X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014 | Hacker News Reader

X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014

theverge.com

171 pointsrntn168 comments

Sounds like they introduced a bug in their link shotener, not that the actual media is "wiped out".

In case we needed more evidence that putting dynamic code between hyperlinks from one page to another, add this to the pile...

Since the problem is that the links to media were broken and we know at least one - Ellen's - was fixed, does that imply the others can/will be fixed too? If so, and if they can be restored programmatically, then this would seem to be a very minor technical stuff up.

But if the pictures/media is effectively rendered inaccessible (e.g forever), that's a much bigger deal.

It seems… unlikely that they’ve just totally lost the data (that is, what the shortened links point to). I mean, it’s clearly not being fun very well right now, but that seems too incompetent.

Aside from competency as a reason there is also cost. Dropping all that old media reduces storage cost.

The connection to the link preview subsystem might be, that they tried to get rid of the old media system.

Just for speculation ...

There's also the fact that the service formerly known as Twitter is running on a skeleton crew. This could easily lead to a buildup in cruft, undetected or unnoticed system errors, or any number of maintenance issues that could result in something like this.

I like to think they cut costs by lopping letters off the word twitter until all they had left was a “t”, and then some bozo walked up and kicked the remaining character over.

site runs better since his takeover despite what the haters say. I have a large follower account - responsiveness has improved.

There are downsides, with new features, algo changes etc but overall it’s been getting better.

We all have access to Twitter and can see its downfall with our own eyes.

https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/1693095184597151822?s=20

Mark Cuban seems to agree, and I am also a heavy user seeing the same thing.

What in particular are you seeing a proof of a downfall?

Dude, I don’t think Elon is going to see this.

I could care less about Elon

https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/1693095184597151822?s=20

Here’s Mark Cuban saying the tech/responsiveness has improved. Does he seem like the kinda guy who needs to suck up to anyone? A guy with fuckyu levels of money?

Amazing what a sudden, drastic decrease in user activity will do for a site's response time.

If I pull the hard drive out from a database server, and put it in a drawer, that data isn't "wiped out" either.

But that doesn’t make for the Elon hating headline everyone foams at the mouth for

Anti-Twitter headlines aren't new, they existed well before Elon was strong-armed into following through with his purchase.

Additionally, whether the data is "wiped out" or inaccessible is irrelevant to the end user. It's the same result.

“ In case we needed more evidence that putting dynamic code between hyperlinks from one page to another, add this to the pile...”

This sentence doesn’t seem to be complete. What did you mean?

It means that we should be linking directly to resources, not shortening URLs.

The <a> tag supports displaying human readable text in place of the link, Twitter could have supported that and not counted the actual link.

But we all know the real reason link shorteners get used by companies, tracking clicks for third parties so you can get sweet affiliate cash.

The original limitation was due to the fact that Twitter started as an SMS text blogging service.

After they moved away from that, the character count limitation has never been a technical limitation.

On the other hand, shortening URLs are handy if they are used directly, and it also allows resources to be moved easily which is not really a bad thing either.

We don't refer to websites by IP address either after all, DNS is pretty similar to a URL shortening service: It makes addresses easier to understand for humans and it allows for flexibility in changing the physical address whenever needed.

“ In case we needed more evidence that putting dynamic code between hyperlinks from one page to another, add this to the pile...”

If you add “is a bad idea” after another so that it reads: “ In case we needed more evidence that putting dynamic code between hyperlinks from one page to another is a bad idea, add this to the pile...”

Otherwise the sentence isn’t saying anything as it is worded. Sorry if I am being mistaken here.

You are correct that that was the intent.

> In case we needed more evidence that putting dynamic code between hyperlinks from one page to another

Would static code have been better? Or would is problem the code part? It's not clear from your statement, and also, there is code between hyperlinks from any page to any other page, that is just how it is. I'm not sure how dynamic code really introduces problems that static code can't though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37189872

I was like... what XFree86 or X.org glitch can possibly cause that, so I clicked. Then I saw that logo which I see constantly instead of the content when someone link twitter, and I face the login wall, so closed the page instantly.

/blog.

for me twitter is dead. (despite being more-or less on the same page with elon in some topics, this project is really botched imo)

Twitter is fine. I have a large follower account, nothing is wrong with the site, besides the terrible name change.

For the record prior to his takeover, twitter went down a lot more often. What has changed is new features finally getting added unlike before where it took months for them to change anything

It's fine other than losing so much revenue that its unsustainable and a substantial portion of their data for basically no reason.

I made nearly 3k posting last month - no different than I did in the past - there is huge incentive to be a creator their now.

Are you an active user or a hater? I have a feeling most people complaining about the site have some other driving force like hating the guy politically that winds them up.

I don’t like him either but from a heavy user he’s been improving things. Prior management took years to ship.

His biggest sin was scaring away Liberals for the time being.

What kind of content creator are you? What’s your thematical topic?

I am a passive user only reading things related to 1 specific thing and some time ago when logging on I was informed that I can no longer use 2fa for my account because security costs extra. Don't remember the details but it appeared absurd.

SMS 2FA was put behind the paywall - ostensibly because they saw "bad actors" abusing it, but more likely because it costs money to send text messages and they're bleeding like a stuck pig thanks to Musk.

App and keyfob-based 2FA is still free.

Also non sms 2FA is much more secure. Telecoms are famous for garbage security. There are naughty places on the web where you can essentially buy the privilege of taking over a targeted phone number courtesy of a compromised employee account. For instance T-mobile has reported major widescale breaches in 2023 and purportedly small scale breaches where an employee account is taken over and used to essentially sell control of customers phone number are much more common to the point there was a telegram channel set up specifically for this purpose and hearing "T-Mobile Up" was a common occurrence.

I have for instance entirely disabled SMS 2FA wherever possible and strongly prefer my yubikey.

His biggest sin is scaring away advertisers so they are hugely in the red despite shedding most of their employees. No matter how useful twitter is to you personally if it doesn't make money eventually it will have to make a change or go away.

Twitter still resolves to a working webpage but what it was as a cultural element is dying. The closest thing to a digital city square we had, and techbro shows up to enshittify it and let his minions vandalize the place.

I kinda agree with the X/Twitter name change but I really want to stress that it is STILL the same service.

I am a large account/heavy user and it’s still very good.

The worst part was changing how DMs worked. Before you could get in touch with Celebs or famous people and know it was them. Right now it could be a parody account, it’s tough to tell. Is that really pmarca in my DMs or a twitter blue user?

Beyond that I think the site has improved. And it will probably get better and you should hop on.

It’s not just political hell fire (which was ‘nerfed’ if you will, in virality during the for-you algo update). I have qualms too but I really do mean it: the site is still very good.

source: 10 year, 70k follower - heavy user

> And it will probably get better and you should hop on.

Nothing advertises desperation more than seeing someone begging people to use the service while dismissing problems with the service in a thread that is literally about a huge problem in the service (but one of a long line of threads about newly-introduced problems with the service).

I was honestly trying to think of how an X11 bug could affect images and links in tweets until I opened the link and remembered that rebranding exercise.

Yeah, I find "X11", while less ambiguous, reminds me too much of macOS users because that's how it's usually referred to as there, as if it's foreign thing.

On Linux, saying "X11" is like calling it by its full first name, and since we're long-time buddies, we're on a first-name basis and just call it by its short nickname X. At a formal dress party, we'll call it the X Window System, and if we were introducing it to royalty, we'd say X Window System, Protocol 11, Revision 6.

“The X.Org Foundation requests that the following names be used when referring to this software:

               X
        X Window System
          X Version 11
  X Window System, Version 11
              X11

”

— <https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/man/man7/X.7.xhtml>

As a Linux user, I still call it X11, and it's in `/etc` as `/etc/X11`, so I don't think I'm that far wrong.

The part that got me was “X CEO Linda Yaccarino” which made me think she had a very short tenure.

Apparently I read the sounds, not the words.

What do you call a group of managers that used to work at Twitter?

XXXX

You don't need reliability engineers until you NEED reliability engineers.

"Why am I paying so much for a guy to look at a forest that isn't on fire?"

On the other hand, this is a 100% self-inflicted problem.

There is no technical reason why links have to be shortened (for SMS users back in the day, the shortening should've happened at the SMS gateway level, with actual Twitter content always using the real links).

You don't need (as many) reliability engineers if you don't add unnecessary moving parts into the system in the first place.

Except for filtering malicious links of course.

If there was some disingenuous ragebait article every time someone broke something in production at my company we'd be in the news every week. And that's with plenty of reliability engineers and QA.

I don't know who you work for, but something tells me your boss didn't publicly fire a huge chunk of the engineering staff being like, "WTF are all these people good for? lol"

Daily active users are at all time highs and Twitter before Elon was heading into bankruptcy. Tell us what your plan would have been

Remember Elon was strong-armed into the purchase; he tried to back out.

That aside, in his shoes I would have slashed non-essential roles, but been a bit less heavy-handed among the engineers. I do feel that Twitter's popularity is orthogonal to the cost-cutting.

there are still TONS of bots, despite what musk says

That's the point. We have reliability engineers and QA, but I don't find that they actually prevent or resolve outages. I guess it's funny to poke fun at every outage after the mass layoffs, but in reality I doubt things would have been much better had that not happened.

Can we just keep calling it twitter

“Twitter/X” seems pretty reasonable for now. After all, it’s not like they changed the domain name.

It has been taken by or at least redirects to nitter.

That's wild. Wasn't x.com owned by Elon? Why would he redirect it to nitter?

That's a typo/autocorrect, it redirects to twitter

Compromise: xitter

It's perfect as long as we agree to use Chinese pronunciation for the first letter.

South Park did it

I still call Meta “Facebook” too.

At least in that case Facebook is still the name of the product, just not the company.

I still conflate them too tbh.

That would be deadnaming it.

That would require corporations to be people, which, fortunately, they aren't.

Citizens United would like a word though.

How about Twixter, as it seems the owner is a little bit of a twixter himself? :)

"The website formerly known as Twitter" has precedent.

is it a glitch or is it to save on storage costs?

Two things about storage:

Basic block storage - high capacity spinning rust - is very cost effective and 'cheap', even when used in a high-availability / redundant configuration.

Said, similar storage, supplied by a Cloud provider, is stupidly expensive in relative terms. Albeit, 'cold' versions can be reasonable value if you don't want realtime access to your data, and you can work your way through the maze of egress price charging points.

You forgot about bandwidth costs. The entire benefit of a CDN is moving data closer to the user to not only speed up access time, but cut down on data transfer fees. So you can either replicate your entire database across all CDN nodes (and pay more for duplicated storage), or you can have cold storage in one location (and pay more for transferring the data).

The thesis of deliberately deleting all these images would be premised on the idea that no one was accessing them anyways, hence they're useless. That merely storing (but seldom accessing) them is very cheap is a sufficient rejoinder to that thesis.

> The thesis of deliberately deleting all these images would be premised on the idea that no one was accessing them anyways

That doesn't make sense. The OP seems to be implying the exact opposite in fact.

Scream test

From "X media" to "ex-media".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZw35VUBdzo

Reminds me of how Myspace lost everything uploaded before 2016. Oops: https://ew.com/music/2019/03/18/myspace-loses-50-million-son...

How is it possible for a company to use a single letter as a trademark? This is completely stupid. Not only it is confusing (when I read this title I thought its about Xorg/X11) I can't imagine them being able to enforce such trademark. Then there is destruction of one of the most recognisable brands in the world (twitter). It literally feels like the jerk that bought the company is trolling everyone and purposefully running it into the ground. Considering his vast interests in China and who will benefit (bytedance, tik tok etc) I also think there clearly is a Chinese angle to the whole thing.

It is confusing indeed, I usually use X in conversation to refer to any unknowns that isn’t the main discussion point, now, whenever I read these articles it’s confusing to follow, at least call it X-twitter, X-app or anything similar.

My first thought: "Glitch in X? That software is very mature, I haven't heard of any glitches in may years (apart from known quirks)..."

Elon should change his name to Elon MuX.

So he can ax a lot of questions

Switch to Wayland already.

How many moved to Mastodon again?

The article says this happened in 2016?

No it doesn’t. The article talks about an enhancement made to Twitter’s link shortener made in 2016 but makes it clear that this happened recently.

You are misreading. There was an architecture change in 2016 but it still worked. The recent changes didn’t support the pre 2016 architecture.

HN users have been giving Twitter 2 weeks for a year now. You can root for someone to fail and still have a gauge on the truth but it looks like a lot of people here don't.

Maybe it takes being a sports fan of anything but the dominant team. Your team's playing Manchester City at the Etihad this weekend. Do you say "we're going to crush them" or do you say "I think we can hold them, maybe even nick a point. They're not invincible"?

what is the truth here?

Does anyone honestly care? I can’t think of anything less important than any tweet that is more than a few days old. Literally trillions of tweets could be deleted and no one would care

Well, apparently some people care as some people have noticed.

(I myself have some old tweets I cite from time to time, sure I can copy, but providing sources is a good practice)

Tweets are embedded in tons of news articles as primary sources, and often require the image to make sense. Like it or not, Twitter is a primary source for a significant proportion of history worldwide, as it contains a lot of first-person reporting and evidence.

Twitter's not just about documenting what you had for breakfast; it's also about documenting civil war atrocities.

I would care. There’s an active community of artists and developers who regularly post images of their work, as well as educational material. I can also conceive of other such communities that I’m not aware of whose members would feel the same. Losing years of those resources would be a great loss.

Twitter really has a PR issue. So many people still see it as the place to post “ate a sandwich for lunch today”, when it’s so much bigger than that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com