Twitter & its ongoing usage

[organic]

Given Twitter is in a state of turmoil at the moment, we should raise the topic

At the moment tweets can't be viewed without an account. We can embed but if you want to see the full, original pictures for example you have to open the tweet first and it'll prompt a login. Then now a rate limit has been introduced in an effort to monetize Twitter

My suggestion is to, at least temporarily, copy the full contents of any linked tweets out into the reply box

For instance:



Could be instead linked as

Carlo Platella [@RacEng2 on Twitter]:

A glimpse of the updated #McLaren
#F1 #AustrianGP #F1Tech

Maybe this is unnecessary, but just finding out from these changes how much reliance on Twitter there is in f1technical space & frustrated by that

[CMSMJ1]

Twitter may go the way of Myspace yet.

It is really dying on it's feet isn't it?

If that strategy works for getting pictures and detail into posts then it's surely a good workaround.

[MtthsMlw]

Good point, thanks for raising awareness. You also seem to be able to right click the embedded tweet and open the picture in a new tab to get better resolution. I like to post pictures of tweets this way though you sometimes have to change the URL to say "large" instead of "small" at the end.

[Zynerji]

Twitter may go the way of Myspace yet.

It is really dying on it's feet isn't it?

If that strategy works for getting pictures and detail into posts then it's surely a good workaround.

Don't let the rope tightening while pulling a knot out allow you to fear the integrity of the rope.

He's stated that Twitter is a coding mess. Couple that with the ddos-like AI scraping, and it will have issues. Let them cook before writing them off.

[organic]

Good point, thanks for raising awareness. You also seem to be able to right click the embedded tweet and open the picture in a new tab to get better resolution. I like to post pictures of tweets this way though you sometimes have to change the URL to say "large" instead of "small" at the end.

I think the best way to post photos is to put "orig" into the url to get the maximum possible for that photo, but thank you for pointing out you can open in a new tab from embedded tweets

That doesn't seem possible on my phone however

[vorticism]

It is really dying on it's feet isn't it?

This meme humors me, the funny thing about FUD posting about twitter is, Musk himself is the original survivor of it. Tesla was defined by auto industry concern trolling for about a decade. Twitter for years had various approaches to forcing and limiting use. Limited reading w/o account. No search w/o account. Various triggers for hard login pages. Etc.

Don't let the rope tightening while pulling a knot out allow you to fear the integrity of the rope.

He's stated that Twitter is a coding mess. Couple that with the ddos-like AI scraping, and it will have issues. Let them cook before writing them off.

The big Web 2.0 projects were quasi government projects funded via inflation and eventually advertising so they never really needed to be particularly good at anything and it shows, for 10 years they never evolved user interface design beyond 1.0 principals. With so much money on tap they ultimately became makework hives, hence the claim of laying off 4/5ths of twitter staff because they were said to be essentially political activists. The 'knots' aren't out totally out yet, spurious bans are still happening f.e., so apparently some 'woke' mods remain, in fact Musk hired one as CEO (lol).

[dialtone]

Twitter is most definitely in a downward spiral, it won't fail because it's still too big, people still use it, and most importantly the competition is still not quite there, but the issue is accessibility of the content linked, and the person in charge has shown that he doesn't really care (or know for the matter) how Twitter works and became what it was before he bought it.

linking + copying I think is a good compromise.

[Zynerji]

Twitter is most definitely in a downward spiral, it won't fail because it's still too big, people still use it, and most importantly the competition is still not quite there, but the issue is accessibility of the content linked, and the person in charge has shown that he doesn't really care (or know for the matter) how Twitter works and became what it was before he bought it.

linking + copying I think is a good compromise.

Twitter is way better than 12 months ago. It just wasn't under attack like it is now.

[dialtone]

Twitter is most definitely in a downward spiral, it won't fail because it's still too big, people still use it, and most importantly the competition is still not quite there, but the issue is accessibility of the content linked, and the person in charge has shown that he doesn't really care (or know for the matter) how Twitter works and became what it was before he bought it.

linking + copying I think is a good compromise.

Twitter is way better than 12 months ago. It just wasn't under attack like it is now.

Except it's not under attack but just hasn't paid the hosting bill to AWS, like he hasn't paid for his office rent in SF, cleaning staff and more.

Their bill is likely in the billions and AWS is likely throttling their bandwidth, which is standard procedure when you don't pay.

Musk then decided to block non accounts from access, which is such a dumb move... Why?

When you block non accounts from access you prevent browser caches from working, this means embedded tweets in pages, which would result in 304s normally and the browser skipping the request (saving money too), the browser has to request over and over each time because they likely result in 401 now which is non cacheable.

How many embedded tweets are there? My estimation is a LOT and when you go from browsers caching this content to requesting anew each time you are EXPLODING the requests which causes a self inflicted DDOS.

In other words the only thing attacking Twitter is, once again, Musk's own incompetence.

Once again this is my field of work, I know this stuff very well.

[dialtone]

Seems like I was quite spot on:

https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057

[vorticism]

he hasn't paid for his office rent in SF

Won't someone think of the bay area rent seekers? This twitter purchase has been quite illustrative; from the woodwork has crawled all of the, in hindsight, predictable political affiliations. Who knew? Followed by endless baby's first FUD posts. Zero self awareness.

Musk then decided to block non accounts from access, which is such a dumb move... Why?

...

In other words the only thing attacking Twitter is, once again, Musk's own incompetence.

Once again this is my field of work, I know this stuff very well.

You post on a website that has technical as its surname, you claim to be an expert, and yet you still can't think of a reason to pull a stunt like this? I just thought of one. And another. Oh, there's another. Smokes really pouring out of my ears right now (rn).

[dialtone]

he hasn't paid for his office rent in SF

Won't someone think of the bay area rent seekers? This twitter purchase has been quite illustrative; from the woodwork has crawled all of the, in hindsight, predictable political affiliations. Who knew? Followed by endless baby's first FUD posts. Zero self awareness.

Musk then decided to block non accounts from access, which is such a dumb move... Why?

...

In other words the only thing attacking Twitter is, once again, Musk's own incompetence.

Once again this is my field of work, I know this stuff very well.

You post on a website that has technical as its surname, you claim to be an expert, and yet you still can't think of a reason to pull a stunt like this? I just thought of one. And another. Oh, there's another. Smokes really pouring out of my ears right now (rn).

Right... Limit the views on tweets for a site that sells ads to its users and already has delivery issues on their ads.

Lmao. Genius move.

and FUD... that they aren't paying their bills to either Google or Amazon is well documented, that they wanted to move back in house also but they were running very late in the project, that their infrastructure has gone down the shithole is extremely well documented by the Ron Desantis announcement fiasco. You cannot FUD when there's ample proof of what's going on. clown show.

[vorticism]

Wouldn't have to be a genius move, just basic trial and error experimentation. Pointing and laughing is, like I mentioned, reminiscent of 'range anxiety' and other tropes. The guy obv doesn't care about public perception in the trad sense; Tesla famously had/has no marketing/advertising dept. All that matters to him the product itself and its eventual popularity; with cars he had to sell a bunch of sub 200 mile range cars before selling 400 mi range cars. You might be horrified to know how many perfectly good cars they crashed into a wall during this process.

[dialtone]

Wouldn't have to be a genius move, just basic trial and error experimentation. Pointing and laughing is, like I mentioned, reminiscent of 'range anxiety' and other tropes. The guy obv doesn't care about public perception in the trad sense; Tesla famously had/has no marketing/advertising dept. All that matters to him the product itself and its eventual popularity; with cars he had to sell a bunch of sub 200 mile range cars before selling 400 mi range cars. You might be horrified to know how many perfectly good cars they crashed into a wall during this process.

That's not how you do experimentation... And definitely not how you do it in advertising. Losing 80% of staff, having your accounts throttled, bombing important events for your own political party, allowing third parties to impersonate your own account or important institutional accounts leading to stock drops (like when he opened up the blue checkmark only to reintroduce the gold checkmark a week later).

This nonsense is just incompetence of coming in thinking you're smarter than everyone and can do it better from scratch only to discover stuff was a certain way for a reason. This reinvention from first principle is one of the dumbest things the bay area does.

Every company experiments, even brutally, but threatening your core business is just dumb, that's your cash cow. He's just betting his market power is strong enough and one day he might discover it isn't and will lose the investment. Especially when this whole nonsense started with him saying that Twitter had too many bots and he was going to clean it up. Never seen someone destroy his/her own reputation so quickly.

As for the marketing dept and such at Tesla, plenty of companies do it, look at Tailscale for startups or even Google grew where it is with minimal marketing. When tech is good it comes easy because you churn few and have happy customers. Tesla was the first real electric car company, press will do your marketing. They still make crap build quality cars that squeak every bump but they showed the importance of software to the rest of car makers, maybe they'll wake up.

Unlike you I can see the good stuff done with Tesla or SpaceX and how incompetent he is with Twitter. I don't need to gargle his balls every time.

[vorticism]

You misunderstand how artificial and overvalued Twitter was, and much of Silicon Valley for that matter. They had a pipeline of practically free money for decades. For various reasons the taps have been shutting in recent years leading to things like monied hardware guys buying software firms. Two different worlds; culture clash inevitable. Apple and Google never figured out how to make a car; yet Tesla wrote software and designed chips and boards. Social media has a lot of non back end overhead; you have to ask, for what purpose? Bots, moderation, curation, etc.; the defining chars of Web 2.0. Imagine if Vodafone/Verizon/phone providers started hiring mods and started eavesdropping calls and texts, and banning customers; then you start to understand what social media is and how inefficient it is and completely removed from deserving the 'tech' demonym.