Hanlon's Razor is, I believe, a good rule of thumb, but people keep using it in situations such as this one where it's not just potentially malice (wanting to harm someone for little other reason than wanting to see them hurt or wanting to hurt) but also greed/self-interest. Hanlon's Razor as stated makes sense to me. I see a lot more stupidity in the world than I see people wanting to hurt for no other reason. But greed? I see a lot of that.

Yeah, I think Hanlon's Razor was intended to apply to individuals, not organizations. Often the "stupidity" of an organization is a shield for malice or greed.

Organizations are made up of people. When you have 5000 people making small decisions with 0.1% possibility of being wrong, if have 40% of chance having at least one mistake over 5000 decisions.

People are not independent coin tosses. They coordinate, manage, overrule, scheme, discuss, and process information in strategic ways that render these kinds of extremely simplified models impossible.

They don't work on every single decision collectively.

This issue is such a small thing that it is much more likely to be an unintended issue than otherwise.

Why do you think a bug is a "simpler" explanation for this behaviour? Maybe if all links were broken then sure, but if only specific sites that operate against the interests of Twitter stop working doesn't that point to something else going on?

An algorithm may have incorrectly marked a site as malicious, or crawling might be failing because of an malformed http header etc. Who knows...

When there is feedback loops involved (in the context of an integrity system, for example), it doesn't outright block everything. In the past work i had our systems blocked some publishers traffic wrongfully, while not blocking others when it should(i was in display ads).

Because Mastodon is not actually a threat.

I would qualify this by saying the priors matter. Twitter has torched their credibility in a flaming dumpster fire. That changes how one might make assumptions.

It also just looks suspect. Mastadon is a competitor to twitter, right? It's obviously good for twitter that no one can post links to the mastadon sign up page, right? Do I still have to assume it's just a bug?

I sure wish the bugs in my code ended up benefiting my company :)

Mastodon is a very very small surface for twitter...

And not long ago Facebook was a very small surface for MySpace. And Reddit was a very small surface for Digg, and so on. Network effects can cause competition to rapidly snowball.

I root for mastodon, but i don't think it becoming big enough to challenge any current social media platform.

Twitter may die, but i don't think mastodon would grow as much as you make it sound.

That must be a hard life assuming things are working against you

Sounds like maybe fartcannon saw the anti-competitive things large companies have done in the past.

We all have.

But assuming everything is of that nature is what I am against.

It just doesn't hurt to assume greed exists and big corporations are behaving greedily. Otherwise you're either in denial, or walking around perpetually shocked.

A masterful example of the strawman and false dichotomy.

Of course, but we aren't talking about everything, just sociopathic mega corps.

Nah, its good. Lots of dopamine from being right all the time.

Sounds good. You must also not be learning anything new. Let this be first.

Not if they actually are. Then it helps to make informed decisions.

There are a lot of people that have no interest in cultivating an objective and accurate world view.

"sounds plausible" goes in the "objective evidence" pile and nobody follows up to see if they were correct.

What is a hypothesis here? That twitter thought they could block Mastodon and no one in the world would notice? That no one would care?

Damage control is cheap and easy.

So do you really think a team at twitter sat down and thought, lets block mastodon for a day to avoid some customer bleed, then we can do damage control, but it will be worth it in the end?

Yes.

In the command center, while drinking a glass of wine...

Let's kill it, board said.

Pleasantly surprised that you got 8 replies saying that things are often working against us. It’s true at least some of the time. And depending on your social status, that “some of the time” can become all of the time.

Competitors have no obligation to play nicely. Is it really a surprise they don’t?

I don't care if they don't play nice. I assume they don't. I also don't turn a blind eye to things working against our collective interest.

> That must be a hard life assuming things are working against you

Yes, better be gullible all the time instead and trust all these corporations...

Or do the correct thing and be somewhat skeptical but also logical, and think of things in context, weight potential causes for an issue and pick the likely one.

Speaking from experience: 1. size of mastodon is such a small thing that i doubt twitter even worries about it, among other things they have to worry about - like monetization. 2. My guess is integrity system incorrectly marked a url or link crawler/preview/whatever service is failing to crawl the page, or something along those lines. It can be something else, but my overarching claim is that it was not someone going into admin UI and typing mastodon to block them explicitly to cut the competition out. It may still be a lowly paid employee incorrectly doing something, but it's not for cutting the competition out and very very likely an honest mistake.

Big tech has earned the assumption.

Not as hard as getting taken for a ride at every turn.

If you go over to the Wikipedia article for "genocides by death toll" we currently have 2 ongoing - one in Sudan, one Myanmar. And possibly Xianjing although that doesn't meet Wikipedia's standards. There are really few limits to how nasty a group of humans can get after they identify an in- and out- group.

That is genocides, in 2022. The idea that a social media company is out to crush competitors and make money is really not that far out there, and certainly not an idea that can be reasonably mocked. These companies are going the way of the more corporate news organizations - they've got influence, they want to be political actors. They are not trustworthy.

You are mixing a bunch of things. I do think twitter has too much moderation problem, i don't think this particular issue is.

Amazon used to take down its EC2 servers where Netflix streamed their content during the early days of the streaming wars.

What of it? Are you actually so naive to think things aren't working against us?

Source?

Uh, me. I worked at Amazon when this happened.

For me personally when large quasimonopolies are involved I give it a 50-50 prior over the incompetence-malice distribution.

Not everything needs to be an absolute rule, this totally looks like a small bug on Twitter's part, and if it takes like weeks to fix then you can decide "okay that's a little more suspicious". What's the point of making this particular moment an immediate, gigantic moral issue?

I prefer the other way around. Twitter is probably acting bad. If they update it immediately, apologize, then we can assume its not an issue. What value do you get by giving them the benefit of doubt? You just give them a way to gently manipulate you if you assume every little thing that's bad is an accident.

The alternative to "Twitter is acting bad" doesn't have to be "Twitter is completely innocent", it can be "Huh that sucks, wonder what caused that". You don't have to make an immediate judgement call on the morality of every tiny bug.

The value I get from that is not spending energy judging everything immediately as soon as I see it, which, in a world with social media, is a significant savings.

I would prefer to draw attention to their bad behaviour. I'll expend my energy. You can enjoy the benefits.

It seems like people many people today aren't satisfied with saying "I don't know" when it's the most reasonable answer. Every little action apparently has to be blamed on something (usually based on very little or no evidence).

It doesn't even matter why as long as twitter is aware of it, and it gets fixed soon.

Maybe this is a bit too forgiving of Twitter, but do they even see Mastodon as a threat worthy of stifling in this manner?

With a dash of expected plausible deniability that it was a bug - unless someone outright whistleblows otherwise.

So you're saying that you don't care about the truth and would prefer people to act on misinformation.