Social Media Companies: Tell it to Earth

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How much longer is Twitter going to last?
	A few weeks
	A few months
	A few years
	About as long as the rest of humanity

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

Coming soon to a timeline near you: the Fail Whale comeback tour.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-how-a-twitter-engineer-says-it-will-break-in-the-coming-weeks/

MIT Technology Review posted:

�Sometimes you�ll get notifications that are a little off,� says one engineer currently working at Twitter, who�s concerned about the way the platform is reacting after vast swathes of his colleagues who were previously employed to keep the site running smoothly were fired. (That last sentence is why the engineer has been granted anonymity to talk for this story.) After struggling with downtime during its �Fail Whale� days, Twitter eventually became lauded for its team of site reliability engineers, or SREs. Yet this team has been decimated in the aftermath of Musk�s takeover. �It�s small things, at the moment, but they do really add up as far as the perception of stability,� says the engineer.

The small suggestions of something wrong will amplify and multiply as time goes on, he predicts�in part because the skeleton staff remaining to handle these issues will quickly burn out. �Round-the-clock is detrimental to quality, and we�re already kind of seeing this,� he says. [...]

He presents a dystopian future where issues pile up as the backlog of maintenance tasks and fixes grows longer and longer. �Things will be broken. Things will be broken more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in more severe ways,� he says. �Everything will compound until, eventually, it�s not usable.�

Twitter�s collapse into an unusable wreck is some time off, the engineer says, but the telltale signs of process rot are already there. It starts with the small things: �Bugs in whatever part of whatever client they�re using; whatever service in the back end they�re trying to use. They�ll be small annoyances to start, but as the back-end fixes are being delayed, things will accumulate until people will eventually just give up.�

Not entirely shocked that this isn't getting as much play from the usual sources, since the circus is in town and the sideshow's doing booming business. Ben Krueger, a site reliability expert, says if current conditions are allowed to stay in place, significant, visible issues with the tech will start showing up within six months. And that's the optimistic estimate.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2022 22:06

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 20:13

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

Sodomy Hussein posted:

The outcome of everyone going "lol gently caress you" to the idea in real time. Nothing much will change about Twitter except a death spiral of stability.

Speaking of which, the latest "Elon fired too many people" article turned up at ZDNet, with this one touching on specific bits of the technical infrastructure that runs Twitter. So here's a little snatch of that to wet your whistle:

ZDNet posted:

Twitter runs on CentOS 7. This free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone comes to the end of its life at the end of June next year. The leading choices for what to replace it with should be RHEL 9, Rocky Linux, or AlmaLinux. But instead of working on on that transition, what few system administrators Twitter has left are both trying to get the platform ready for Musk's laundry list of new features and keeping it patched and up-to-date.

That's a problem. You see, unlike RHEL, where a big part of the attraction is that you can depend on Red Hat for first-rate support, CentOS, Rocky, and AlmaLinux are all primarily meant for companies with in-house staff who already know Linux servers backward and forward. That's no longer the case at Twitter.

As Terra Field, a Honeycomb Staff Platform Engineer, pointed out, "An infrastructure the size of Twitter will not fail overnight, but it is going to relatively quickly go into a degraded state. The few platform people that remain will have their necks exactly at the waterline. It will not take much to sink." Field's right.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2022 17:20

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

A few snatches of things from Reuters:

Reuters posted:

In a poll on the workplace app Blind, which verifies employees through their work email addresses and allows them to share information anonymously, 42% of 180 people chose the answer for "Taking exit option, I'm free!"

A quarter said they had chosen to stay "reluctantly," and only 7% of the poll participants said they "clicked yes to stay, I'm hardcore."[...]

On Thursday evening, the version of the Twitter app used by employees began slowing down, according to one source familiar with the matter, who estimated that the public version of Twitter was at risk of breaking during the night.

"If it does break, there is no one left to fix things in many areas," the person said, who declined to be named for fear of retribution.

In a private chat on Signal with about 50 Twitter staffers, nearly 40 said they had decided to leave, according to the former employee.

And in a private Slack group for Twitter's current and former employees, about 360 people joined a new channel titled "voluntary-layoff," said a person with knowledge of the Slack group.

A separate poll on Blind asked staffers to estimate what percentage of people would leave Twitter based on their perception. More than half of respondents estimated at least 50% of employees would leave.[...]

In an apparent jab at Musk's call for employees to be "hardcore," the Twitter profile bios of several departing engineers on Thursday described themselves as "softcore engineers" or "ex-hardcore engineers."

# ¿ Nov 18, 2022 03:13

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

Young Freud posted:

Someone reposted this analysis of Elon's tweets and he's become increasingly terminally online.
https://twitter.com/zbloom89/status/1593664308835221507?s=20&t=N20n3penE13nFrlxj75MPA
There's a joke that Elon's heart is probably going to give out before the servers at Twitter will.

Sounds like a joke in earnest. He is 51, after all.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2022 19:13

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

Young Freud posted:

What I am seeing is that activists and journalists are congregating on Mastodon, where the federation allows them to communicate one another while moderating each other's server's content. One of those interesting things is that the Holocaust Museum posted that it took them 5 years to get 50K followers on Twitter, but they got that in a month on Mastodon.

Meanwhile, celebs and some creatives are going to tumblr. Like Mark Ruffalo just put out a "going away" tweet to his 8.3 million followers and the only link he has is Tumblr.

My guess is that how did you spend your time on Twitter? Was it mostly in activism or reporting the news? Mastodon. Was it mostly shitposting and retweeting funny stuff or making memes about things? Tumblr.

It came out a few weeks ago that Automattic is looking into linking Tumblr with ActivityPub, which would instantly make it the biggest player in the fediverse. It's intriguing, but there's already an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, and Automattic's WordPress.com will be happy to let you activate it if you bump up your membership to the $40/mo business class. That steep of an upsell pings my questioner radar like crazy.

But really, that last set of questions is the main thing that's been tripping up the Mastodon onboarding process to this point. The main thing the "join" page is asking right at the door is "What do you use social media for?", like your output as much as who you follow, so that they can kit you out with a home base that you click with while you look into the wider federated space. There are plenty of general instances, but people are saying they have a different quality of experience when they "vibe" with a more specialized one.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2022 19:48

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

The general gist of it is that if/when Tumblr gets mainstreamed into the collection of platforms that uses ActivityPub, we should be able to follow and reshare Mastodon accounts on Tumblr and vice versa, unless the mods of your instance block their traffic at the door on principle. That's an extreme move and would usually be a last resort, but it's within the realm of possibility.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2022 20:34

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

Young Freud posted:

Guess what Mr. Free Speech banned while allowing Neo-Nazis back on the site...
.https://twitter.com/steinkobbe/status/1603002493377695744?t=MzIjSQdTweXTKq29bfnPqQ&s=19

nine-gear crow posted:

Nice work, Elonk, you dumb shithead, now there's gonna be like 20 of these accounts by lunchtime today.

Still up on Truth Social, oddly enough. That's going to make for an interesting flex at some point.

EasyEW fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Dec 14, 2022

# ¿ Dec 14, 2022 19:19

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

haveblue posted:

Mastodon has definitely been thrust into a spotlight it's not ready for, but I could see these problems resolving themselves over time if one federation emerges as "the" Mastodon. Someone could make a thin frontend for it with a friendly flow that handles the process of getting signups and delegating them to instances, and that would be the entry point that gets advertised and shared. Instances would under this model be less about community identity and more about load balancing- you wouldn't join "the furry Mastodon", you'd join "charitablebrand27.mastodon.social"

A huge thing Mastodon's got going for it at the moment is that out of all the potential microblogging contenders that have been getting the media spotlight, it's more or less the only one that's out of beta (or probably even past v1.0), so once you pick your home base you can get rolling in a hurry. I signed up for a Cohost account and finally got approved for posting privileges earlier this week, one month into my "two day waiting period".

# ¿ Dec 17, 2022 21:41

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

Eric Cantonese posted:

I hate linking to the NY Post, but this is the most recent story I can find about how capricious and distracting Musk's leadership style can be.

https://nypost.com/2023/01/18/spacex-employees-enjoy-calm-as-elon-musk-distracted-by-twitter/

I think there was some longer piece from an anonymous blogger talking about Tesla and SpaceX employees implementing special routines when Musk was around to keep him from interfering too much into real work. I wish I could find it now, but it may be buried in the C-Spam Doomsday Economics thread.

This might be the one you're looking for.

My favorite example: "The funniest example of �stage management� I can remember is this dude on the IT security team. He had a script running in a terminal on one of his monitors that would output random garbage, Matrix-style, so that it always looked like he was doing Important Computer Things to anyone who walked by his desk."

# ¿ Feb 27, 2023 19:18

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

I keep getting booze and Nordstrom ads on YouTube over Roku, and my desktop recommendations include a lot of church services. Not entirely convinced they got my number just yet.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2023 02:10

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

Automata 10 Pack posted:

What? Lol this loving rules.

You might get a kick out of this one, then.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2023 15:29

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

Ah dammit. If I had known that was the bar, I wouldn't have made a keep-alive tweet yesterday.

# ¿ May 11, 2023 19:09

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

A totally unintentional (I'm sure) side effect of today's shift: If you were leaning on Nitter to run the blockade, you might've just lost your Plan B.

e:

Alctel posted:

Who is actually still using Twitter at this point aside from right wingers

There are a lot of people who don't give enough of a poo poo about (or are so demoralized about) politics to make it their entire online identity--at least that's the impression they want to give--or who recognize what a nightmare it is to scoop out a community and reconstruct it on new ground.

And sports fans.

Actually that last one should've been first. And it could've been the only one, really.

EasyEW fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Jun 30, 2023

# ¿ Jun 30, 2023 20:54

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

It's really fascinating following the whole "how did SA dodge that bullet?" conversation knowing that whenever the forums come up in any media these days, it's usually as an example of "the old, bad Internet".

Soonmot posted:

I never left Facebook, even though the site is doing everything possible to push me away. I don't even reliably get notifications on replies my friends make to my posts, and my feed outside of the front end I use, is showing posts people made days ago. The fact that I have to use an outside program to force chronological posting is bad enough.

But just like the folks still on Twitter, this is where my community is. I cannot do discord. Social media was a mistake

For the record, there is still a built-in option on Facebook to cut the algorithm crap and sort your feed chronologically, but it's been years since you could make it your default, and they keep changing what they call it and where it is on the sidebar menu because they really, really don't want you to use it.

It's "Feeds > All" at the moment. Who knows what it'll be by next weekend.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2023 17:18

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

If you've got Instagram you've already got the login, and it comes with @dril preinstalled

EasyEW fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Jul 6, 2023

# ¿ Jul 6, 2023 02:18

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

StumblyWumbly posted:

"Scraped my legal name from somewhere else" sounds pretty unbelievable, but I don't use FB or know much about it.
I'm sure somewhere in the FB ad machine knows the info, but there's no profit in putting in a whole system to change people's names.

From personal experience, it sounds...plausible? I've done some Instacart shopping for my mom, using her account information in a separate browser profile (in Chrome, if that helps this make any sense). A couple of times I've gone back to my user profile and the Facebook ads showed me her full grocery list on my timeline. If nothing else, it felt like something crossed over that shouldn't have.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2023 18:40

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

Not to break up the X-a-thon, but a quick note that the Kids Online Safety Act, a classic bit of overreach which is the first step in forcing every platform being discussed here (and presumably this one) to card you at the door, is going to be discussed in committee on Thursday. It has 39 cosponsors in the Senate, so if one of those Senators is yours, you might want to get in touch with them. And if not, just check in anyway.

Apart from the issues the EFF bring up--like giving certain state attorneys general a new tool to hold the rest of the US hostage--the endgame is totally stable X/Twitter owner Elon Musk sitting on a government-mandated database of every user's real name, address and photo ID. A power I'm sure he'll use responsibly.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2023 18:11

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

Elon's first AI model just rolled out and three guesses what dataset they're training it on.

Futurism posted:

Over the weekend, Elon Musk's startup xAI released its first AI model, called Grok, to a select group of users � and judging by screenshots posted by X-formerly-Twitter employees, the model will be a far more crass and dad joke-prone chatbot compared to more professional offerings like ChatGPT.

After X employee Christopher Stanley asked the bot when it's OK to listen to Christmas music, for instance, Grok promptly told him that anybody who complains should "shove a candy cane up their rear end and mind their own drat business."

In other words, it's quintessentially Elon Musk, who's always had a strong penchant for trolling behavior and calling his critics names.[...]

The AI is "designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don�t use it if you hate humor!" the company's website reads.

Worst of all, the AI "has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform," suggesting it'll lean on extremely skewed and fundamentally untrustworthy data. "It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems."

X's vague documentation and the latest screenshots leave plenty of questions unanswered. For one, we still don't know if this kind of aggression will be part of the regular chatbot or if there'll be an opt-in "fun mode," as one recently shared clip suggests.

So...Grok? Does that mean QBot was already taken?

# ¿ Nov 8, 2023 16:29

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

You know, spicy questions. Questions that fill you with energy and make your face feel numb.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1720643054065873124

# ¿ Nov 8, 2023 16:59

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

SgtSteel91 posted:

So for a few weeks now my YouTube history page has been filling up with random music videos and other videos I�ve never watched. Does anyone else have this problem?

I'm going to go out on a limb and ask if you still have the feature enabled where the YouTube UI will start inline playback of any video that you hover over for more than a few seconds (as opposed to a silent 3-second preview). It's been my experience that every one of those, even if you linger on them for just a few seconds, will show up in your history and screw up your recommendations, and if you don't want that you have to manually disable the feature on every device you use.

All the other things are great security practices, but never forget that YT is overloaded with stupid platform tricks.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 14:03

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

If you haven't yet, go into the Google account security panel and at the very least sign out any devices that you're 100% sure aren't yours.

Google: one password, a world of hurt.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2024 05:33

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 20:13

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

Unless your instance preemptively blocked threads.net from day one. Which a lot of them did.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 16:20

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