Any time a social media system goes down, I feel like Depth Gauge in Waterworld[0].
It is an end (albeit temporary) to lack of social contact (because they are too busy to meet in person or talk to me face to face), but with an ironic boom, I only hear how miserable they are because the social media is down.
I'm more than slightly proud, actually. I can't remember the last time a "major" social media site had an outage that affected me. That includes Twitter, HN, Facebook, and Github (since that's turning into a social site now).
Me neither. I am not on it enough to care and increasingly I am seeing less and less value from Twitter, especially after learning that less than 10% of it is actually active and most of the noise is coming from a cluster of individuals who will build narratives that ultimately benefit them.
I guess we'll see in the coming months whether this was just a one-off or whether the stress the company has been under has pushed out some of the more important people keeping the site up.
> Since then, the site’s importance to global politics and culture has grown, and a long-lasting outage could even have had a material effect on the Conservative party’s leadership election, where runners and riders have been trading barbs since Boris Johnson announced his resignation last week.
This is downright dystopic and people don't get it. A countrys exceptional situation where a they get a new leader which is not being democratically decided by the people, but a minority of Tories that have the time to read "barbs" on Twitter. It is insane to think that the availability of a tech platform like Twitter has a material consequence on how the Tories elect their new leader. But if it is true that it has consequence on the result, a minority that have the time to write and read Twitter instead of working for the people(like the politicians are supposed to) are deciding the result of their leadership.
> This is downright dystopic and people don't get it. A countrys exceptional situation where a they get a new leader which is not being democratically decided by the people, but a minority of Tories that have the time to read "barbs" on Twitter.
That's not dystopian, it's just how that system of government works. Literally no system will satisfy everyone, and direct democracy has its own well-known flaws.
For what it's worth, a lot of US liberals are currently fetishising parliamentary systems like the UK's.
"It is how the system works", is not getting it... Twitter is used by a minority yet it supposedly captures significant political power. It is really hard to explain it to someone who doesn't care how supposed work and think I mean that it is about "direct democracy". Elected politicians should be working for the people regardless they voted for them or not. They aren't supposed to write crap on twitter about the "other guys" within the same fucking party.
I think Twitter's a red herring. IIRC, in the UK the prime minister is chosen by the MPs from the majority party. It's not just the ones on Twitter, though Twitter might be one of the channels some of those members use for rhetoric to influence the final decision. That rhetoric will happen somewhere, Twitter or no.
Also when it gets down to it, in an election the ultimate outcome is decided by the people who are on the fence, which is much smaller that the whole group.
A small short-lived productivity increase, followed by a mad rush of other services trying to spin up (or scale up if already running) and piling lots of man-hours into advertising themselves as the best replacement. Also many miles of column-space pontificating on the whys/wherefores, and a few people will try to sue because there was one little bit of irreplaceable information on there that is vital to them and they didn't have backed up elsewhere. Other than that, little or nothing of long-lasting consequence I expect.
Users'd probably just join Reddit. It's full of snark and outrage too
Elon would make his own Twitter called Doge-r, and a company that developed it and also did construction, so he could have dump trucks called Dogers (as in bulldozer), jokes about "taking a dump", etc
No hate to any of the engineers there, but honestly, it would be a net positive for society.
The level of vitriol, hate, and performative outrage has reached up to the gods on Twitter. The valuable signal that comes out has long been overwhelmed by the noise.
There are other platforms that largely fulfill the same purpose.
I was thinking when services go down like this it forces us to remind ourselves how reliant we are on these services. Also remember they are free and you don’t get a refund for the service being down due to a SLA clause. People expect Twitter to be high availability but don’t spend a cent on the platform, except for Advertisers, who will be hurt most.
Twitter execs are smart - let him continue using twitter and keep digging his own ego driven grave. After all that's all he has done all these years on that platform.
Maybe the current hosting providers don't want to be involved in the discovery process of Twitter's lawsuit, and so the site had to be migrated on somewhat short notice.
Yours is "Twitter's Down" while this is a link to an article; not that yours necessarily should have been flagged (although that's a community decision so apparently several people thought it should have been) but they're not the same post.
