#twitter trash fire

[antifataylorswift]

I'm always fascinated by the World Cup despite not really caring about fútbol because it creates such specific load problems for social media sites, especially the large ones. Especially Twitter.

It's a genuinely global event that people are watching simultaneously worldwide, reacting to the same things at the same time — especially as it gets down to the final matches. You'll have upwards of 1 billion people seeing the same saves, bad calls, and goals scored at the same time. Very many of them will be posting about it or tweeting about it.

So you'll get huge, concentrated bursts of traffic happening more-or-less simultaneously. Say that most people who see a crazy goal and want to tweet about it will do so within 1 minute of it being scored — that's a HUGE volume of traffic for a system to deal with on top of already-elevated traffic related to the game.

On top of that, since it only happens every 4 years. Internal systems and the number of users on a given platform have changed, perhaps drastically, since the last time any given site had to deal with it. There was likely some system hardening done for whatever caught on fire last time, but there's no way of knowing if it will be enough. And there's no way of knowing what other system changes will have created other weak points.

For example: during the last world cup in 2018, Twitter reported having 126 million daily active users on its platform. That number has nearly doubled since then — in Q2, Twitter reported 237 million daily active users. The number of monthly-active users is even higher, around 450 million. Naively, that could mean more than twice as much traffic as the last world cup.

The world cup is notorious in software infrastructure and site reliability engineering circles. Teams of engineers will spend weeks doing capacity planning to prepare for it. Teams of engineers will be on-call during the matches, dealing with all of the issues that inevitably will still arise and trying to keep small problems from snowballing into huge problems.

That's under normal operation. Twitter is not operating normally:

The vast majority of its staff was just laid off. Including engineers who do capacity planning for things like the world cup. Especially engineers who specialize in putting out fires.

The few remaining engineers have been pushed to working 60+ hours a week to make tons of intrusive changes to their systems without properly planning for them. Those engineers are certainly tired, overwhelmed, disoriented, and burnt out. They're going to have a hard time responding to issues effectively, especially issues that

On top of that, they've reportedly been trying to reduce their infrastructure footprint to lower costs. Let me tell you from experience: the first things that get cut are there for safety and resiliency to outages. And typically everything that gets cut reduces stability and makes the overall system more fragile. Things like reducing how long you're keeping backups around for, database replicas and standby instances, reducing the CPU and memory available to your various servers and databases and other specialized infrastructure components — they might not be the individual cause of fires, but things like this often play a role in cascading failures.

Maybe it will be totally fine. Maybe whatever infrastructure was in place to deal with huge load spikes still exists and will still behave normally. Maybe it will break a little bit here and there, a few errors, some brief site-wide downtime, but nothing major.

Or maybe it will melt down catastrophically. Only time will tell.

And hey, even if Twitter makes it through the World Cup, New Year's is right around the corner.

[pugoata]

Twitter doesn't like my crochet junimo :(

I'd love to know what flagged this as "sensitive"- is it because he's naked? Do AIs fear the junimussy? Do they think he's making rude gestures? Do they think he's a weapon of mass destruction?

Next time, I'm just gonna crochet a junimo with massive honkers next. Maybe with a fat doobie and a gun. I'll give them a reason to flag me.

[paranormeow7]

Meanwhile in Twitterclan….

i didn’t put any effort in2 this I am so sorry

[raindoecoates]

Anyone checked in on the platform formerly known as Twitter lately? I think it's safe to let it go. That is, unless the Earth really is flat and breasts are the new currency. It has become like the walled off city in "Escape from New York." I opened it tonight and actually scrolled for the first time in a while and every post I saw was either porn or conspiracy theories. RIP Twitter.

[dudja]

Wrestling LEGEND right here

[boilingmarsart]

wip dump bc ive been so busy i havent finished anything in weeks lmao T▽T

[xipiti]

How much would you pay for this flaming organic-waste dumpster?

Twitter began its highly anticipated mass layoffs Thursday evening by eliminating its top internal critics. Twitter’s Ethical AI team, according to former staff, is no more.

Multiple members of Twitter’s Machine Learning, Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) team, including its former leader, posted on Twitter saying they were no longer at the company. At least one of the former workers suggested the entire team was being disbanded. The apparent layoffs impacting the company’s strongest internal watchdog group comes as thousands more brace for cuts potentially impacting around half of the company’s staff according to previous reports.

But wait, there’s more! You also get:

Five former Twitter employees who were fired on Thursday have already filed a lawsuit against the social media company for failing to adhere to California’s WARN Act, a law that requires large employers to provide 60 days of notice to employees before mass layoffs. And the lawsuit even calls out another company run by Elon Musk for doing the exact same thing.

Twitter employees started receiving layoff notices late Thursday, and while it’s not clear exactly how many people will ultimately get the boot, roughly half of the company’s 7,500 employees are expected to lose their jobs. The layoffs are part of a plan instigated by Musk, according to several reports, though he didn’t even have the decency to sign his name to a notice that went out to all employees on Thursday.

[bobokitty]

so that twitter situation, eh?

[monkeyfishgirl]

Ummm...

[cartoonico]

Wow, so in addition to only being able to see like 20 posts before my TL cuts off despite the limit being supposed to be 600, Twitter isn't letting me Like, Comment, Reply, Tweet/Post nor even follow new people. That trash app is quite literally unusable.

[msviolacea]

Every so often someone will retweet a particular mid-grade Hollywood screenwriter (director? idk) onto my Twitter feed and I’ll be reminded when I go to click on it that she blocked me last year because I responded to someone else’s incredulous comment on the screenwriter’s belligerent pro-NFT thing. Like, I didn’t even tag her in, so she very deliberately went out of her way to read the comments and block people there. Which is her right, block anyone who doesn’t bring you joy, but it’s still amusing every time I remember it to know that even successful people are both dumb and thin-skinned. Makes me feel better about my own weaknesses, y’know?

Also I hope she regrets that whole NFT thing now. Probably not, but hey, I can be privately petty on my own time.

[thebuginthecornerofyourroom]

Can't think of something better to decimate the twitter population

[cloistergardens]

I’m very interested to see how the way content creators interact with their fan bases will change if twitter truly collapses. like I for instance use twitter a lot to track streamers’ schedules or see memes they talk about, or to see fun discussions and media recs from the academics I follow. it’s an easy way to keep fans updated and also build the kind of parasocial relationship that gets you a following. I wonder what we’ll do without that though, bc it’s such a thing we’ve become dependent on and like. twitter has post notifications, but instagram barely does and it certainly doesn’t have story notifications. is tumblr going to have to beef up stuff and will we have to deal with tumblr post notifications? does mastodon do anything like that? this is insignificant in the grand scheme but it’s something I interact with daily so Im interested to see how that part of my life is gonna change

[flock-of-feral-plague-doctors]

For the low low price of 8 dollars a month, I could impersonate Barack Obama on Twitter and nowhere else

-Gabriel [Hy/Hymn]

[xipiti]

Elon Musk has taken over Twitter—most recently, dissolving the company’s board and naming himself CEO. And amid the transition, the platform has apparently limited its own ability to police misinformation, just in time for the U.S. midterm elections.

Musk and co. have reportedly barred most of the employees on Twitter’s Trust and Safety team from accessing their usual content moderation and policy enforcement tools, according to a report from Bloomberg attributed to an unnamed number of anonymous sources. Some of these workers are reportedly unable to impose penalties on accounts that violate Twitter’s rules on hate speech, or posts that include misleading or offensive content.

Generally, site moderation works through multiple levels of screening. There’s automatic detection and enforcement tools, plus external contractors who review content. Both of these protocols are still active on the site, said Bloomberg. However the final level of assessment, which is often deployed for prominent accounts or bigger violations, falls to real-life Twitter employees. Usually, hundreds of workers have the ability to ban or suspend accounts in breach of policy. Right now, only about 15 people on staff are able to do so.

[rotting-in-your-arms]

thanks tumblr