Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

I just went to their status twitter; it showed me a status update from 2021, then one from 2020, then one from 2022. I... can see why they might want to avoid this. (It's unclear to me whether the random ancient tweets thing is a 'feature' or if Twitter is just broken).

If a service can't keep its own status page up (Twitter's has been an SSL cert error for months), you should perhaps consider not using it for yours.

View on HN

You are only seeing what Twitter's current front-end is showing you: a random assortment of old/"best-of" tweets.

Enter through an alternative front-end (https://nitter.com/SlackStatus) and you should see more status from this year.

Sure, but what are the majority of their customers going to do? X is an unstable platform that confuses most users, never mind the moderation problems.

Would be nice if they were adding a Mastodon account, but I can't blame any company that chooses to retire Twitter presence at this point.

I totally agree that Twitter/X is a shit-show since the not-so-recent change of hands. I am only providing an explanation to what OP sees.

To be fair, Twitter has began pushing algorithm mess onto their users far before the Musk take over. We really can't blame him for that. I was kind of hoping he would have at least tried to reverse it though.

Yeah but only after Muskover they started to first block unlogged users, then started showing them random tweets on profile page.

Nope, they’ve been blocking un logged in users one way or another for like 4 years. Musk removed that for a few months, then made it worse.

Twitter profile pages showed all Tweets linearly from inception until about 9 months into Naughty Old Mr Car's tenure; he can absolutely be blamed for that.

The algorithmic stuff was only ever for users' feeds, not Twitter profiles.

Exactly. We could always see a user's own tweets in order by going to their page.

It's made the whole business of status updates completely unusable. If I want to find out why the fire helicopters are out, I can no longer see that on the fire department's Twitter page (even though they do post it!). If I want to find out if my local lake is closed due to algae, I can no longer see it on the park's page (even though they do post it!).

Pretty soon all these organizations are going to realize that their pages are worthless and leave Twitter.

You can do all of those if you're logged in.

Just an aside, some of recent changes seems intended to mimic Reddit. Not that it matters much.

We can blame him for two decisions which have made Twitter almost unusable:

a) Favouring blue-tick comments and post over those with higher engagement.

b) Paying people to comment which has meant more click-bait, hate etc. content.

> To be fair, Twitter has began pushing algorithm mess onto their users far before the Musk take over. We really can't blame him for that.

I don't think this is a very fair and honest take on the toilet flush spiral where Elon Musk placed Twitter. Screwing up the timeline made available to non-registered users is a recent development, and one that lands squarely on Elon Musk's rule over Twitter. So does the shitshow that was the verified badge policy changes and opening the floodgates to racist and anti-semitic content.

In fact, I dare say that there was not a single change to Twitter that spawned from Elon Musk's takeover that had any positive or neutral impact on the company in general and service in particular.

> Sure, but what are the majority of their customers going to do?

Providing a status monitor/canary page does not force anyone to register an account or subscribe to a service. They can provide all sorts of push/pull notification options they can conceive. Once Elon Musk's Twitter restricted access to their API I'm afraid Twitter lost any relevance for this type of use case.

In all fairness if there is an active post it will be at the top and that's the main value of a status page, not so much about the right order of years-old outages.

In all fairness a visitor now, who sees random old tweets, will assume the status tweet page is unmaintained and useless.

That is not necessarily true. I don’t have an X account; if I go to Musk’s X page I see his pinned post followed by something from 2022. So Slack could always pin the most recent post but they’d still lose the progress of the incident.

No it won't. At least not for me, a not-logged-in user. What's an "active post" anyway? A pinned post is at the top, but what status page constantly pins and unpins their latest post?

When I go to most Twitter pages, now, I see completely random posts from years ago at the top.

Are you asking what slack users are going to do? Or like, what are twitter users who arent as big as slack going to do?

Slack users should be using https://status.slack.com/ in any event.

The real problem with walled gardens is that people actively avoid going outside the wall. Who is actually not going to Slack's own status page when slack is down? People who would rather be wrong than inconvenienced.

In its heyday, using Twitter as an aggregator of alerts in a place that I was already receiving casual updates from was incredibly convenient. Tying that to conversation, it was easy to discern if this was a global impact caused by, for example, a failed deploy, or local, say a failing CDN endpoint. I truly don't think this is a case of folks opting solely for convenience over accuracy, so much as it added both convenience and context. Not to mention it was a useful canary in the coal mine, as declaring incidents on large platforms trigger SLA contract provisions, so we often see quite delayed reports from first-party sources.

People who don't use Twitter won't use Twitter to get status updates.

There are many bad things about how Musk is running Twitter, but the UX for people not logged in is pretty low on the list.

I think it's pretty high actually?

If I'm a random person who just heard that Joe Biden tweeted something, I can't see that tweet by going to his Twitter page. That's a pretty goddamned terrible experience right there.

It's also not clear that I'm just seeing the most popular tweets — no other social network has that experience for logged-out users.

If I've heard someone tweeted something, it's almost always in the context of a news article which embeds the tweet. Even if the embed doesn't work, the direct link to the tweet should.

I agree wholeheartedly that Twitter shouldn't be the primary vehicle for official communication from just about anything (except maybe Twitter itself).

In Japan, it’s not uncommon for companies or governing bodies to announce something _only_ on Twitter.

This can be anything from websites announcing maintenance to a public safety announcement. For example, the district I live has a disaster announcement account on Twitter.

At least for people here, using Twitter only for status updates while not logged in is a very common thing.

> In Japan, it’s not uncommon for companies or governing bodies to announce something _only_ on Twitter.

Not just in Japan.

But the practice, much like the one of using Facebook or other such service exclusively, has always been a Very Bad Idea. Perhaps such entities will finally abandon it entirely.

> Enter through an alternative front-end (https://nitter.com/SlackStatus) and you should see more status from this year.

Very assuring to know Elon jeopardized the reliability of the service for cost savings

nitter.net, not .com

https://nitter.net/SlackStatus

https://nitter.net/SlackHQ

Thanks, you're right! I actually run my own private instance for scrapping so I never recall the main instance.

I've mistyped it many times myself, which finally taught me

I want to see what someone is tweeting -> go to a site that isn't Twitter is not really the response that sparks joy. They're really risking the network effect with this round of mad strategy. If people can't read tweets there is a massive gap for competitors to move in to.

Although I do enjoy the sublime wonder of how between Twitter and the Twitter clones everyone in this space has concluded that to display a 280 character text message they require somewhere between a full Javascript web app or that and an account. It is a pity that HTML is not up to the challenge of these hard times.

If you're not signing up, there's no network effect. Most Facebook and Instagram pages show limited content when you're not signed in.

> If you're not signing up, there's no network effect.

This is blatantly false. In the past, Twitter links, both to tweets and to user timelines, were widely shared through third-party services, including major news outlets.

I want to downvote your comment, but it's really X and their engineering team I want to downvote.

I don't want to use a third-party client to access a fucking website for it function logically.

I want X to always show me the most current post someone has made. I'll decide to scroll down on my own if I want.

This is also why I don't use it much. To be fair, Twitter had this same problem - at least so far as I can remember, it did. I didn't see much value in Twitter and I don't see much value in X, at least not in it's current state.

Maybe that'll change.

> I want to downvote your comment, but it's really X and their engineering team I want to downvote.

The issues you mentioned were not engineering problems. They are all Product Manager diktats. Screwing over the timeline of non-authenticated users is a business requirement, and one which Elon Musk's Twitter decided to change recently.

>> It's unclear to me whether the random ancient tweets thing is a 'feature' or if Twitter is just broken

They started doing this a few months ago. It means if you want to see a persons latest tweets, you have to login/create an account. It's infuriating. A stupid growth tactic. My workaround for now is using Nitter. I can see how businesses linking to their Twitter (e.g. as a source for 'updates' on anything) would have issues with this.

> It means if you want to see a persons latest tweets, you have to login/create an account. It's infuriating. A stupid growth tactic.

It's a dark pattern, and one which only the most desperate services implement as their last desperate attempt to force users to register and login at the expense of eliminating any value the platform has to them.

It just makes twitter look like a dead website tbh.

yeah in the past I might have clicked thru to view a tweet, but now I don't bother.

That's a really good point. When I click on a page and see the top post is from 2021, my first instinct is to assume that they no longer post there.

That’s just because you don’t know product genius when you see it

Oh, yep, I know they've been doing it for a while, but I'm unclear on whether it's actually _intentional_; it could be a really stupid product decision, or just more brokenness.

Yeah this is easily the worst change I have seen on Twitter since the takeover. I have completely stopped using the site because of it. I need to use Nitter or Google Previews when looking up an account and even then it's bad. It pretty much has forced me to just never rely on twitter for any at the moment information and use other sources.

I can't find a bad tls cert for any twitter front end ATM.

9/10 times TLS cert errors are bad cacheing, clashing between browser cipher suites, bad intermediates/roots being on devices etc. Especially on mobile, more especially on android.

But, I also can't find this status page you mentioned. So maybe I'm missing it and twitter actually is incompetent?

I got the same on the Slack one, and also just checked my own profile while logged out and it just redirects to a login page. I wonder what makes an account get shuffled vs not shown at all.

> Twitter's has been an SSL cert error for months

This one? https://api.twitterstat.us/

Seems fine now.

I think parent meant this one: https://status.twitter.com/

Looks like Twitter have just quietly deprecated this page, given that it's powered by a completely different service.

Deprecated/not paid for.

... Wait, so they _have_ a working one... but https://status.twitter.com, which has been the status location for about a decade, has had a broken cert for months?

Is there anyone left working there at all, or is it just Elon roaming the empty corridors as Jason Calacanis follows him telling him how marvellous he is?

If you accept the invalid cert (which is apparently a wildcard cert for *.twimg.com of all things) then it redirects to https://status.twitterstat.us/, so I guess that's the new one? Super unprofessional to leave the old one with an incorrect cert for so long.

But that certificate has also expired!

Absolute omnishambles.

> Absolute omnishambles.

The company renowned for their CEO using a pocket knife to unplug servers straight from the server room is not expected to do stellar work managing certificates.

My homelab has better certificate management.

Hahaha you know I didn't even actually load the site once I was done checking what the hell it was doing.

I saw the common name on the cert and the redirect and was like, oh ok so they wanna move away from this domain then, makes sense.

It didn't cross my mind that what they were redirecting to could have an invalid cert as well...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com