However, the site is going through a serious cultural (maybe you could say spiritual) death, and that might have something to do with the lost institutional knowledge of what made Twitter tick at a level deeper than just the code.
That said, Twitter is no longer "open" like it used to be - I bet it just won't handle the public traffic anymore. That is directly tied to cratering revenue but it's hard to untangle from the owner's self-destructive drug-induced behavior.
It's a testament to the quality of the codebase in general. Good code is hard to kill, but it WILL be eroded to the point where it can no longer grow and be better.
Twitter as it runs now is far more locked down. And that happened after it experienced significant, noticeable outages.
Performance is not binary… Twitter is still “up” as a service but with a much smaller public footprint and handling much smaller amounts of traffic.
Also, Twitter had two notable Spaces problems, when launching the DeSantis campaign (into the ground) and the second fiasco, which I actually forget what it was, just recently. The system just cannot handle truly planet-scale traffic like before.
I was never a big fan of it, and never used it much, so I can't judge any loss of quality over the past 2 years. And since they now require a login most of the time, and I don't feel like logging in, I don't bother clicking through links to Twitter that people post.
Quality content has disappeared on Twitter and there is a proliferation of Only Fans tweets. However if you love Musk and right wing conspiracies it is still a fine platform to use.
People are addicted to twitter because of FOMO, because god forbid they learn about breaking news an hour later than anyone else.
The only thing that changes is i used to click on those that looked interesting and now i don't because i know i won't see the thread without a login.
Not doomed, but lots of failures did follow. Timeline not loading or repeating forever, SMS auth issue, API performance, going down in Australia, etc. - they experienced quite a few problems early post-change, but managed to recover.
create table users (id integer autoincrement primary key, username varchar(32), password_hash varbinary(32)); create table questions (id integer autoincrement primary key, user integer references users(id), title varchar(256), body bigtext); create table answers (id integer autoincrement primary key, question integer references questions(id), user integer references users(id), body bigtext);
but actually that's just a tiny fraction of actually making Stack Overflow.
Sure, the advertisers say its because of the platform being a cesspool. But I mean anything on Twitter is on FaceBook or YouTube; you might have to look faster or harder. However, that stuff isn't where FaceBook / YouTube sends your ads. The targeting on Twitter is so bad compared to alternatives that advertisers just don't care to use it. This is an engineering problem caused by having nobody to fix it.