UKC

Twitter is on a downward spiral. It's used by 100s of millions for news, emergency communication, social chat, so this is a bit irritating.

However it is trivial to say Google or even Wiki collapsing. They are pretty much essential to everyday life now.

Is there a need for contingency planning for this sort of thing now, like with water, electricity outages etc?

Do hard copy backups of Razzle from 1987 count?

There are other search engines.

Wiki relies on user funding. Stick some money to them.

Not sure what we'd all do if UKC collapsed...

That's one aspect covered!

Go climbing? 🧗‍♂️🙄

Bit like this guy:
 

Convert to Catholicism and pontificate at random members of the public?

The other channel...

I don't have another channel.

Well, apart from Audiokarma...

I’ve still got an AOL CD so i’ll be alright

Google search could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn't be more than a minor inconvenience to most people, even though most of the alternative search engines rely on Google indexing so they would also disappear.

If Google or Amazon's servers/web hosting/cloud hosting disappeared, the modern world as we know it probably stops functioning.

Does google have the world's biggest bell-end in charge?

E

Currently no, thankfully. Twitter didn't a few weeks ago...

Yes it is a bit irritating that the world is using Twitter for news,emergency communications and arranging insurrection in the USA by its own president.

You think posters, and pamphlets were a better option? I do see your thinking.

I'll need to dig out my laminator...

Less echo chambers for keyboard warriors to inhabit.

I wouldn't be worrying too much about wikipedia.

The entire English language wiki database will fit on a single 20TB hard drive, which you could temporarily host in your own house for yourself for about £400. 

Dropbox is 2TB. Just for me. 1 user. They have 700million registered users, 15million with 2TB or greater paid-for accounts. They have no hardware, it all lives on Amazon AWS. 

If AWS fails, it's back to paper. 

Twitter is collapsing because Elon Musk doesn't realize his employees have better options and thinks he's smart and his management style is great when in fact he only gets away with treating people like crap because there's a limited number of places for engineers to work on electric cars and Rockets. There's tonnes of jobs in the US for software engineers and others who want to work in tech. He's quickly finding out if you fire everyone or they quit then you're done. Google execs aren't that stupid or egotistical, at least not in the sense Musk is.

Nor were twitter execs a few weeks ago. Things can go wrong quickly is the point.

Interesting. And a good reminder to make a few backups!

I haven't seen the Elon Musk show but on the trailer on radio there's someone saying he's smarter than Einstein! 😂

They meant 'a rock'...

Do you reckon that you're more intelligent than him?

I don't know. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have made the long series of remarkably dickish moves that he has made over the last few years. I'm sure he's an intelligent bloke, in one sense. But he seems to lack the emotional intelligence required not to make these errors. I'm aware of my limitations. He doesn't appear to be aware of his.

Storage is not usually the issue, as you've pointed out it's super cheap! The cost comes from the infrastructure needed to handle the rate of traffic, and that IS significant 

Is the 20TB just the text or does it include media as well? Does it include all versions or just latest edit? I'm curious

Three very different companies with totally different revenue models.

Wikipedia relies on public funding. They will stay around as long as people like us continue to donate.

Twitter relies almost exclusively on advertising revenue, which is part of the problem it now faces. The uncertainty before the takeover and the chaos of the changes being put in place after takeover are eroding advertiser trust. Even without that, there would be an uphill struggle to get the platform's spam/troll problems under control, restore advertiser confidence, and grow revenue (as increased regulatory pressure has and will continue to drive up costs). They may, or may not weather this storm, too early to say for sure.

Google (Alphabet) has a huge advertising revenue, but also a very device portfolio spanning cloud services, mobile devices, AI/science, productivity, etc. They are likely to be here for some time to come.

More contingency planning is needed for centralised infrastructure failures. DNS service issues, ISP issues, BGP leaks, cloud provider outages, and so on. While all these systems are highly resilient and have multiple redundancies, they can and do break and the impacts can be widespread. 

Not "probably" unfortunately but certainly. Food distribution, all transport including shipping, the financial world, energy production and distribution and so much else is done for without the Internet. There's no going back to 1950s days, that is pre-Internet, now

Is it? Quantify it.

Ooh. A Musk sycophant arrives.

Not in the slightest, I’m actively shorting Tesla but do carry on.. you will have some evidence rather than a personal slur I presume! Because all I can see that you’ve done is link your dislike of an individual, of whom I have no real opinion either way, to what you’ve read on the internet about a service collapsing that has had no outages, no decline in quality, nothing. Yes there’s been a bit of hoo-haa over the verification stuff but your initial points about news, emergency communication and social chat have shown zero decline in availability or quality - I say that as an active daily browser and an unoccasional poster on Twitter.

Do you read the news? We have 

A CEO telling staff bankruptcy is possible 

50%of employers sacked 

More employees leaving after being told to work unreasonable hours 

Advertisers halting and pausing spend 

Regulators in the US and EU warning about data security etc.

Other than that, all good.

If bankruptcy is possible now after offloading a huge percent of the workforce then it was even more so before the take over.

Take overs generally result in a reduction in the work force when seeking profitability. Fairly standard business practice, markets react well to it on publicly traded companies. See Meta’s share price after they announced huge layoffs recently - not concerned about Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram outages though are you? Not concerned that the remaining staff there are going to have to work longer and harder, are you? 

Advertisers halting spend is offset by wage reduction. 
Data security etc, fair point there perhaps but it doesn’t stop any of your initial points being a concern - the service continues to work, provide news and communication channels to anyone who wishes to use it.

The woman saying that on the show is (or was - I don't remember) the chief HR person at SpaceX.

I found the show interesting.

Zuckerberg hasn't had to lock the 10-20% of his staff still willing to work out to prevent one or hundreds of them sabotaging his new aquisition. He's treating a mature company with valuable salleried staff like a hopeful little startup where people will do the 25hr days for a cut until it booms or folds. That ship sailed yeard ago with Twitter, Musk is just haemoraging the skills and knowledge he needs to even maintain Twitter let alone grow it. That's why it faces bankrupcy.

Jk

Nothing at all to do with the $1.2bn loss in 2020, or $220m loss in 2021 then? Or $125m negative cash flow in it’s last filed accounts? It’s only ever posted two years with profit in existence. So yea, it’s all clearly to do with Musk. Mature company it may be operationally but start up it very much is financially.
Edit - Probably also worth noting that staff levels are now back to where they were when it was last profitable..

Not necessarily. Previously a stable loss making company. Now an unstable one alienating more and more of it's stakeholders.

Yes, but not in a wildly chaotic uncontrolled manner, to the point that some are begged to return.

Indeed, and owned by the Saudis, so to use your own phrase “all good”:

..and here lies the nub of the matter, the business is all being carried out in public, because that’s how Musk operates. That’s how Tesla became a meme stock. Why everyone is so interested in Space X. Nobody has the first clue what goes on in other similar companies. It’s not the first, nor will it be the last, to lay off staff en masse only for some to return. Perhaps not publicly begged, but the mechanism is the same. A bit of bad PR is all, if Twitter is turned around successfully it’ll be long forgotten. If it ends up collapsing it won’t be the straw that broke the camels back, either.

If you think so...

They do. It's not what's happening at Twitter. 

I look forward to revisiting this thread in 6, 12.. 24 months to find that twitter is still chugging along, probably still loss making, but categorically not having collapsed. 

And at the same time you will be able to provide us with a list of company restructuring events in the intervening 6, 12.. 24 months where employees are summoned en masse from across a continent to a meeting that same day showing that this is normal rather than crackpot.  

Alternatively you can accept that there are elements of idiocy atypical of mass layoffs and corporate restructuring.

Why would I? I’m not defending Musk. It’s in my interest that he fails. I asked MG to illustrate this ‘downward spiral’ which he has failed to do other than with a series of ifs, buts and maybes.. because as of this second the user experience hasn’t declined in availability or quality (or lack of, if that’s your stance).

You characterised Twitter restructuring as "Fairly standard business practice".

You should be able to find lots of examples similar or equivalent to summoning en masse from across a continent to a meeting that same day showing that this is "Fairly standard business practice" rather than crackpot.  

I never said hauling people across a continent was standard business practice. I said mass lay offs were. The two are quite distinct claims. Yes, Musk is a bit of a crackpot in his methods.

No, but mass layoffs are not normally done in such an insanely chaotic way with negative respect for the staff.  You'd get The Bobs in and have a go at a sane approach.  There's nothing sane about what's being done at Twitter.

If you've been following the details of this sorry mess, you'll note that Musk is treating anyone but the prolific coders with contempt.  This is foolish in the extreme.  Why? Because Twitter is not like SpaceX, which he appears to be basing his approach on.

• The techies are the critical people at SpaceX because their entire business case is entirely based on smashing engineering barriers.  If you build it, they will come.   There's massive scope for innovation to increase the competitively with other providers and to expand the value of the market by offering services at a price point nobody else can compete with, making previously inconceivable larger scale projects possible.  Their position is heavily elevated over the rest by the sheer weight of their IP which they successfully keep a trade secret.  Still, having proved it possible, others will now try and succeed at doing it to. 
• The business case for Twitter comes down to marketing, not engineering.  It's already built, there's not much innovation to be had, there's absolutely no IP of any real value and what IP there is isn't protectable beyond the name of the business.  I mean, they have 1000+ patents but it's all bullshit and circumventable.

It's not the only way he's treating Twitter like SpaceX.  The whole push for exceptionally hard graft from the staff at Twitter is rank stupidity.  He gets that graft from people at SpaceX because they're directly involved in giving the formerly stale space industry a series of giant kicks up the arse, and they're making news all over the world, regularly, and because it's just fundamentally awesome, and they all get to cheer in their mission control as they launch a freaking car in to orbit out beyond Mars, etc. etc. etc.  How is the job satisfaction from social media ever going to compare to that?  It's not.

Twitter was over valued - I think we agree on that.  Twitter was not profitable - I think we agree on that.  Twitter had way more staff than were needed for something that had exhausted growth and was steady state - I think we'll probably agree on that.  Twitter could become profitable with a well executed restructure and round of layoffs - I think we'll probably agree on that.  Is Musk's approach an appropriate way to do this?  I think we disagree quite significantly.  Time will tell.  Even if it works, I think it's absolutely deplorable in that it maximises the streets and misery for his staff under his duty of care as CEO.  It's contemptible.  As you're noted other parts of the social media industry are doing mass layoffs to, so they may not have an easy time finding another job.  Which is why a good CEO would be careful, measured, considerate and kind when wielding the necessary axe, not some tosspot wanker who does't give a single shit about how any of his employees are going to sleep tonight.  What a tragic journey from genuine technical visionary to complete c**t.

We don’t, and I’ve not once said Musk’s particular methods were either normal or sane, or applauded them. The end goals may be relatively normal, but not necessarily the methods. 

Curious how you are managing that. The only way I'm familiar with as a retail investor is using a single stock leveraged ETF, but these typically only have a time horizon of one day so wouldn't be much use as a long term strategy. More if you had an inkling that Musk was going to do something particularly daft on a given day (not that bad a strategy IMHO). Unless you're not a retail investor.

I gave you a clear list, no ifs or bits.

Currently not much ( if you ignore switching off emailing password reset by accident...). However, many users are moving or setting up parallel accounts on e.g. Mastodon, and it's the user's that provide the value 

I have some cash in ‘long term’ 3x leveraged ETP in my invest account which isn’t directly shorting as such. Typically hold the position anywhere between a few minutes and a few days, depending on the markets. Then also have some in a margin account which is ‘direct’ and generally hold these positions anywhere between seconds and minutes.

If Twitter dies, it will be by a thousand cuts rather than a single catastrophic point of failure. Resiliency is designed into the system, and whilst it might not be as exciting as launching rockets into space, building responsive web services that can serve hundreds of millions of users is not a trivial exercise.

One of the bigger dangers comes from the rather boring regulatory angle. Twitter handles the personal data of hundreds of millions of people, and in all the layoffs it's easy to imagine some responsibilities in the security area have been overlooked. A fine due to a data breach could prove to be very costly.

‘Many users’ - again with the vagueness. Do you have any evidence as to how many ‘many users’ have left Twitter? It’s not really any proof of any downturn in active Twitter users, and the new CEO said to the contrary that there were more Twitter users over the last couple of weeks. Of all the accounts I’ve seen proclaiming to be setting up an account, a grand total of 0 have as a result deleted their Twitter account, all are still posting on Twitter and the majority haven’t done anything on Mastodon beyond a ‘hello world’. Purely anecdotal experience of maybe 20 or 30 accounts of varying sizes, but telling all the same.

Quite likely to be true, as the number of Twitter users is highly correlated with major media events, such as the US Elections and, most recently, The World Cup.

I'll let you Google

You clearly think it will all be fine and Musk is great. Maybe. I doubt it will remain as prominent or effective as now.

Regardless, this wasn't really the point of my OP.

‘Musk is great’ 🤣

Though it doesn't collect much data.  I guess card details if you've been mad enough to pay for the blue tick, but other than that to sign up you only appear to need handle, date of birth and mobile phone number.  Still a leak of course but not a very harmful one.

That's a spectacularly narrow view of the data Twitter has! The bare minimum of data you can manually input to sign up is a tiny slice of the sum total of data Twitter holds on most users. Like every other big tech company, they'll be constantly building up the most detailed profiles of every user that they can get hold of. Plus everyone's direct messages and protected (non-public) tweets. A bad data leak could be immensely painful for users and immensely damaging to Twitter, in terms of reputational damage and legal consequences.

I thought Dropbox was just a means of backing up your files offsite?

Surely the smart answer is to also keep a local backup for those occasions when the broadband connection is down or the provider of your offside backup fails?

 Which requires a lot of.storage. It does rather more than backup, e.g allowing shared access and working in files.

Yes.

If you can borrow the Lemmming's laminator you can have it.

Good plan . It’s just that in my second hand copy somebody has glued pages 42 and 43 together and I always wonder what I’m missing . Can’t be much if the original owner saw fit to do this . 

I don't agree.  Most of the rest of what they collect is public in the form of Tweets - anyone can harvest that, and many organisations do!

Not many people seem to protect their Tweets, and it seems a wholly pointless thing to do as it makes conversations flow very oddly when half of it is missing.

How would you harvest everything that's being tweeted by anybody?

I can't be bothered, but I am sure Twitter's APIs are quite easy to exploit in that sort of way,

I don't think it's that easy. Getting access to the entire feed is not something which Twitter would ever - or has ever - made available.

No, but there are ways to drill into it.

I'd never put anything on Twitter I wouldn't want out there in public.  I don't see the point.  It doesn't serve the same purpose as Whatsapp which is sold as a secure platform for personal interactions, say.

Obviously the majority of the tweets themselves are public. I have no idea how many people protect their tweets, but the number that you actually notice making conversations flow oddly is probably only the tip of the iceberg (as I'd imagine those people are less likely to be engaging in the more high-profile conversations). Even if it's only a miniscule percentage of all tweets, it's still a substantial amount of data that Twitter need to protect. And then there are the entirely private DMs, which you've not acknowledged. I don't disagree that Twitter have a higher percentage of public data than a lot of social media, but it's absurd to suggest that they don't hold much private data or don't need to worry much about data leaks. They hold more than enough to get them in big trouble if they screw up.

That is easy for you to claim. However I think you'll find that, in practice, you are incorrect here.

Not easily. Whilst Rob Parsons is wrong in that Twitter did use to provide access to all tweets in real time to a limited numer of companies they did stop that several years ago (in theory its still available though since they did make it available to Musk) mostly because it made more sense to monetise it themselves.

What about all the DMs? Quite often see in investigatory journalism comments about "first contacted via DM" and there are also all the "lets have the only effective customer service provided via twitter". Going to be lots of private account details in those DMs after the original tweet to get attention.

It would be survivable if they fell over provided local backups have been maintained.

The one that concerns me is the cloud based accounting packages that many of us have had to migrate to due to "making tax digital",  do any of them have the facility to maintain a local backup?

I wasn't wrong - I know that what you write here is the case, since I myself have professional experience of such access.

What I was saying that, without being granted such access, the harvesting that Neil Williams implies is possible would not at all be a simple problem.

I am with you on Musk.  I have this feeling  he knows what he is doing and will be reorganising Twitter in a very focused slim downed profitable way.That it is being played out in this way is just part of the process. it is playing to the gallery. The USA has pretty ruthless ideas in the hiring and firing process.

Meta and the others are also going  through a period of rationalisation with reduced advertising spending etc. 

Not a backup as such. You delete the file locally, Dropbox will also delete its remote copy. It’s more about synchronising files / folders across devices.

You can get access to retrieve up to 10 million tweets per month. There are roughly 900 million tweets per day.  You could grab a whole heap but far far far from all of them.

Billionaires do not become billionaires by being nice to others. It helps a great deal to be a complete arse without empathy - sociopathy even - in order to achieve what is still, even now, regarded as 'success' where people and planet are expendable.

In the light of the many crises brought about by the very ideology that has overfed outrageous wealth for the greedy few, success should now be much more cognisant of the looming emergency about to grip the entire planet. Nowadays, even the most basic levels of empathy should be the most valuable asset anybody could ever possess. Musk appears to have none. He may be wealthy in one way but very deprived in the things that matter right now.

Certainly being driven, self confidence and luck and  are required. I think you are right this is often at the expense of empathy but not necessarily. Soros, Gates, Buffet etc. seem to be fairly engaged

Yes

Indeed. I think he has done well with luck and being driven. The more I see and hear of him the more he appears just a bit dim. He doesn't seem to have anything insightful to say 

So CBS news announced yesterday that they were ceasing their Twitter activity. They lasted less than 24 hours. There’s a high profile 8.8m follower account that tried, and failed. 

https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/enterprise#fullarchiv...

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/enterprise/search-api/ove...