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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Buy down to 5%, but I think true odds are less than 1%. MySpace still exists. The base rate of a corporate failure of this size in less than 6 months is practically zero. The only way Twitter goes away in 6 months is if there is some massive financial fraud discovered like Enron or FTX. Even then, somebody will buy the IP and run it.

At the risk of nutpicking, there are a large number of users in my personal circles who are exchanging off-site contact information (uh, and nudes) under the assumption that the site or their account won't be accessible in days. Guys with SRE experience are talking about the site falling over in ways that can't be brought up. Other people have been encouraging everyone to grab data dumps of their account.

I'm exceptionally skeptical of these arguments, but I also haven't worked anywhere near those scale of systems.

Exchanging off-site contact information is entirely reasonable even if there's a 2% chance of it going down, because they have a large number of many-year-long friendships/acquaintances they don't want to lose contact with, and sharing contacts is a low-cost way to avoid a low-chance, high-cost outcome.

Obviously some of them are claiming it's >50% gonna die forever, which is premature, as well as probably claiming the sorts of glitches that've happened for the past five years as evidence twitter is decaying.

But the people who work in twitter SRE that I've followed say there's a decent chance bad things happen, but that twitter >80% won't die permanently

While it is certainly possible for distributed systems to be fragile in the way he describes -- the most famous example is not software but the US power grid pre-1965 -- it is not necessary. I know of large distributed systems which are not.

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