Tech giants fighting each other.
Interesting to see how they have all managed a system with each other that is so hard to switch around.
Based on how this was (apparently?) an automatic response by the Google search algorithm, seems more like a case of:
Twitter: ”You took everything from me!”
Google: ”I don’t even know who you are”
Probably coulda just like… emailed someone at Google and asked before making the switch.
When you do something abysmally stupid, then have to walk it back, not saying anything is a lot safer than trying to explain.
I don’t know though. I’d find a certain amount of entertainment in watching him ummm and stutter his way through the explanation.
And the number of people surprised…?
- No, 800. Aaaarrrrgh!
Lol too little too late.
They actually likely did this due to SEO. Google was allegedly in the process of removing tweets from the search index because they weren’t accessible. This happens automatically for most sites.
Probably also advertisement revenue. Why would people go on twitter if they can’t see anything? Why would advertisers pay money to show ads to no-one?
I think Elon got quite a talking to.
This feels like an extremely basic thing to miss. Something 10 seconds of thought would have fixed.
Okay but that would involve whoever is in charge there to think longer than 10 seconds.
I guarantee you whoever pushed this to prod knew exactly what was going to happen, but the super genius(🤮) in charge is always right and must never be questioned.
He’s the Wile E Coyote of Tech.
Nah, I actually like Wile E. Coyote
I like this.
The supreme leader is always right!
All hail plankton
So much this. The leader on top is the one who instills the corporate culture. In this case, the engineers have no say in the matter. They need to do what they’re told.
Does anyone else think a lot about the incredible irony of western freedom-loving democracies being fine and dandy with the fact that nearly 100% of workplaces are top-down dictatorships? Even when you’re “given” freedom to act independently, it’s always predicated upon your decisions and actions aligning with the wishes of your superiors. The second that isn’t the case, you get your marching orders, and you can either comply or fuck off.
It would be one thing if employment were “optional” to some degree, or there were always more jobs than people to do them, but so many people are one missed paycheck or medical emergency away from homelessness, you basically have no choice but to grin and bear it.
It would be one thing if employment were “optional” to some degree, or there were always more jobs than people to do them, but so many people are one missed paycheck or medical emergency away from homelessness, you basically have no choice but to grin and bear it.
Well, it is “optional” to some degree. I know plenty of people across Europe who are doing oke enough on basic support. It’s not an amazing living but it’s not like you are out on the streets. And a medical emergency will not cripple you with debt.
At least far as actually freedom-loving democracies go (as in, free to abort, free to express your identity, free to protest, …).My upper manager always goes on about “empowerment” being part of the new direction for the business, but wouldn’t you know, we still get drawn and quartered for the smallest errors.
Are you sure they didn’t mispronounce “employee disembowelment”?
Perhaps - I am notorious for my issues processing verbal communication!
There are solutions to level the playing field like unions or European works councils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council . but it’s still top down in the end. Always seemed strange to me, perhaps it’s the way to get things done…
The real solution isn’t those things; it’s structuring the businesseses as employee-owned co-ops.
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Yes, most likely, within days they lost half of their links in Google.
How tf they did not see this happening?
Since Elon I don’t think Twitter has been thinking about the long term effects of their actions. Everyone predicted the blue checkmark fiasco but they went ahead with it anyway so this doesn’t surprise me.
And if they didn’t fire everyone, someone with a spec of sense would have told them this
Same with popups that try to throw you to only a mobile app
What makes you think that even if someone told Musk that, he would have listened to them?
True. If it were a good idea he would have already thought of it, right?
Every single one of these “iNDePENdeNT/liBerTaRian” tech bros think they’re the smartest man in the room. Too high on their own farts.
He was firing people before who told him something wasn’t going to work, so it wouldn’t surprise me if everyone who knew this would fail stayed silent in fear for their jobs.
How does Pinterest get around this then? They pollute image searches like crazy, and require you to login to see anything. At least they did, I blocked them from searches so maybe it’s different now.
Pinterest is cancer. They act like their content belongs to them when it’s all stolen images
They must have changed their paywall behavior, I just went and was able to see every image I clicked on.
The login popup appears after a few pages but you can just exit out and keep viewing. Google should be able to index the pages without access issues
Maybe that previous aggressive login screen killed their SEO before, I see much less pinterest images than I used to years ago
it 100% did, google removed over half the twitter links on its index due to dead links/login requirements, which if kept like that would basically kill all Twitter traffic since most traffic comes from search engines
Most of these sites serve the information, then put up something to block being able to view it.
Easy - detect if you’re getting accessed by a search crawler or a human. Serve a full page or just a login request.
So how can a user pretend to be a web crawler?
You’re going to need a special hat.
Perhaps a safety vest as well. You know, for access.
Adding a clipboard and a ladder will make it even more official
This browser addon can spoof useragents:https://add0n.com/useragent-switcher.html
Ever heard of https://12ft.io/ ? It allows you to bypass alot of pay walls by basically pretending to be a search engine trying to index a website. For SEO reasons a lot of pay walled sites allow search engines to access the whole article to index. 12ft.io leverages this to show you whole articles behind paywalls. This is something you could also achieve by spoofing the User-Agent. It would probably work for things like Pinterest without an account as well, but that’s something I have never tried (since I have no interest in the cancer that is Pinterest).
https://www.rawstory.com/google-twitter/
Yeah they were already doing that, I imagine he took a look at how many inbound visits come from Google and quickly U-turned
Didn’t like not being on googles results page did ya Elmo?
Business genius.
Elon is speedrunning bankruptcy right now.
So trying out changes to a platform isn’t a bad thing and can lead to a lot of good optimization, but usually you don’t just push them onto the entire user base without testing/marketing research to try and anticipate their effects.
How exactly do these changes make it to production without being evaluated? I know blame is mostly on Musk here but do the software devs really never stand up and say “we’ll look into it and get back to you in a few weeks”?
The reason this doesn’t make sense to you is because of how you’re framing it.
This corpo is being run unilaterally by someone unconcerned with its longevity. It’s that simple.
The only devs left are those whose visas are tied to employment, so they can’t piss of the management or they get deported.
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Fritter works by scraping the twitter website, so it should be working. The only issue is however that the website changed a lot so I guess the scraping strategies don’t work as well now.
A lot of government agencies use Twitter for breaking news, notifications, and alerts that they’re trying to get out as quickly as possible to as many people as possible, such as tornado warnings, amber alerts, traffic conditions, etc. I can’t imagine they’d stick around a platform that requires logging in to view these messages.
This morning storm Poly smashed the Netherlands, especially North Holland (Amsterdam region). Digital emergency alert system was used, three times, and directed people to Twitter.
Which was closed, of course. It’s a political shitshow right now. Amsterdam municipality already runs its own Mastodon, and this fuckup will probably have consequences in moving official broadcast channels off Twitter.
Nonsense like this is why I believe outdoor warning sirens are still incredibly important. Mobile alerts are not foolproof, and can be bungled horribly, and not everybody has their phone on them, or a phone at all. If there’s a severe storm or tornado coming, you need to know ASAP. Sirens are an excellent way of getting people indoors, regardless of who’s outside. I heard the Netherlands was considering decommissioning its countrywide siren system, which I thought was absolutely fucking stupid. What you posted proves exactly why.
Which was closed, of course. It’s a political shitshow right now. Amsterdam municipality already runs its own Mastodon, and this fuckup will probably have consequences in moving official broadcast channels off Twitter.
Germanys gov runs its own Mastodon instances - social.bund.de - where the cabinet, the ministries, state institutes etc have their official accounts.
Some non-political examples are: The German Weather Service, the German Aerospace Institute, and the Consumer Protection Agency.
I can’t imagine they stick around on a platform that isn’t stable and in the last year has changed direction so many times that almost no one can keep up with it. It’s the instability and constant changing that makes people jump ship from a previously stable platform. It’s not like a Lemmy instance where it’s to be expected for a while.
Just today we had a severe storm alert pushed to phones through the emergency system here in the Netherlands and the alert contained the fire department’s twitter handle. I was like “welp, I guess I’ll hear the updates later”
Ideally governments should be pushing things like threat to life alerts out via a digital emergency alert system (e.g. Amber alerts) rather than hoping those potentially impacted are checking Twitter.
Which is funny because the UK decided to finally implement this recently and my god the Twitter Boomers were mad.
I reluctantly disabled all government alerts on my phone a few years ago because despite theoretically having multiple levels of importance (minor alerts, major alerts, critical alerts), apparently they weren’t categorizing the alerts when they sent them out so I kept receiving all alerts, even minor ones and alerts for things happening far from where I live, and to make matters worse they overrode do not disturb. Hopefully they’ve improved the system by now, but I haven’t thought to check until this conversation thread.
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Tell me more
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Thanks for the context. I see why you would want to turn off the alerts. That’s definitely an irritating misuse of the system.
Let me guess… Amber Alerts in Canada being sent as the “presidential alert” which bypasses everything on your phone and wakes you up at 3AM? Goddamn Alert Ready is a mess.
I read that public service annoucement accounts were excempt from the change, but it’s just bad business either way.
Kind of terrible that we ever got to this point. I’ve seen announcements from government agencies that are ONLY available on social media. Who thought that was okay?
The joys of neoliberalism and privatization. When you’re convinced the private sector can do no wrong and the government can do no right, is it any surprise that this is the outcome?
Welcome to the dumbest timeline
I thought the exact same thing this morning when the NL alert had a Twitter reference in it
Still doesn’t work for me?
It may be rolling out, there was a point after the change was initially implemented when some people reported still being able to get in
Ahh, that makes sense
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Better Late than never…
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