Somebody at Twitter 1.0 left a poison pill algorithm hidden in the code to keep certain people shadow banned after they left or were fired.
(media.greatawakening.win)
🕊️ TWITTER CRIME SCENE 🕊️
It's called Tombstone Generator: https://twitter.com/The1Parzival/status/1656505671377117185?
"Tombstone Generator" is an awesome name.
Right?
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1656505665962254347.html
"Tombstone" appears to be the terminology they use for error messages that appear when you're unable to view a tweet for whatever reason.
This type of message specifically, from trying to view a tweet from a user that has blocked me: https://i.imgur.com/1zqG2H1.png
We can look at the API response for this tweet, and see the "tombstone" terminology used there: https://i.imgur.com/6MV6h5b.png
The code pointed out by this user does not seem to indicate any "poison pill algorithm". From what I can see, it just generates and localizes the messages displayed for content you are unable to view for a range of normal circumstances.
Yeah that code doesn’t do what the tweet author says/thinks it does
Cates overstates. Always.
I think I used that for a finisher on a pro wrestling game
Cool. I just so happen to be taking my son over to Tombstone, AZ tomorrow.
Great town. Be sure to stop by the Trump store on your way in (depending on what direction you're driving in from)
TBH, In his interview with Tucker he said the code was bizarre and convoluted (paraphrasing). And he needs help to get it back into proper form. He said Twatter was run as a SJW. platform and not as a business. Massively over staffed and in desperate need of reform.
I suspect Twitter software is like a small start-up I worked for briefly. They just kept adding code on top of code on top of code. Never going back to update the original but instead adding more layers. They did this to customize for each customer. Hopelessly complex mess. I do not seek to offend anyone here if they code but the people I have met who do this seem to think only in terms of short term fixes. "I CAN do this." Therefore, "I do it". Little thought to how what one just did might effect what the guy sitting next to you just did.
Fun fact about Twitter. When LinkedIn first was becoming a company, Twitter gave LinkedIn their code so LinkedIn is actually built on Twitter's code. Once LinkedIn became successful Twitter tried back tracking and sued lol
Honestly, from what you see in a lot of coding focused industries, that seems to be depressingly normal.
After all, games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy 14 among quite a few others are referred to as "spaghetti code" because it's "not worth the money to go back and update old code", and this ends up being justified by a lot of people defending them because coding is a skill and takes time -- like every other skill, of course.
The thing it guarantees is that if the code is ever destroyed, there is no one who could recreate it.
In system engineering, we call this "losing control of the system definition." It is bad ju-ju and it certainly happens. I might say "it happens to the best of us," but the reality is that anyone who allows this to happen at all, does not deserve to be called "the best of us." It is just sloppy. Like Michaelangelo sculpting a "David" with six fingers on one hand.
It has unfortunate real-life implications, as 346 passengers and crew found out in regard to the 737 MAX MCAS software.
It's the retarded AGILE scrum fad. Don't think about the future and don't plan anything. Just spend two weeks at a time writing random code and hope it works. Then two weeks later change your mind and do it again.
Agile works if done properly. The problem is, most businesses don't know how to do it properly and end up with a bad mix of agile waterfall, which doesn't work at all and ends up with spaghetti code messes.
Proper agile takes time for writing proper unit tests and following a test-driven paradigm. That test-driven paradigm then leads to "fearless refactoring". Proper agile will then take the time to refractor the code to be better.
I was in a company that did proper agile for a while. Problem was, that company was a contractor company and didn't have enough clients so many got laid off. The clients it did have was happy, but they hired more than they could afford to pay from the clients they did have.
I've been to 4 companies since then and not a single one did proper agile. Always some bad mix of agile and waterfall.
Its not a fad. SpaceX has seemed to do quite well in manifesting the principles in manufacturing rockets...
In my experience as a software developer, this comes down to management more so than actual engineers.
When creating a new product, management typically wants to move fast and prototype things to get feedback from stakeholders. So you end up making something messy, quickly, so that you don’t waste time building the wrong thing before you get feedback.
But once you solidify plans, you definitely want to go back and clean up what you built to be both solid enough to release, and robust enough to build upon for the next iteration.
The problem is, no matter how many times you tell stakeholders that what you’re showing them is a prototype, they don’t get it. If they see something that appears to work in your demo, then the notion that you need to hold off on all their ideas and plans, so that you can go and do some mythical sounding “clean up” and “architecture work”, sounds like a waste to them.
A good manager can set these expectations with stakeholders, and knows how to set the scope of features for each iteration before it’s time to clean up old technical debt and reevaluate the architecture to make sure it can handle the new ideas coming forward.
A bad manager will be as clueless as the stakeholders, and think that any developer who wants to “hold off and clean up the underlying layers of code first” are just being drama queens. Some of them may even believe their own bullshit when they say “let’s just do this one more thing real quickly, and THEN we’ll clean up the old stuff”.
Here’s where different types of devs come in. Generalizing, you have skilled devs who value their craft, you have newbies looking to prove themselves, and you have crappy devs who are lucky to make anything work at all.
Of those overly generalized types, the skilled devs are the ones praying for the chance to properly structure the underlying layers of code.
The newbies are shouting “I can do that” and going in to try to show management that they can do things that the whiny skilled devs are trying to delay, and the crappy devs are being assigned tasks and creating huge messes of their own because they essentially just want to make the damn thing work by hitting it with a hammer until it does.
So guess who bad management likes best? The devs who just get it done, no matter how, with no complaints about “scalability” or “sustainability” or “proper engineering”.
It makes for some fast early releases this way.
In the end, though, it just makes for a product that breaks at a slight breeze, slows down all future development, and drives competent devs away.
Gosh that all sounds familiar!!
Almost certainly this is what they were doing. My guess is the original code probably was fairly decent because it was a start up and Dorsey despite being a soy faggot probably had some decent talent to begin with which is why the service limped on as long as it did but as the company became more activist and staffed with diversity hires it probably became worse.
Have you used Facebook recently? Just in every day browsing it seems to have all sorts of errors in even basic navigation and it noticeably gobbles RAM and processor resources. If it wasn't for the fact mobile devices have gotten faster the last few years it wouldn't be usable.
They need to start again with it but the company probably couldn't pull something like that off at this point because its best days are long behind it.
There are obvious bugs with Facebook. If I click on a notification of a comment reply, it, more often than not, does not take me to that comment. What seems to happen is that it takes me to the comments page for the post, and even opens the thread automatically, but turns on "Most Relevant" comments, and, for some reason, doesn't consider a comment that literally mentions me, of which I just clicked on the notification to see, as relevant. So you click "All Comments," but then it refreshes and the thread is no longer open. So you have to scroll to the top level comment which, if the post is particularly popular with thousands of top level comments, is impossible.
This has been like this for a long time, possibly years. And that's just one manifestation of this type of issue with notifications not taking you where they should.
At first I attributed it to malice. I believed they were trying to stifle long, argumentative conversations for one reason or another. But I've since realized it happens regardless of the conversation. It could be a friendly chat with you cousin on photos of their wedding.
The thing is, too, that Facebook wants this type of engagement. This type of engagement is what keeps people on their website. There have been many times where I was stuck on Facebook in an argument with someone and couldn't get to the notification, so I just decided to leave all together.
It's crazy that such a massive bug which directly impacts their user engagement, which is a major factor in how much money they make, goes unfixed for years.
It's to the point where most people I've talked to just accept it and don't even consider it a bug. It's just the way it is. As if it's intentional or something. The public just accepts that modern software is shitty.
No, I am perma-banned on FB - can't even bring up the page. I use web versions not apps as much as possible so my experiences are often different from what people report on mobile devices.
I have been saying this for years. These big tech companies get so massive and start employing all sorts of useless people. HR is in charge of hiring, and they have to hire based on objective criteria, and they have no clue what to look for. They hire people with degrees, but no skills. The company gets bigger and bigger, because that's what "looks good" to executives and shareholders. But, even if the people weren't useless, big teams are inherently going to generate messy code. Even if you only hired skilled developers, there gets a point where diminishing returns turn into negative returns.
This is why modern software is utter shit. It keeps getting bigger and bigger, even though it's not really actually doing much more than it used to.
Think about this for a second: think of your very first smart phone you got 10+ years ago. Think about the kinds of things you used it for. Now... what kinds of things are you using your smart phone for today?
If you're like the overwhelming majority, they're the same things. You use it to watch video, view images, take pictures, read text, listen to music, etc. Nothing's changed. It looks a little bit different, but none of the changes actually necessitate faster hardware.
So why, then, does the phone you have today still take just as long to load as your phone did 10 years ago? Not talking about internet connection here. I'm talking about how long it takes to boot up, or to cold open a local application. How is the hardware of your new phone lightning fast compared to your first phone, but takes just as long to do anything as your first phone did 10 years ago?
If you were able to put the most recent update of the common apps on your old phone, it would run like utter shit on the older, slower hardware. Why? What is it doing that requires faster hardware?
The answer is bloat. The code is written so horribly that it just gets slower and slower with every minor update they do. And it's too far gone to go back in and fix it. A total rewrite is required. Which, honestly, wouldn't even be that massive of an undertaking for these companies to do, if they put a small team of skilled developers on it. But they 1) don't know how to arrange that and 2) don't have motivation to arrange that because the public has accepted that software is slow and buggy, and are convinced that's just the way things have to be
Maybe those fired coders can start a restaurant. They seem to know their spaghetti.
I bet they have an algorithm that automatically rejects ban appeals for certain people.
You probably have that same code embedded in many of the social media sites.
Yes, versions of it everywhere no doubt. Back before FB perma-banned me I called it keeping us in silos, echo chambers where only we and maybe one or two others could see our posts.
I'm still on FB, and it acts very strange at times like someone has been taking the shadow bans off for a time. Then it is back to not seeing friends posts again. The whole thing needs to be either taken over or scrapped.
I wonder if we could consider LinkedIn a threat of some kind considering LinkedIn was built using Twitters code
Not disclosing stuff like this, when asked to do so, is a crime.
Will be interesting to see how quickly Elon gets rid of this algorithm and if it leads to probably many other similar ones. Think of the difference THIS could make in Free Speech!!
They underestimate the tenacity of our autists when they decide it's time to dig.