Sean Reiser
The Great Internet Twit-Out. I don't get it.
May 15th, 2008 Some posts this evening about a twitter boycott scheduled for 5/21 to protest the outages at twitter. Where I'm all for protests that have some meaning, I really don't understand this one. As far as I'm concerned a protest makes sense when a company's customers feel that the company is willfully mistreating them. A perfect example of this is the livejournal protest from last month. LJ users felt that adding adverting without notifying them was unfair and protested. Whether the protest was successful or not, is another question, not for this post.
In the case of twitter, there is not willfulness behind their mistreatment, just incompetence. The last thing the folks at twitter want is this negative publicity. If it were in their power, I believe these issues would've been fixed, so once must believe that twitter's issues are not easily fixed. Whether it's Ruby on Rails, the server infrastructure, database scalability or some issue that we haven't discussed these problems are large. I suspect some of the more public staff changes as of late are attempt to get these problems under control.
From this post:
Taking place on Wednesday, May 21st (or a week from today if you’re too tired or too lazy to look that far ahead,) Twit-Out is our chance to show Twitter that WE ARE TWITTER. Without us, there is no community.
I haven't seen any indication that the folks at twitter think otherwise, have you? I believe that they built a platform that grew out of control and have been unsuccessfully playing catchup ever since. Whatever they do to increase capacity, isn't matching the growth in their client base. To quote the great Yogi (Berra) "It's so crowded nobody goes there anymore".
And further more, it provides a chance to show that Twitter is no longer the only way for us to communicate with a similar platform, whether it be via FriendFeed (the preferred method for communicating on Twit-Out) or your microblogging stream of choice.
This brings up the real question. Why give them a chance? Over the past year a number of microblogging platforms have been introduced pounce, and jaiku are some examples. Why do we still come back to twitter like a battered spouse? In a related question .. what will make this protest successful? I refuse to believe that even if no one tweets on 5/21 that on 5/22 twitter will become stable for all time (and if it does it won't be related to the boycott). That's not how software works.
So, if you're boycotting, what do you expect from it?
Sean Reiser, 40, is a developer, technologist, and amateur photographer. Sean has spent the past 20 years as a programmer, system architect and development manager. He is a life long New York resident.
Sean currently serves as the President and Chief Geek Officer of Repair Sense, Inc.. Please go to that site with any professional inquiries.
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Thu, 2010-09-02 14:01
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I think it's more a protest for added stability than any negative view of Twitter. I LOVE Twitter. That's exactly why we're doing this.
But - don't you think Evan, Alex, &c. want Twitter to be stable more than anyone else?
I mean, a protest like this isn't going to make them say "golly, we've seen the light, we'll make Twitter more stable". They're already trying to do that. A "Twit-out" will just make them feel bad about not being fast enough for you.
(Besides which, consider the impact of a "Twit-out": so many people are going to be hammering the server with tweets right before the -out begins and right after it ends that it'll probably bring Twitter to its knees anyway!)
For some reason I can't reply to your new comment directly, but here we go. While writing that comment I guess you haven't seen the update to my post (Update 2 actually) which I further explain the issue. Originally this project, for me at least, was a project based on frustration. It has now evolved into a brilliant conversation, which has both taught me and challenged me.
Twit-Out is not meant as a "solution", because there is not one event that will change the stability of an entire service. Especially one that isn't directly tied to the service at all. If Twitter was still in its beta beginnings, this sort of stability would be understandable. But they have been given quite a lot of time to make sure their service is stable. Is there any excuse to be down so often? If they were testing these new parameters on a test server, you'd figure that these cache issues would be caught, and a solution figured out.
Now, it might just be the condition of such a service that means that there will be some major cache issues along the way. But why tweak things so often that need to encounter a cache reset. And then no warning? Not even a "Sorry, we're working on it" type page? No. It's just dead. Is that anyway to treat a cult community?
thank you for making my point much more succinctly then I did above. I've been protesting things for years (heck I protested the Tuna industry for the Dolphins back in the 80's) and there has to be a purpose to it. I don't feel that the twit-out has defined what it's goals are.
Ah, reply depth limiters.
I can see that argument. On the other hand, they haven't yet: and while we'd like to see Twitter be the Perfect Application, we also need a way to deal with the downtime until it is the perfect application. ;)
Another thought: if you must boycott, could you rig a script to tweet "Twitter, please upgrade your infrastructure to avoid future downtime!" or something like that, every half hour or so? That way you're getting the message across without a bunch of people nudging you. ;)
I always feel really bad nitpicking this sort of thing, because I know people mean well. But I just feel like the Twit-out has too many problems to really be viable as a solution. (For example - it's gotta be hugely publicized; @ev needs to know about it, at the very least. Twitter has more than 200,000 regular users; I suspect that the Twit-out will be lucky to get more than 0.5% of them to stop using it for a day. That's not a noticeable enough traffic drop to really make an impact.)
In the end, I feel like this kind of boycott serves to make the people they participate in feel better - like they've done something - but don't actually have any real effect. I've left some more comments over at Andrew's blog - I really should put them all in one place at some point - but the end result is that you can count me out of the Twit-out.
The inability to update was my fault. I set disqus with a thread depth of 5 which is generally enough for my content, sorry.
As far as how they treat folks when it comes to notifying us about outages, I can understand and respect that as a point. (Although when the had the twitter is down cat, it made me hate cats). If this was posed as a "We're boycotting because we feel the folks at twitter don't keep us in the loop when there are outages" I'd understand and respect it. This feels more like "I'm pissed that twitter goes down so I'm taking my ball and locking it up for a day.. that'll teach them".
It's about a lot of things. One of those things being that Twitter isn't very respectful of their community when it comes to filling them in with a "We're working on it" message of any sort. It's just BAM, API down, server not found. Totally in the dark.
Though all arguments aside, this is a great reply post, exactly the sort of conversation I wanted to see.
Boycotting to send a message to twitter to "tool up" while we Twit-Out! I love twitter too and want them to survive the onslaught of demand coming their way... they need to scale their app NOW or it could be bust....which would make a lot of us cry! ;-) (me included)
do you think they are not trying to do this already? I honestly think that they are tooling up as quickly as they can, it's the platform that's too weak. Like I said above I feel this is incompetence not willfulness. Boycotts don't generally fix that.
I don't think it's willfulness either, but I think a lot of people feel like they've been negligent at best.
Sure their isn't a whole lot of us, but enough so that we can each be reminded that the world doesn't end with Twitter, there are plenty of other ways to be social and have great discussions.
In a way, for me personally, its just as much for architects at Twitter as it is for the community itself.
My main point is that these server fixes shouldn't be maintained on the main Twitter site, effecting the whole community. There must be a way to test these changes before utilizing. It seems like they jump the shark.
How do you know that they aren't tested before they're deployed? To be blunt, I have run into many, many instances of things running fine on the local server and crashing the live server. One variable set in a slightly different way can spell disaster.
Even then, how is the Twit-out going to get the message across? You're trumpeting "community is key" in the actual Twit-out post; you don't talk anywhere there about how server fixes should be tested before they're implemented. Sure, that's a component of maintaining a stable server environment, but that's an awfully broad topic, and - again, to be blunt - nobody but the Twitter developers actually knows what their server environment is like. If they are testing before implementing, and what they actually need is better servers or server software, then saying "you have to test before you implement!" isn't going to do anything. If they test and have great servers but it's Ruby on Rails that's failing them as they scale up, then nothing is really going to help because they're going to have to rewrite the whole damn thing if they want to get it anything like stable, and that's going to take months at the least.
In my job as a medical data analyst, I'm often confronted with the problem of separating the immediate cause of an injury from the underlying cause. A person may have broken their leg because the leg hit a table, but they hit the table because they fell, and they fell because they tripped. Tripping is the underlying cause; hitting the leg is the immediate cause. In the current case, a server upgrade that deleted server caches and brought the server to a halt while the caches were rebuilt is the immediate cause of instability - but we don't know the underlying cause, and we can't unless we're actually in the Twitter server room or talking to Alex Payne, who's their main tech guy.
Like I've said elsewhere, I'm nothing but sympathetic, and I want Twitter to be stable as much as the next guy. I just don't think a Twit-out is the best way to the goal.
Holy crap, that was long-winded of me. I'm so sorry. >_<
(I think disqus limits the depth of comment threads, which is unfortunate but understandable.)
I did see the update - in fact, I paraphrased part of it. ;) But I think we're talking past each other.
I understand that you're frustrated with Twitter's stability. I am too! I want Twitter to be there whenever I want it, and I want Twitter's tech support guys to have nothing to do but sit around and tweet. Sadly, that isn't the case. But a boycott isn't going to change that, and honestly it's not even going to start to change that. Like I said above, it's largely an exercise in making the participants feel better.
I agree with you that Twitter needs a fallback server, even if it's just a Windows NT 4.01 box that displays a filing cabinet with a poster saying "Beware of the Leopard" on the side. Part of the problem, unfortunately, is that Twitter is tossing up the "There is something technically wrong" pages with enough frequency that they're going to have to make a fallback page very significantly different - so much so that the average user will actually read it, rather than just assuming that it's a run-of-the-mill error and keep refreshing. And then, once they've got the fallback in place, the mechanism to do the falling back needs to be incredibly fine-tuned - how long does it wait for a response from the main server before it kicks in? If there's non-server latency, how often will it throw false errors? It's not an easy problem to solve, especially for a company that's growing as fast as Twitter. That isn't to say that I think they should give up - just that it's a hard problem and I don't think Ev and the group really expected this much growth this quickly.
Back to the main point: I agree with you that the conversation is great, and I'm honored and flattered to have been able to be part of it. But the thrust of the conversation is, at least nominally, the pros and cons of the Twit-Out - and so far, at least for me, the pros don't outweigh the cons.
If you're willing to entertain suggestions, it occurs to me that a better use of May 21 might be gathering a group of talented developers and designers, and creating your own fall-back server! Set up an infrastructure like Twitter's, active only when Twitter is down (so as not to compete with Twitter), and storing tweets for users; the system could then, when it got a reliable response from Twitter, forward all of the stored tweets on (so that they were placed in Twitter's database), and then close itself down again. Call it the Emergency Tweetcast Network or something like, and make sure people know about it as a backup for when Twitter's servers go on the fritz again.
(If you're lucky, Twitter might spend some of that $75mm in VC money to buy your ETN... ;)
I'd love to see Twitter do it by themselves though is the point. I think if nothing is changed after Twit-Out, which probably won't happen because of the small percentage of users who will actually not Tweet, then maybe forming a "ETN" like project could be worth it. But I'd really love to see Twitter do it on their own.
Haha, I'll think about it. But don't want to be put on the Blacklist for spamming ;-)
It had a lot of good information, no need to apologize..
Hey. Sure, the Twitter guys are doing all they can and are likely well aware of their down time problems. But that doesn't mean a strong message can't be sent that they need to solve this faster. If the team they currently have can't figure it out, heads must roll and scaling / stability made a priortiy.
The end result of their lackadasical attitude tells me as a user that they don't care about stability, and therefore, not my needs as a user. The reasons (be they unwillingness or incompetence), I am completely unsympathetic to.
Say I order a pizza and it never shows up. I don't care if the delivery guy got lost, I don't care if the delivery guy is a moron. They didn't do their job, so I never order from that company again.
If a company can't provide what they claim to, they don't deserve my patronage and possibly don't even deserve to be in business / funded / exist. It's simple, really!
So, summing up your first 2 paragraphs. They are doing everything they can, know about the problem, yet have a lackadaisical attitude and need to do more and do it faster? Do you see any contradictions in that?
My problem is I don't understand the 1 day boycott. Why are you using the service when there are competitors who are more stable? (friendfeed, jaiku, pounce) Why not just leave for good?
No contradiction, because I only care about the results, and see none. If you have a person who is running around saying, I know about the problem, I am doing everything I can, but at the end of the day, nothing is accomplished, all that effort is for naught. That is where Twitter is.
And as for leaving the service for good, that's exactly what I will do. I don't need Twitter that badly, and they need users more than I need them. Again, this is very simple stuff.
The boycott is infantile and useless.
Twitter's a free service so you're getting precisely what you paid for. More, in fact.
If you don't like it, vote with your feet but please, stop bleating and don't slam the door on your way out.