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@thor
Only skimmed through it, but it reads like a pile of bs cope.

They try to make it sounds like Twitter is a living entity, a being with a consciousness of it's own that likes to be fickle and act randomly. It's not. It's software.

Sure, software can have bugs, but it doesn't "develop bugs" in time, it always has them since someone programs them in, and they'll remain the same up until someone updates the code. They don't generate spontaneously out of thin air.

The reason Twitter is buggy is not because it just decides to chaotically break. It's because they kept adding code to censor people, topics, or to control discourse. Just think about how many checks the software must do these days to just load in the replies to a post. Just from the things we know, it needs to: check for users you banned or muted, check for accounts banned by Twitter, check against various shadowbanning algorithms, check against "safety and security" bs, check for and load in "fact checks", group replies in threads, sort by Twitter's prioritization algorithms instead of displaying chronologically. And I'm sure I'm missing stuff, and that there are things we're not even aware of that Twitter is doing behind the scenes.

Point is, Twitter has become buggy because all those pieces of code, that do all those different tasks, were created by different people, and the interaction between all of them is probably not seamless. I wouldn't even be surprised if some of the code is self contradictory. Twitter has become buggy because they over complicated the code. Remove all the manipulative bs, and I bet you can get a stable Twitter back.

And let's be honest, Twitter was severely overstaffed. They had enough staff to remake a new Twitter each year. You don't need that much for maintenance. If there was any sign of actual active development I would have cut them some slack. But how many years have they struggled until getting an edit function? Let's be honest, Twitter's staff was doing jack shit. Then Elon breaks in with a sink in tow, and in just a few weeks they manage to code in $8 verification. If that isn't proof they were lazily wasting their time before, I don't know what is.

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@alyx @thor I completely agree with what you wrote, but I would add the proviso that browsers can also break a site and introduce 'bugs' in site code that hasn't changed. The chrome team updated their rendering engine at some point in the last 12-18 months to adhere closer to spec and managed to completely fuck a very large number of websites. Something to do with calculation of element widths that used percentages when the containing element also used percentages, I've redacted the exact details from memory. I do remember that firefox wasn't affected because they had implemented that part of the spec correctly.

To add to your list of bullshit checks twitter has to perform is that some tweets are illegal in certain countries, so the users location has to be checked for each specific tweet to see if it's on a national blocklist.
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