I remember reading comments on how the site still fine after firing so many people. "What do they do".
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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People fail to understand that large projects have inertia. He could have shuttered all twitter offices, fired all employees, and only paid the server bills, and the website would probably continue to function just fine for a few months.
But as a devops/SRE, this whole saga has been awesome to watch
Weren't they not paying their AWS bills for a while?
Back in March it was reported they weren’t paying their AWS bill. Two weeks ago it was reported they weren’t paying their GCP bill either.
Back in March it was reported they weren’t paying their AWS bill. Two weeks ago it was reported they weren’t paying their GCP bill either.
And often the tipping point is invisible. Some small routine or service degrades, but outwardly everything still works fine... there is just more strain on the services and clients that use that service, causing them to slowly degrade over the next few hours, days, or weeks, which in turn puts more strain on the services that call those services... etc etc.
Until one day the system is so degraded major things start breaking. It seems like it came out of nowhere, but the initial failure happened weeks ago and has been cascading since then.
Once a system hits that point it's often not enough to just fix the initial problem because so much of the ecosystem around it has been thrown out of whack.
See the film Passengers for an example of cascade failures from systems trying to cover for each other.
The Expanse has a whole b-plot about an artificial ecosystem going through cascade failure in one of its arcs.
As a way-too seasoned web developer who appreciates working alongside great SREs, this has been pretty interesting. I'm honestly surprised more hasn't gone wrong but maybe that's yet to come. Since they are (I imagine) losing users instead of growing it might actually avoid running into future scaling issues that were looming.
Feels like elon doesnt even use his own site
Feels like all social media is being strained for a reason and the free flow of information is at the center of it.
Twitter and Reddit actions are also in line with suppression of content farm bots and data scrapers.
The internet and social media landscape is changing forever, and it will keep on doing so! hang on tight :)
Rich people want to influence elections and the easiest way is to destroy Social media, especially those where more left leaning voters congregate.
Yep! All social media sites can see the bombshell that is LLM's, and they're working to try and create their own applications behind the scene, or at the very least monetize their datasets for usage by the likes of OpenAI. There's a LOT of money in that space right now!
I double dare u/spez to follow his idol. Do it.
2023: the year the internet died
The enshitification of the internet is accelerating.
There's a theory that the internet has been mostly dead for a while and it's just a lot of bots talking to bots.
The year the corproate internet died. The internet was built to share information and communicate. Corporations trying to profit came later
how can they make so much bad decisions in such a short time????
They have Elon, he's self proclaimed genius after all.
Are we still entertaining the notion that the man isn't deliberately destroying Twitter? Because it definitely seems conscious and purposeful, and has for a while now IMO.
If he is, then it will be almost as great a service to humanity as killing the internal combustion engine.
My theory is that Reddit and twitter are being deliberately killed because they are too good at letting the proletariat self-organize. They don’t want an Arab Spring of the west.
Let’s not underestimate the hubris of stupid rich people
People talk a lot of insurrection but it’s very easy to sit on your ass and say “fuck the establishment” and feel like you’re doing something. When in fact, the platform is the very opiate that stops people from doing anything worthwhile
I'd agree with that if people weren't at each other's throats all the damn time on both platforms.
I'm not convinced that part of that wasn't bots trying to hamper productive discussion. They were rampant before, but the amount of bots had gotten ridiculous over the last year or so.
I swear, a bunch of rich people were bored, got in a room, and decided to see who could kill a social media site
A modern day Trading Places.
"Mortimer, I bet this little pig boy nerd can run a social media giant into the ground in 1 month."
"Well, I think that's only possible with a rich tech snob at the helm, and even then it would take him 6 months!"
"The usual bet?"
"$1"
The corporations cant stand that us poors have access to seeing how they are fuckin us over.They are literally killing the planet for greed
The corporations cant stand that us poors have access to seeing how they are fuckin us over.They are literally killing the planet for greed
I’m on Twitter to follow some pro-labor activists, and the pro-labor activists are on Twitter because that’s where people who most need to see labor actions are. The Fediverse is good if your audience is tech-educated, or if your audience is specific friends and you all switched at once. Retail workers who just had a problem with wage theft and need some advice are probably posting to Twitter and they’re certainly not going to go through learning what the Fediverse is and how to sign up for it on top of stressing about the wage theft.
As I understand it, it's likely because he didn't pay his server bills to Google. and wasn't able to migrate enough stuff off in time. Maybe he thought that like the dudes he's renting buildings from, he could just not pay and they'd wait. The difference of course being that, Google can repurpose those servers within a few days. Those buildings might remain empty for months.
I heard that the new CEO paid the bills and made even larger deal with Google.
Per the article right under the one you linked, they ended up renewing the contract.
Another bad decision from Elon.
Firing most of the people that maintain a service and overworking those that remain has drastic consequences for that service. Who knew?
Can't wait for spez to copy this decision too.
He's spez's inspiration, after all.
He sort of did already with the whole >100 API calls.
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