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I work at twitter and wasn’t able to find out immediately, but have been collecting responses like these + the article and communicating with someone who knows what to do. I only found out about this over twitter and I am personally deeply frustrated and working to understand whatever led to this.

Sorry to hear that, can imagine the frustration.

I don't really think there's any polite way to put this: Your employers are simply assholes.

This is the sort of informationless pile-on comment that damages HN regardless of what you're talking about. Please don't post those here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To be honest, this reads less like an attempt to integrate anti-harassment measures and more like an attempt to completely destroy a business trying to offer them. It further solidifies Twitter management as complicit in aiding and abetting the harassers by using its capital to eliminate a threat from the market. After the speed with which Twitter went after the ICE employees list, the evidence is clear that Twitter only has a problem tackling harassment when it's against marginalized populations.

That's a pretty extreme leap when virtually no information is available yet. The HN guidelines ask you to "assume good faith" for a reason: people are all too ready to take such charges as givens and then pile more on top of them. It's a behavior that harms the container here, and it's not hard to wait until actual evidence appears.

That's fair, I will suspend judgement until further evidence appears, but the well of beneficial doubt is running low. I think a long past history of suspicious behavior is a good reason to update our assumptions.

I don't disagree. But the real reason for having an "assume good faith" rule is what it does to this community when people don't. Therefore it needs practicing even when it feels undeserved.

Here's the whole guideline you're talking about-

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

It's talking about how we all talk to each other. I think it's main purpose is not to lessen criticisms for corporations so much as to keep the discussion constructive.

You're probably not going to win an argument with a moderator by explaining to them the subtle logical error in the interpretation and purpose of their own guidelines.

Yet now we're failing to assume good faith in our moderators, by assuming that they will fail to recognize a conflict of interest arising from questioning the extent and source of their authority, which they have reason to see maximized.

The parent comment actually seemed spot on to me. The rule is to assume good faith of your interlocutors. The parent failed to assume good faith of a billion dollar corporation. I think it's reasonable to push back against being asked to tone down the latter, while honoring the rule for the former.

I think dang explained it pretty clearly in the comment. It is bad for the forum when, given some very limited set of facts, you offer the most heated, ragefest pile-on inducing explanation or theory. It doesn't require some talmudic reading of the guidelines which are, after all, guidelines and not every single thing is explicitly spelled out. 'Avoid taking discussions into flamey or ragey directions' is advice the mods dole out to some person or another nearly daily.

the well of beneficial doubt is running low

That is a metaphor made with an industrial grade cement mixer.

As someone down thread said - this smells like the long arm of GDPR unintending some consequences.

Another plausible scenario is the acquisition terms required Smyte to wind down the service over the past 6 months or build a replacement to fulfill contracts. Smyte didn't for whatever reason (either through negligence or negligence+hope to continue operations in a new capacity) and the deadline came to hand over the servers in the agreed condition (no externally accessible APIs available).

Twitter could have stepped in and halted things, but that would have required Smyte to have acknowledged breaching the contract and forfeiting $$.

This is all guess of what seems to me more likely than any Twitter exec pulling any triggers like this. Of course, it's still a screwup by Twitter to have not been tuned in and aware that fingers would point to them.

But that's a very different kind of mistake than "I have an idea, let's hit the power button at 6:30. Team: you have 30 minutes to let all our customers know."

You never, ever agree to a change in your business before the acquisition is complete. The chances that an acquisition won't go through are just too high, and it could leave you completely f'ed over.

Yeah, but if you're less experienced, or if you're more devoted to your potential profit than to your customers, you might agree to the term, and then realize what you just said, leaving you with the (immature but perhaps "seemed reasonable") situation we see here - doing nothing until the acquisition is complete and then immediately abiding by the terms.

To a large degree, the responsibility is also on Smyte, right? Selling to a big corp is one thing, and once you are no longer owner of a company you've washed your hands of future decisions. But at the time when they agreed to the sale they were still owners of the company and their hands had not been washed and they could have and arguably should have stipulated some conditions for how the service would be wound down following the sale.

Only if the acquisition hasn't closed yet. If it has, who's there to go after?

But you're actually right -- if the acquisition hasn't closed yet, they're independent and independently responsible.

Litigation aside, the founders of Smyte seem pretty culpable here. I would be wary of using another service that they created, given a demonstrated willingness to turn it off without any notice.

Twitter’s VP of engineering has posted some additional information: https://twitter.com/michaelmontano/status/101024630798476902...

"We couldn't operate their business and continue collecting data from their customers, while continuing to meet our own high standards as a global company."

My hunch as an outsider is that Smyte wasn't GDPR compliant. Their leadership knew it, they knew they couldn't easily become so (for instance, they may have been using Kafka in a way where compaction wouldn't help, and didn't want to build an encryption-based monstrosity [0]), realized that they wouldn't increase in value as a business due to that risk, took an acquihire for cheap in order to give their employees a decent landing and give a return to their investors, and couldn't tell anyone about these plans in advance because it might jeopardize the transaction.

EDIT: They were indeed using Kafka per [1], and due to the strict latency requirements on their business, that may have ruled out the type of encryption scheme in [0].

[0] https://danlebrero.com/2018/04/11/kafka-gdpr-event-sourcing/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ByXQfIq5uU

That's a good thought. The only good reason to shut them down so abruptly is if they posed an existential threat to Twitter itself. The threat of GDPR fines or sanctions might have done it.

I still don't get why they couldn't just come out and say that. Was incompetence and unprofessionalism really a better look then a understandable engineering challenge? Or was this another case of "being honest and doing the right thing would have created legal liability so we opted not to do it"?

Generally your lawyers will advise you that the less you say, the better.

Maybe, but then why would Twitter acquire Smyte in that case?

Presumably because Twitter was interested in the project, but didn't need the actual implementation immediately. Get the team on the cheap for now, and then just have them rebuild it in-house in a compliant way.

I've seen lawyers advice that [0] doesnt do the trick anyway, ie deleting the key is not enough to comply.

GDPR does seem like the most likely culprit here, if they've been planning an aquihire for a while it wouldn't have been worth implementing GDPR and Twitter likely made it a condition that the service is shut down before the acquisition completes

I'm quite surprised none of the cloud vendors were interested/could offer more than Twitter for this team though, seems like a logical service to add.

This is one of those instances in which I think employees (developers) and companies working with Twitter need to have a "never forget" attitude. I actually know someone personally at Twitter corp dev (the group that usually manages M&A activity) and I hope that individual was not involved here, as it would be pretty out of character.

Why would Twitter care? They make money from ads, right? APIs and legacy deals are going to be time consuming and boring for them. Stuff like filtering hate speech etc is something which can be done globally and in a way which doesn't require highly paid employees, APIs etc. Hasn't Twitter repeatedly show that third parties aren't really that interesting to them?

All companies have suppliers and partners, including Twitter. Getting a reputation for this kind of toxic behaviour harms their ability to build relationships with them, as nobody will feel they can trust them.

It could also hamper their ability to make further acquisitions. In future, a startup being linked with a possible Twitter acquisition is going to cause its customers to panic and start moving elsewhere. That'll make startups more reluctant to engage, and may turn some off entirely, if they're not comfortable with the prospect of totally screwing over the customers who've supported them during their early stages.

A startup's customers panicking? Not sure that's on twitter's radar.

I think potential for reputation damage, on an activity they don't do very often, and where they will justify it, will be weighed up against the financial benefit now, and disregarded.

I think it's possible to overstate the relevance and importance of people typing furiously on internet forums about things like this. Twitter is what it is - most people aren't using APIs, third party clients etc and will never notice this.

They can shrug it off, still those companies that had contracts with Smyte are not one person businesses on the other side of the world. Those Twitter people are going to have lunch or dinner with other people and get to talk about this issue for a while. Not very pleasant, even for employees totally unrelated with this case like the one who answered the very first comment in this page (sorry.)

I never said Twitter cares about startups' customers panicking, but it cares about being able to make strategically useful acquisitions, like Smyte. And acting like this makes it harder.

This isn't about people typing furiously on internet forums. This is about business risk, as weighed up by people whose job it is to care. Acquisitions take time and negotiation. Just because a startup is talking to Twitter, doesn't mean the acquisition will definitely happen. But if customers get wind of it, then they may start looking to move elsewhere, anyway, instead of waking up to find services they rely on have been shutdown without warning. If you're the customer of a startup Twitter is negotiating to acquire, then you're negligent not to reduce your reliance on them. And if you're the CEO of that startup, then you have to consider the risk of customer flight (and your own comfort with the thought of screwing them over) vs. the likelihood of the acquisition happening.

But the very behavior you're talking about... didn't make Smyte not sell. So even they didn't care.

Why would anyone else?

if the Smyte shutdown limits the opportunity of current and future Twitter associated startups, whose business model is to help companies safely navigate the social media landscape, then that sounds like a win-win for Twitter

> A startup's customers panicking? Not sure that's on twitter's radar.

Let's not forget that those customers are also likely candidates to advertise on Twitter

Twitter sells data through an API. Unsure how profitable it is. See: https://developer.twitter.com/en/enterprise.html