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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Twitter's MAU count is around 450 million active users. You're not going to find many bigger user bases.
Where did you get that number from? Best I’ve seen is ~350M and dropping. For reference, Pinterest is ~465M.
Twitter had an outsized impact but it’s not at FB or Insta or Youtube numbers, and it’s already struggling to keep working under the load of mostly text and static images.
Here’s one that puts it at 550mil MAU:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/
Is it as big as YouTube or Facebook or Instagram? No. It’s still one of the biggest user bases on the internet though.
Also how has twitter been struggling to keep working?
Interesting. Looking into the sources that Statista uses, you find this graph that paints a very different picture.
Did you not hear about all the limiting they had in place recently? 600 or 1000 posts viewable per day for non-paying users, 6000 for paying users. I know the official reason given was to (somehow) limit data scraping, but come on, we all know that's bullshit. And outside of that, there have been a bunch of issues with outages, basic things like search breaking, etc. It's a platform in decline.
That graph literally says "significant anomalies in source data", so they're even saying that it's not an accurate picture though.
Rate limiting isn't "struggling to keep working". It isn't like it was crashing due to people using it too much. Saying "we know their reason is bullshit" doesn't make it true. Nothing indicated that they were having trouble with uptime or performance.
Yes, it says there are anomalies—that doesn't mean it's wrong, just that it's unusual. Almost like there was a moron in charge of the company who was making erratic changes to its infrastructure and driving a mass exodus of users. And even if that number is wrong (it probably is) it's not like the previous number isn't heavily outdated. There have been massive changes to Twitter since then, it would be stupid to assume old data is still accurate.
It was crashing in part because Twitter was DDOSing itself. Twitter rate-limited itself on purpose because they were fucking their own system up, but they gave a BS reason because it would be embarrassing for Musk to have to admit he fired too many people and the skeleton crew that's left can't keep up with his stupid decisions.
Remember, this is a website that primarily serves short text-only posts and was largely stable when it was bought. It's not rocket science, and yet Musk's still managing to make it look hard.
I didn't say it means it's wrong, just that it's not going to be an accurate picture. It might be right, it might be wrong, we have no idea - which is why they put that qualifier there.
There's nothing indicating twitter isn't still largely stable.
Also that's not a DDOS since there was no denial of service. Those calls are likely all just getting stopped at a cloudflare (or alternative) level anyway.
There was no denial of service because they rate limited accounts. That’s the entire point. Had they not done that, it’s likely they would have overwhelmed their servers and crashed the service, resulting in denial of service.
But no one knows when that repeated call was added to twitter - it could have been there for years. Like I said, it also likely just gets caught by cloudflare etc when it's doing that, meaning it's not going to overwhelm anything.
You're saying that they did a release, realised it was going to DDOS itself, so then rate limited accounts in another release rather than simply roll back the broken release or fix the call? That doesn't make any sense.
They didn’t realise it was going to DDOS itself, it was in the process of hammering their servers and they rate limited accounts because they didn’t know what was happening. It was still making excessive calls when they were rate limiting.
It makes no sense because the things they’re doing aren’t the actions of a competent team with a knowledgeable tech lead.
I think I’ve made my point pretty clear by now. If you’d still like to believe they’re not useless, go for gold, but the facts doesn’t support that.
That’s 100% guessing based on nothing more than your wild speculation. You have no facts to support it.
I mean, neither do you. This is all speculation since it’s a private company run by a known liar.
I’m not the one making claims, you are. You’ve got nothing to support those claims.
As a developer myself I’m 99.9% sure what you’re claiming didn’t happen because it makes no sense from a dev standpoint.
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