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Comment by montroser | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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