News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by ALittleLight on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @01:48AM (#33702847)
I think Twitter was stuck in a not-especially profitable niche. They shift into fast-mode to get out of it and find a better spot, then they can shift back into stable mode once they occupy a better equilibrium.

That said, there are lots of bugs in Twitter now, today, when they presumably had the benefit of being in stable mode for a long time. For example, Twitter regularly refreshes and loads new tweets while I'm reading them, pushing the tweet I was in the middle of reading out of view. That seems like a pretty silly bug to exist in a mature product. I regularly reach a state where I have to kill the app and relaunch it because all of the "back" commands just minimize the app instead of taking me back to the timeline. I could go on.

Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by groffee on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @02:56AM (#33703212)
That's not a bug, it's a 'feature', tons of sites do it for whatever asinine reason.
Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by rjh29 on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @03:19AM (#33703335)
Keeping vertical scroll position stable while asynchronously loading lots of randomly-sized content is harder than it seems.
Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by mschuster91 on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @03:34AM (#33703443)
Yeah, but there's always the option of showing a "fallback" when loading and inserting content in the middle of a feed - one link at the top "go to last bottom of top" and one at the bottom "go to last top of bottom".
Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by vagrantJin on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @04:53AM (#33703969)
A complicated feature I am 100% certain no user ever asked for.
Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by valeness on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @11:59AM (#33707933)
Actually twitter does it better than anyone else and it's the reason I use it over other apps. The User Experience is unparalleled
Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by ldng on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @03:19AM (#33703333)
Like ... displaying new / refreshing ads ?
Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by WA on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @02:57AM (#33703221)
They replaced their somewhat productive engineering workforce with completely unproductive interest payments. I’m not convinced that this will lead to a better spot.

But regarding the bugs, I’m totally with you. Same here. I use Twitter only in the browser. Browse long enough and the page reloads as if it ran out of memory.