm a fifty-something trans lady and I am just fucking
| tired of trying to change viewpoints. I just want to live
| my life and talk with my friends without some butthead
| coming in and telling me I shouldn't exist, I get enough
| of that by checking the news lately.
|
| If you have the energy to politely engage people who
| think of you as a child molester who should be shot on
| sight, great! Go for it! But I have done that, and I am
| tired, and I do not want to do it any more. I run a
| Mastodon and I just want it to be a space to talk to my
| friends and maybe make some new ones, and thus, I block
| the fuck out of places I do not expect to get anything
| but hate from.
| hinkley wrote:
| Common rhetoric among PoC even twenty years ago was
| essentially, "We're tired of being spokespeople and
| tutors for your problems."
|
| Not everyone is cut out to be an educator, and I think
| you should have the option not to be voluntold for the
| job. Not just because it should be your right, but
| because insisting that everyone in a group can speak for
| that group is itself stereotyping. I think once you see
| that it's really hard to be patient with people who
| don't.
| ktm5j wrote:
| As a trans woman living in a conservative area, I get
| where you're coming from but I seriously disagree. The
| hardest pill for me to swallow through all of this has
| been realizing that some people will never change no
| matter how much you engage them. The only way I maintain
| my sanity is to do whatever I can to reduce my exposure
| to that kind of thing so I don't end up engaging with
| it.. because it just never goes well.
|
| I realize it's a complicated issue, and I'm never a fan
| of banning speech. But not all speech deserves a
| response.
| sleepycatgirl wrote:
| That is.. quite opposite from the experience I have had. I
| have discussed a fair amount of topics, it was civil, and
| things were fine.
|
| Though, the only time when I did see that happen, was when
| someone was transphobic, homophobic, racist and such.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >Though, the only time when I did see that happen, was when
| someone was transphobic, homophobic, racist and such
|
| "I mean, when all the wrong and bad people are kicked out
| everything is great!"
|
| No one is complaining about people with Ford vs Chevy
| comments being banned. It's the controversial things that
| need to be refuted, not hidden.
|
| What makes you so absolutely certain you are on the "right
| side" of any opinion? Because the people in charge of these
| services are censoring the other side?
|
| How long before you find yourself with "the wrong
| thoughts"?
| kstrauser wrote:
| I run a Mastodon instance. You don't have to see eye to
| eye with me or my users to talk to us. However, I _have_
| defederated from instances that host:
|
| * Loli porn
|
| * Extreme neo-Nazi content; I'm talking about swastikas,
| hardcore racial slurs, and the like
|
| * Targeted bullying and harassment
|
| You want to spark a conversation about the relative
| merits of Republican fiscal policy, let's chat! You want
| to say that we should still own slaves, Jews eat babies,
| or gay people shouldn't exist? Go away. I don't owe you a
| soapbox.
|
| Disconnecting from a server with despicable content
| doesn't take away that server's right to speak. It just
| preserves my -- and my users' -- right not to hear it.
| burtness wrote:
| First they came for the Nazis...
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's what happened. People started demanding that Nazis
| be censored on Myspace. I knew people at the time who
| were under the impression that being a racist was already
| illegal in some way, and thought that Myspace not
| immediately banning all of them made the site an
| accessory to the crime. The worst part was they seemed to
| be centering it around me because I was the only black
| person they knew.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| What kind of topics would those be?
| kstrauser wrote:
| "Oh, _you know_. "
| nkozyra wrote:
| > I prefer Twitter in the sense that it's more laissez faire
| in terms of what kinds of speech get you banned.
|
| I really don't think it is. It's still largely political, and
| subject to the whim of the reader.
|
| The guy who tracked and reported on Twitter Blue
| subscriptions was suspended today.
|
| You always have to kiss someone's ring.
| reaperman wrote:
| > On ~~Mastodon~~ Twitter simply discussing certain topics
| will get you banned.
|
| Also true.
| redox99 wrote:
| Yes, that's why I said its more permissive, not that
| Twitter is fully permissive.
| pronik wrote:
| Early days of Twitter were just like that. Mastodon hasn't had
| the time to go to shit yet.
| agluszak wrote:
| Mastodon doesn't have the _incentive_ to go to shit, as there
| 's no company trying to earn as much money as possible behind
| it.
| viraptor wrote:
| Apart from Facebook (I mean Meta (I mean Threads)). Let's
| see how that one plays out, but initially it seems like
| they'll be blocked by almost every bigger instance anyway.
| agluszak wrote:
| Even if Facebook starts using ActivityPub in one of their
| products the protocol will still be just a protocol. And
| if FB's product goes to shit it won't affect ActivityPub.
| mod50ack wrote:
| Well, it's a FOSS self-hostable server program. Mastodon
| isn't a service, so it's not susceptible to enshittification
| per se. A particular Mastodon host, sure. But Mastodon itself
| is just a codebase.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Make no mistake though, enshittification follows the
| population. Mastodon is about as protected as html in that
| sense. Could you build a nice lean mean performant static
| site in html? Of course, but hardly anyone does that. Most
| popular sites that you are able to discover these days are
| enshittified because the incentives favor that.
| qchris wrote:
| > Mastodon is about as protected as html in that sense.
|
| I think you're probably using the term "enshittify"
| differently than the parent comment. Enshittification, at
| least as I tend to see it used, doesn't really follow
| from a particular technology stack, but more about how an
| organization itself approaches its end users,
| particularly against over-exploitation/monetization of a
| given platform. It typically doesn't speak to the
| underlying technology (i.e. html vs. MB of Javascript vs.
| WASM), since that is (within reason) somewhat orthogonal
| to how the organizations running instances treat their
| users/how end users actually experience the platform.
| Shawnj2 wrote:
| The biggest problem with Mastodon is that 3 instances
| comprise 50% of all traffic. That's not that bad but that
| creates the conditions for the largest X instances to
| become Mastodon Inc., use VC money to fund advertising for
| their site and fund improvements the other instances don't
| get, eventually defederate from the other instances, and
| finally enshittify. I think Mastodon is a bit more
| insulated from this than fully private companies, but it's
| not invulnerable while that many users are on the biggest
| instances.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| How could a decentralized thing go to shit?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Take the current crop of decentralized website as an
| example. No one forces you to make an enshittified website,
| people do it on their own accord.
| Macha wrote:
| The point of it is that it isn't a company but a standard, so
| if one instance owner goes crazy and patches ads in you can
| move to another (or your own) and keep your network
| 0xblinq wrote:
| Sorry if this is a dumb question, I'm still new to it.
| Wouldn't you have the same problem as with an email
| address? I mean, your handle or whatever it is called would
| still point to that instance/owner right? Or is there some
| kind of "DNS" or registry so you can move your handle to
| other instances?
| Macha wrote:
| Yes, you can use your own domain as a handle even if
| you're relying on someone else's server for hosting. It's
| sadly a little more complicated than DNS though:
|
| https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2022/11/05/mastodon-
| own...
| egypturnash wrote:
| You can transfer your account to another Mastodon
| instance, yeah.
| vidarh wrote:
| Assuming the old instance doesn't just totally shut down,
| you can trigger a "move" process that makes your
| followers automatically re-follow your new address.
|
| On top of that, you can host your own webfinger alias, as
| sibling suggests, which lets you have an unchanging
| address that forwards to your current server. But note
| that accounts follows _URI 's_ not the handles, so you
| still need the move process to migrate existing
| followers.
|
| It's not by any means perfect, but it's improving (e.g.
| the move process is relatively new) and probably will
| keep improving.
| dmje wrote:
| Yes. This IMO is one of the 3 key issues with federation
| as it is now:
|
| 1. Noone understand what "federation" is so they all
| flock to the big servers hence making the majority of the
| system totally non-federated in nature
|
| 2. Findability (of users, topics, servers) is terrible
| which pushes people to 1)
|
| 3. What you said. Until there's such a thing as federated
| identity, we're all still tied to one server, thus one
| server owner can ban / switch off / over-moderate and
| we're all back to square one
|
| Some of this can be solved with ux and education but I
| worry that some of it is basically baked in to
| federation.
|
| Edit: yeh I mean in theory you can move servers but it's
| apparently not easy...!
| ploum wrote:
| Let's say that I want to move my @ploum@mamot.fr account
| (my real Mastodon account) to another server, let say
| "writing.exchange".
|
| 1. I create an account @ploum@writing.exchange on
| writing.exchange.
|
| 2. I go to mamot.fr and, in the settings, I enable
| migration to @ploum@writing.exchange.
|
| 3. I go to writing.exchange and, in the settings, I start
| the migration from @ploum@mamot.fr.
|
| All my followers and following are automatically
| transfered. For them, it is transparent. They still
| follow me on my new account without them being even
| notified.
|
| Of course, you need cooperation from mamot.fr. If
| mamot.fr decide to close your account, you can't migrate
| it.
|
| But it works well, I've used it myself. It is really
| great and allows people to do "server hoping" to join a
| community that fit better their need.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| The problem there is that there's nothing stopping the
| crazy instance owner from retaliating by "defederating"
| your own instance and cutting you off from your network.
| jtode wrote:
| He could defederate from you, but one for his instance.
| If you haven't pissed off the whole federation and you
| backed up your data (another thing you can do on
| mastodon) you'll be fine, and keep all your followers
| too.
| LexiMax wrote:
| Only if you have a single account. Most Mastodon clients
| allow multi-accounting quite trivially.
|
| Also probably not the best argument to make in a thread
| whose main topic of conversation is about how one of the
| biggest social networks on the internet is disintegrating
| in real time thanks in part to the management of its
| owner.
| meepmorp wrote:
| What? Remember the fail whale?
|
| Twitter shit the bed all the time in the early days.
| sseagull wrote:
| In Twitter's early days only one celebrity could tweet at a
| time
|
| https://theoutline.com/post/4147/in-twitters-early-days-
| only...
|
| HN discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17147404
| sph wrote:
| It's MastOdon, not MastAdon.
| revskill wrote:
| No difference to me.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Mastodon absolutely does not load quickly. I clicked the link
| and saw the _followup_ tweet /post/whatever for a couple of
| seconds before it reflowed and showed me the actually linked
| tweet in a smaller body font. The had to wait longer for the
| whole thing to finish loading. There is a ton of unnecessary JS
| bloat on the linked site.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Most of the rest of the world doesn't agree.
| p0pcult wrote:
| [dead]
| teawrecks wrote:
| Also most of the rest of the world doesn't use Twitter (I'm
| seeing about 240M total users?). The ones that do use Twitter
| do so because of a significant amount of money going into
| marketing Twitter's platform.
|
| Conversely, relatively nothing goes into pushing people to
| use mastodon. It can only take off if it really does prove,
| not just useful, but _more_ useful than a centralized version
| that 's got money behind it.
| Brybry wrote:
| What microblogging service does most of the rest of the
| world use? Weibo? Telegram channels?
| antiframe wrote:
| I imagine 'none'. With Twitter, the most recognized micro
| logging site in the world only has 240M of the worlds
| population, I conclude micro logging isn't popular
| worldwide.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > What microblogging service does most of the rest of the
| world use?
|
| Most of the world doesn't.
| hengheng wrote:
| The rest of the world uses WhatsApp Status. Twitter is
| for those who hand in their sanity in pursuit of an
| audience.
| reneberlin wrote:
| The kind of input you have when feeding tweets into an LLM is
| toxicity. It looks like something you can blackmail LLM for.
| Look, you have all this toxic trash in your model.
|
| Like: we have the sources and you could detox you model if you
| pay for it.
| craig1f wrote:
| I believe that we are all focused on Musk ruining Twitter and
| Spez ruining Reddit, with the belief that this is accidental.
|
| The two remaining sites that allow regular people to post and
| have discussions are being wiped off the internet in time for the
| next election. By the next US presidential election, there won't
| be ways to access information that don't go through the "wrong"
| people first. Hacker News is all that's left, and it's not big
| enough to be significant.
|
| Where do you all get your info lately? How do you stay informed?
| I really don't know how to get a wide swath of information
| anymore with Twitter and Reddit gone.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
| stupidity.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > Never attribute to malice that which is adequately
| explained by stupidity.
|
| Still so many examples of the opposite.
| pferde wrote:
| Or greed.
| woleium wrote:
| Hanlon, is that you?
|
| Reminds me of the joke: Pavlov was sitting at the bar when
| the last order bell rang. "Oh shit", he thought, "I forgot to
| feed the dogs".
| agubelu wrote:
| Conditioning works both ways!
| smilespray wrote:
| My cat nods in agreement.
| superchroma wrote:
| I guess you'll just have to talk to your fellow man with the
| hole in your face instead of your fingers. I wince thinking of
| it even now.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| > Where do you all get your info lately? How do you stay
| informed? I really don't know how to get a wide swath of
| information anymore with Twitter and Reddit gone
|
| News sites reddit and twitter source stuff from... Or pick your
| favorite aggregator.
|
| Sometimes Discord/Matrix and blogs are good for really niche
| topics.
| lolinder wrote:
| > get a wide swath of information anymore
|
| My personal feeling is that a lot of the social troubles of the
| past decade stem from information overload. I subscribed to
| News Minimalist and have been feeling much happier lately.
|
| https://www.newsminimalist.com/
| a1o wrote:
| Thank you for this, this will be exceedingly useful :)
| progfix wrote:
| Did you forget that newspapers exist?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Did you forget that newspapers exist?_
|
| How could he? 95% of the "news" on the internet is stuff
| that's regurgitated from what newspapers and magazines
| published a day, week, or month ago.
|
| When it comes to news, you get what you pay for.
|
| More and more I'm starting to think "If it lights up, don't
| trust it."
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Increasingly, many don't.
|
| Both print and online.
|
| Those that remain, _outside_ national papers, are often thin
| husks of themselves.
|
| A year or so back, the _Chicago Sun-Times_ effectively _paid_
| the local NPR affiliate, WBEZ, to take over the paper. That
| is _negative_ value.
|
| And the competing city daily, the _Chicago Tribune_ is
| arguably doing worse.
|
| That's in the 3rd largest city and metro region of the US.
| Many other cities are in similar shape, or have no
| traditional newspaper journalism at all. There's some
| coverage through TV & radio, though often it's the local NPR
| affiliates which seem to do the heavy lifting.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| How about reading candidates' actual campaign platforms and
| watching campaign debates then?
|
| Nobody needs a "wide swath of information" unless it's part of
| their job. The world needs to normalize unplugging and going
| offline more often.
|
| Also, HN is far from being immune to information manipulation.
| 99.9% of non-tech articles on HN are either misinfo campaigns
| or egoistical turf wars.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > _Hacker News is all that 's left_
|
| While I visit here a lot I would guess that your claim that "HN
| is all that's left" is just wrong. There are hundreds if not
| thousands of forums and various gathering places where people
| are having conversations, just not in a place you are aware of.
|
| > _Where do you all get your info lately? How do you stay
| informed? I really don 't know how to get a wide swath of
| information anymore with Twitter and Reddit gone._
|
| MSM hasn't gone anywhere. And realistically speaking most news
| doesn't matter anyway.
|
| But I do think the case of "I need to learn about X and it's
| not on reddit or twitter anymore" is a realistic concern.
| Hopefully search engines can fight the tide of LLM created
| bullshit and help you find what you need to know.
| freedomben wrote:
| Who do you think is orchestrating this demise? Do you think
| Elon is willfully participating or is he being manipulated?
| grumple wrote:
| "Yeah, let's roll this out on a Friday night before the biggest
| national holiday weekend of the summer."
| noncoml wrote:
| Perfect example of why you don't just fire all your senior
| engineers.
|
| You can't debug and root cause if you do. So you end up adding
| hacky point fixes
| wand3r wrote:
| I definitely agree. I do think the major issue at Twitter is
| more managerial than engineering though. They likely could have
| run Twitter at the same output with the current team. The
| problem is a CEO who is learning on the job by altering
| basically everything at a superfast pace.
|
| The root cause is business & feature experimentation at scale
| with a tight runway & no executive oversight.
| kvetching wrote:
| Could this be the reason for the rate limiting? Elon thinks the
| server usage is scrapers when in reality it's just bad code
| causing a self DDOS?
| [deleted]
| bradknowles wrote:
| Ask him whether he wrote the code himself that is DDOS-ing
| Twitter. I wouldn't be surprised if he had that much hubris.
| Topfi wrote:
| Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are
| more agitating than being forced to execute on something you
| fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and
| failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to
| go against your best judgement.
|
| Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they
| never made such a request, even when provided with written proof.
|
| I can of course not say whether the people currently working at
| Twitter did warn that the recent measures could have such major
| side effects, but I would not be surprised in the slightest,
| considering their leadership's mode of operation.
|
| Even as someone who very much detests what Twitter has become
| over the last few months and in fact did not like Twitter before
| the acquisition, partly due to short format making nuance
| impossible, but mostly for the effect Tweets easy embeddability
| had on reporting (3 Tweets from random people should not serve as
| the main basis for an article in my opinion), I must say, I feel
| very sorry for the people forced to work at that company under
| that management.
| [deleted]
| choppaface wrote:
| Well "forced to execute" is somewhat subjective. If you are
| convinced leadership is doing the "wrong thing," then best to
| either leave or accept that you're just collecting your
| paycheck.
|
| In the case of Twitter, the new owner has thoroughly broken the
| advertising business and is trying to aggressively pursue a new
| version of the data business Twitter once had-- E.g. Google's
| Caffeine, which Twitter also eventually lost
| https://searchengineland.com/google-search-algorithm-change-...
| ... The statements about "too many scrapers" are almost
| certainly as illegitimate as the previous pre-acquisition
| statements about "too many bots."
|
| The nature of business is that there's no judiciary or
| referee... the purpose of a business is to make money. Tech
| businesses just happen to hire lots of academically-oriented
| engineers who developed their skills in a different
| environment. It's possible to build a culture of "fairness" in
| a business, but at the end of the day even Google dropped
| "don't be evil."
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Well "forced to execute" is somewhat subjective. If you
| are convinced leadership is doing the "wrong thing," then
| best to either leave or accept that you're just collecting
| your paycheck._
|
| Ia, Unless your visa is sponsored by your employer.
| threeseed wrote:
| And you have a young family.
|
| And it's a tough market where 5% of IT engineers across the
| board have recently been let go.
|
| Even non visa holders at Twitter have had to wait it out,
| sometimes months, until a suitable job was found.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Cry me a river, IT workers especially the ones working
| for SV companies are one of the most privileged people
| out there.
| lrvick wrote:
| I do not feel bad for anyone working for Twitter. Employment is
| a choice in this country.
| roughly wrote:
| That will be the case once H1-Bs are reformed and universal
| healthcare becomes real. Until then, this is an unrealistic
| and cruel position.
| lrvick wrote:
| Fair point. I was only considering the perspective of US
| citizens.
|
| It does make me wonder how much the ratio of forced labor
| H1B situations has gone up at Twitter as US citizens all
| bail from the fire.
|
| I cannot imagine why anyone would work there if they had a
| choice at this point.
| [deleted]
| grecy wrote:
| Not if you want healthcare and to keep paying your car loan,
| student loan and mortgage.
|
| I'd say employment is less a choice in the us than any other
| oced country
| sanderjd wrote:
| I'm curious about this: When you were experiencing this, why
| didn't you quit? I truly feel bummed for the people remaining
| at Twitter who are miserable but for whatever reason feel they
| can't just quit.
| praisewhitey wrote:
| >Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things
| are more agitating than being forced to execute on something
| you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried
| and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing
| you to go against your best judgement.
|
| In this case the horrible idea is being forced to push changes
| to production at a moments notice
| beebmam wrote:
| A union vote is the only way to save that platform. Either
| unionize or let the company die.
| drekipus wrote:
| Unions are for the people, not the company
| skymast wrote:
| Never, in the entire history of the world has socialism or
| unions done any good.
| xenospn wrote:
| Hope you're enjoying your weekend!
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Are you an employer, or do you just really like the taste
| of licking boots?
| medium_spicy wrote:
| Haven't been to Norway, then?
| selimnairb wrote:
| Capitalism is the best political-economic system in world
| history, except for all the forms of socialism capitalists
| won't let us try.
| megabless123 wrote:
| I appreciate your honesty about failing high school social
| studies
| krapp wrote:
| Speaking from a US perspective...
|
| Unions are the reason we have a minimum wage, limited work
| week, paid holidays, equal pay for equal work, unemployment
| benefits, workers' comp, the family medical leave act, and
| many more things. If not for unions we would all still be
| doing sixty hour weeks getting paid in company scrip.
|
| "Socialism" brought us Social Security, Medicare, child
| labor laws and agriculture subsidies, health insurance,
| food assistance, housing subsidies, energy and utilities
| subsidies, and education and childcare assistance. And it
| brings the rest of the modern world free education and
| healthcare.
| natebc wrote:
| When I was 13 I had a lot of fun at the beach with my
| friends. Sure beat the heck out of working 100 hours a week
| at the paper mill in town.
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| Be able to brag about ones lack of education takes a lot of
| courage. Kudos to you sir.
| pasdoy wrote:
| Very bold claim. In the history of the world like you say,
| unions shaped our world in a good way. Certainly not all
| unions, but it literally saved workers life from corporate
| abuse. Check the Asbestos Corporation in 1950s.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos_strike.
| Chinjut wrote:
| Do you enjoy having weekends off from working on somebody
| else's goals?
| macintux wrote:
| Are you by any chance working 40 hour weeks?
| froggychairs wrote:
| You can disagree with workplace organizing or the political
| positions of socialism, but this type of generalization is
| anti-intellectual, lazy thinking, and just wrong.
|
| Although yes. I don't think Twitter unionizing will save
| the site.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| At least once have I done a CC blast as a form of insurance
| when being asked to do something absolutely boneheaded.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| You gotta get executives in writing sometimes or they'll
| throw you under the bus later.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| If executives are throwing you under a bus, make an exit.
| There's no coming back from a clown show like that.
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