Today, in front of Twitter HQ Nothing like a lil protest at Market & 10th on an otherwise gloomy Thursday

A Thread: 🧵 TL;DR - Bluesky is an *incomplete* beta.
It's fun, and the community is great, but the company has a HUGE amount of important (and difficult) work to do before they can be a viable global competitor to Twitter. By the time they're ready, the hype may have died off.

Just realized that linking directly to a certain other site which rhymes with foo sky might get downranked on here now. So... I'm over there checking it out, at @mosquito.capital - would love to hear your thoughts on it, there or here. @mosquito I'm already pleasantly surprised by the frontend for content moderation, it's quite pleasant and I appreciate how straightforward it is about the various content categories, along with the Hide/Warn/Show options

Twitter is complying with a far higher percent of demands from governments for user data & takedowns since the acqusition, and hasn't outright denied a single request.

If you really believe in free speech on this platform, you should be pissed, because:

restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk… In the past, Twitter was known for having some of the best pushback on government overreach in these requests.

https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1605299924614221824?s=20

I've been working on building some neat open source tooling for interacting with LLMs, because they're very interesting systems.

But I'm blown away by how far the hype is from the reality - even GPT-4 gives inaccurate/differing/hallucinatory answers to the simplest prompts.

https://twitter.com/stokel/status/1651908491148140545

Bored ramble follows

As a vehicle for techboi hype, it's far superior to crypto in that it's not hard to imagine LLMs being used for something genuinely useful beyond gambling, financial crime, buying drugs, and sanctions evasion.

Have you wondered why everyone is freaking out about the changes to Twitter Blue? Without talking about any particulars, I'll talk about why it's worrying.

Background: I was a Site Reliability Engineer at Facebook/Instagram, and I've seen a lot of product changes come and go. Super quick background: At FB, most product decisions were made only after careful A/B testing. This did stifle some creativity, but it also meant that catastrophic changes to the app were usually reverted before they ever made it past a few thousand users.

Great thread by @rahaeli about the real human dangers involved in running an online social platform. cw: NSFL

https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1594724708309553152

SFW/SFL follow-up thread about what a replacement platform would need to do to be actually in compliance and ready to deal with this stuff from a legal/policy perspective:

https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1594756281650524160?t=LeAmTR00PXkHaBfDMb3_Kw&s=19

PREDICTIONS THREAD: Twitter Doomposting Edition

"Do you think Twitter will die this week?"

A lot of people have asked me that in the last 48 hours.

And my answer is a pretty hard *no*, for many reasons. It's not impossible, but it's very unlikely. With that said... Do I think Twitter is going to face serious technical, social, organizational, and possibly legal problems in the coming year as knock-on effects from the recent firing/exodus of >50% of the workforce? Oh yes.

I've seen a lot of people asking "why does everyone think Twitter is doomed?"

As an SRE and sysadmin with 10+ years of industry experience, I wanted to write up a few scenarios that are real threats to the integrity of the bird site over the coming weeks. For context, I have seen some variant of every one of these problems pose a serious threat to a billion-user application. I've even caused a couple of the more technical ones. I've been involved with triaging or fixing even more.