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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29069 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Happy Birthday Elon Twitter

We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter X. How have your predictions fared? I'll answer below.

One potential problem of assessing any levels of platform stability, is that most large tech companies have incredibly strict starting standards for tech uptime and reliability, so sometimes even a 10x or even 100x change in platform stability might still be completely unnoticeable to a regular end user. Imagine a platform going from 1 minute of downtime a year to 100 minutes. Even 1000 minutes of downtime might be hard to notice depending on when it happens and for what features it happens to.

However, someone is usually going to notice some downtime, and Musk owning the platform meant that bugs on twitter suddenly became newsworthy events, rather than things everyone would just ignore and not care about. So even if overall bugs and uptime remained the same, there might easily be a large change in the number of news stories and people's level of awareness of those bugs.

I would not be surprised if platform stability got significantly worse, but also that most tech companies overspend on platform stability as a point of professional pride and bragging rights. So whether you notice is probably determined by whether you follow bad news about twitter, or how much you blow up the importance of the one or two rare downtime incidents you personally encounter.

Yes, I used to work at a small tech company a long time ago and they advertised the uptime for their API in decimal places after 99% with 99.999% being the goal back then.

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