[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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-07-01 23:00 UTC)