Encrypted DMs and other DM upgrades rolling out this week | Hacker News Reader

Encrypted DMs and other DM upgrades rolling out this week

twitter.com

38 pointsmvdwoord69 comments

Unrelated, but genuine question from someone who doesn't really use twitter. What happened to Twitter's QoS falling apart after Musk laid off all those people? Were the warnings overblown and unrealistic, or is there just an inside story? I feel like I heard a lot about how they were doomed and now it seems like they're rolling out new features.

They’ve had significant outages, managed to block their own API, account fraud and reduced content moderation.

Nobody said the system failures would be overnight, they happen slowly in the form of unmaintained rot that’s already manifested multiple times since the layoffs.

I would also warn against the fallacy that new features imply that old infrastructure is also getting the attention it deserves. Elon has been rolling out tons of new things since he bought it, and redirecting people to what he wants.

> Nobody said the system failures would be overnight

There was literally a massive Tweet storm of whiners writing drawn out farewells to their loyal followers one night late last year as people were convinced that the rapid culling of staff and firings would lead to unrepairable, technical collapse of Twitter that very weekend, and that it would be impossible for them to get it back up because no tech people would want to work for them anymore.

I’d love to see data, but anecdotes suggest reliability has declined and the company is addressing it by charging (a lot) for formerly-free features as a way to reduce load.

https://news.yahoo.com/nyc-subway-stop-tweeting-because-1324...

Interesting, the article mentions that they were asked to start paying $50K/mo. It seems like they didn't feel like they were getting their money's worth.

> and the company is addressing it by charging (a lot) for formerly-free features as a way to reduce load

Twitter was losing a ton of money, the free features had to go regardless.

I do think it's a bit silly I can't use the free API to read my own tweets, though.

Twitter was profitable as recently as 2019. A simple round of layoffs to fix the pandemic overhiring could have brought them back to that, or close enough that they wouldn't have had to blow up the service in bigger ways.

Although this is an avenue that would have been open to the prior leadership. The extra debt and baggage introduced by Musk may have taken a solution that simple away.

"Free features" like letting public agencies post public service info?

Rule 1 of being a content aggregator: never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, for any reason, should you charge people for giving you content that makes your platform more valuable.

https://istwitterdownyet.com/

Personally I don't really see much of a difference tbh.

Just anecdata from a very simple user. I typically only read the following tab, in Firefox with uBlock and have seen zero difference in functionality or reliability and actually enjoy not being tricked into the algorithmic feed anymore.

Then again, i don't use DMs, bookmarks, or any other advanced features. It feels more or less the same if not better. I do distinctly remember though that there were plenty of voices, also here iirc, that definitely predicted a faster decline than what is mentioned nowadays. I have no horse in this race though... Just eating popcorn and watching the show :)

For reference: This is what it looks like now:

[For you] | [Following]

Following is not strictly chronological, but mostly. I think this is fair.

> and actually enjoy not being tricked into the algorithmic feed anymore

Same. I also noticed that sometimes I actually want to dip into the "For You" tab. I like this UX.

Since so much on Twitter is political (I know there are other uses), a third tab might be interesting: "Other perspectives", "Break out of the bubble" or something along the lines of that.

@tpmx Same. The "explore" features are still kind of lacking in general. Can't switch to other country trends easily, or have a list of active spaces etc. I expected this to get fixed first!

Public search no longer works. I don't want to have to give Twitter a phone number just to use its search bar.

Sounds like a reasonable simple fix to reduce scrapers trying to bypass paying for API. I honestly don't see why Twitter would allow non users to search considering how the service works.

It's not about bots it's a brazen money/user data grab. They don't want you to use search unless they have an account to track you with. What other website does that? Not Reddit or Google or Bing or HN or YouTube or GitHub or Twitch or Wikipedia. The bot argument they make is a facade.

Things are definitely noticeably degrading, but not in a way that keeps you entirely from using the site(most of the time, anyway, they did block their own API tokens once or twice). Anecdotally, it's things like bookmarks being stuck 4 days in the past, and then suddenly updating with everything you've bookmarked in the meantime. What you would expect from huge distributed systems slowly falling apart.

Most of the features he's added are retooled old things or very small things, so I wouldn't necessarily say that it's an indicator that things are going well on a technical level.

> Things are definitely noticeably degrading

Yes. Rudimentary & basic functionality like the ability to follow people was briefly broken on Twitter's web app. You clicked 'follow' and the button didn't change to 'following' and it didn't register that you clicked follow.

And an anecdotal thing that happened to me on the iOS app: their reporting feature was broken and I went to report some questionable content I found whilst randomly browsing, only to find the reporting functionality was broken. It just hanged with a vague message: 'Something went wrong'. This is unacceptable behavior. Users should be able to police content, not just algos and content moderation teams.

Then there's the 'Lists' feature which doesn't tally the amount of members of a list properly. You add five members to it, and the tally displays '0 members'. I keep hoping a new update fixes this, but it's treated as a second class citizen of Twitter: 'Who even uses lists, we don't need to pay attention to Lists' mentality.

And another nitpick: the iOS app keeps asking me to enable notifications even after repeatedly declining to turn notifications on. Can't they just get the message: I never want to enable notifications on Twitter. Infact I have notifications turned off for everything in iOS cause I don't want to be bombarded with pointless little 'red dots' that diminish my dopamine supply and distracts me.

Search routinely doesn’t work lately. Wrong results and/or extremely slow. Just my anecdotal experience but corroborated by others.

I just casually use Twitter as an observer and I haven't noticed anything degrading. It runs the same way it used to.

You haven’t noticed major differences in search results? I used to see reputable sources like Reuters and AP in the top few tweets when you search for a news story. Now it’s people like that catturd guy.

I don't think most people use search except at major news events so most people wouldn't notice. Twitter search has always been broken and a common thing to complain about. At least now under Musk it's not 60% gay porn spam accounts anymore. No clue how the precious people messed it up under those few weeks. Even worse than the spam comments YouTube had.

It looks like their last time down was April 21 for about an hour, but for the year the site's only been down twice for a total of about 2.5 hrs. I compared that to the last place I worked and it was about the same. Both were at about 99.91%.

Open replies under the tweet linked in this submission. If this is any indication what the discourse on twitter is like… judge for yourself.

I don't think that's really fair. The replies to Elon have always been the worst of twitter.

Every time I've looked under one of Elon's tweets it's nothing of substance, just fellatio en masse

Elon:

- if not #1 most famous person on twitter, then surely in top 10.

- richest, or second richest, or third richest, i mean it changes by week, but he is up there, person in the world. I bring it up because he is certainly a person with resources and influence.

- owns twitter. Which is relevant because if one wanted to change something about twitter, i think he has the tools at his disposal.

- publicly went on record, not like anyone was pulling his tongue, about his agenda for bringing change to twitter.

… and having said all that - the replies on his posts specifically are somehow not representative of what twitter is, and it is “unfair” to to use them as an example? I mean if >I< were in charge - I’d start there.

It works more or less like it did before. The media is mostly histrionics, as usual.

My client stopped working and I deleted an account that I'd used daily for over a decade. It would have been hard for me to break that habit on my own if I'd actively tried.

Twitter is a lame duck. Its problems and missteps are more nuanced than downtime. But just like Facebook didn't go out of business as it became irrelevant to people below a certain age, Twitter is also too big to fail quickly.

Most tech companies don’t run lean. They run bloated because they are trying to chase a dozen different things at once in the hopes of finding the thing that lets them 10x to please investors.

A lot of companies can do what Twitter just did and come out relatively fine, perhaps better in some ways.

I’m surprised people here ever thought Twitter would collapse. So many of us have worked at these companies. We know how bloated they are. You can spend a decade at Google, Facebook, Twitter or Amazon and make an amazing salary but never work on a single thing that makes it to market.

> I’m surprised people here ever thought Twitter would collapse.

I'm surprised people think Twitter hasn’t been in a state of continuous functional degradation with a particular bad period around each significant feature rollout.

I’m kind of jealous and wish I had access to the Twitter they are using.

I don't know what version of Twitter you're using, but mine (web and android) has been reasonably fine.

Sure, there have been periods of buggy behavior, but that's always going to happen when the system is changing, and they get resolved reasonably quickly. My "For You" feed has only been getting better and better recently. I don't even bother with my "Following" feed anymore because it tends to get drowned out by addicts who tweet hundreds of times a day.

> Sure, there have been periods of buggy behavior, but that's always going to happen when the system is changing, and they get resolved reasonably quickly.

I also use web and android, and the periods of buggy behavior have been more frequent, more severe, and taken longer to get resolved (some of them appear to be serious unresolved but intermittent, though maybe they are resolved and re-caused, though in some ways that would be more worrying.)

But, if you’re happy with what you’re getting, good for you.

I was more annoyed a several months ago with buggy behavior blocking content. I haven't seen anything as bad in recent months.

I mean there's the whole thing recently pictures of tweets getting removed because they show bluecheck users behaving badly[1]. It's "moderation", but it just makes it look like the site is broken because there isn't any message about the tweet having been moderated.

[1]: https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1652085164783091712 as an example, I think there were other similar ones but I can't remember which accounts.

Works fine for me.

It’s a simple website with a lot of traffic. It’s mostly just a forum for shitposting. That’s all it has ever been. It doesn’t need thousands of employees or any “significant features”. The site today is much the same as it was 10 years ago and even earlier. When I think I’d truly major “features” I think of Summize and Twitpic and maybe TweetDeck.

I suppose all of those journalists, politicians, and corporations are just shitposters

A mostly correct supposition, just not “all”, obviously.

The journalists went there for the shitposting politicians and the corporations went there to “be part of the [shitposting] conversation.”

That’s not to say it’s without value. It’s highly entertaining, which is very valuable. But it is what it is.

How long have you been on Twitter? Be honest. The site has always been nonsense. What else would it be? You literally just scream into the aether. It’s an unstructured message board. It’s a public chat room. It’s a radio frequency where everyone transmits at the same time. It’s designed for shitposting.

Back in the old days you had to “raid” other forums to create controversy. It took coordination and effort. Posting was a skill. If you posted something and the thread got no replies it was kind of embarrassing. Now you just create a Twitter account in 30 seconds and you’re good to go. You just post over and over again and there’s no shame at all. It lowered the barrier for shitposting so low that even people who were borderline computer illiterate could participate. It was able to normalize the activity so much that people do it under their real name with no shame.

I have never had a Twitter account, so I have never "been on Twitter"

No, you’re a newage lurker.

“Every time I've looked under one of Elon's tweets it's nothing of substance, just fellatio en masse“

You love the shitposting so much you seek it out.

Yea you got me, I have to seek out his tweets because they never get posted to HN

You might want to glance away from the mirror from time to time, there's a whole world out there

Perhaps I misjudged you. You do get it. <3

Especially when Twitter was slowly falling apart before Musk too. Small bugs everywhere, glacial update rate, had completely externalized and lost control of moderation etc.

The idea that the site would just implode because of a change of leadership and aggressive restructuring was just delusional.

As if Twitter ever had it “together”. It didn’t. And it didn’t need to because it doesn’t matter. IMO their biggest mistake was getting rid of the Fail Whale.

Of course it's overblown. Twitter still operates better than reddit does most of the time.

True but that's an extremely low bar.

just politics.

Reddit is radical left leaning, they do not like Musk and hive-mind believed that "Twitter was collapsing", yet, after gazillions were fired, nothing happened.

Goes to show you that one should never let brain mix what one wants to happen with what is actually happening.

Are there details about how key management works? Where are the keys stored, what has access to them, etc? Because this tweet is empty hype.

Don't worry, it's strong military grade crypto, uses AES-256 /s

The fact that it will be implemented in a web app makes it security theater from the start. It doesn’t matter how key management works.

If someone with access to Twitter’s servers wants to read DMs, they will now need to include an extra snippet of JS in the frontend response of the user they’re targeting for a single request. It’s (maybe) a bit harder than getting the message right from the DB, but still not much of an obstacle for a motivated insider.

E2e encryption or just not stored in plaintext on their servers?

End to end.

Source?

Elon Musk said so, ie that Twitter itself can't decrypt messages, which implies end to end. Anything else would be bs anyway.

Elon has zero credibility. There’s also zero reason to believe it’s implemented correctly.

But you are the one I guess.

Where? The quoted tweet says "encrypted DMs" and nothing more.

Musk's extreme lack of credibility aside, why would anyone use Twitter for this when there are already many very popular alternatives that have been around for years?

Reach & ease perhaps?

To put things in perspective, Whatsapp has 3B users and Twitter has 300M. There is no reach on Twitter.

WhatsApp has 85m users in US. Twitter is said to have 95m. It's about who you want to reach. It's THE site when you want to reach well-known people.

> It's THE site when you want to reach well-known people.

Not since Musk bought it, most of them are fleeing the platform.

Is there evidence that more than e.g. 5% of users have left the platform in response to the acquisition?

Yes, the massive growth of Mastodon and Bluesky. This last move of prioritizing blue checkmarks seems like it was the final nail in the coffin, the site has become completely unusable.

Mastodon user activity is down from 2.3 to 1.3 million MAU and have been dropping for fourth months straight. I think you're overestimating the size of the "massive growth".

https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats

That's pretty extreme growth, with a lot of influencer/power user types too. Now with Bluesky and people just abandoning social media altogether, a Twitter implosion seems all but certain.

Social media platforms don't implement E2E encryption for the benefit of users. They implement it so that they don't have to comply with content moderation requirements regarding CSAM.

source: NYT investigations by Gabriel Dance's team linking the spread of CSAM to the growth of social media https://www.nytimes.com/by/gabriel-dance

This is a really valid point and probably the actual intention of the feature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com