Jesus, I hadn’t even thought of this, but of course.

This is something that historians have been warning about for a couple of decades. How much of our history was not just on Twitter, but on MySpace, on blogs and web sites that came down after a few years, on e-mail, on texts. None of that leaves a record. Once the file is deleted, the server shut down and scrapped, the backup disks decay into being unreadable junk, that history is gone.

Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We aren’t even writing letters. I’m as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I haven’t printed and mailed one in over a decade. It’s all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.

So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.

That is not good.

In cyber and academic circles this has routinely been called the ‘digital dark age’, I wrote on the subject a few years ago linked below. There is a Wikipedia article on the concept.

It’s thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this — archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.

This coupled with the fallibility of hard drives, CDs (make sure to back them up! They only have a 20-30 year lifetime!), and more and there is a chance that even though there is more information than ever before, more primary and secondary sources than ever, we may become just a strange blank spot in societal and cultural history. Digital decay is a terrifying concept that we are already beginning to live through.

DNA Data Storage: A Solution for the Digital Dark Age? (2019)

i said this before to my friends but i guess it's worth posting here: i truly did not expect the scope of how bad the twitter acquisition would go. i genuinely thought musk was going to talk big and whine before the deal, then slowly over time wreck the site with a series of poor decisions.

the pace and magnitude of the fuckups he managed to pull in such a short period of time is unprecedented. it's SO fucking bad. since i at least have some technical understanding behind running a social network, i feel like i'm staring into the sun every time a new headline comes out. there is no hyperbole when it comes to describing how badly elon musk is fumbling the bag.

if you're absorbing this news and think that maybe it's not as bad as it sounds, i assure you it is probably WORSE than what we're hearing. this isn't just haters amplifying small mistakes, musk is weaving the goddamn rope.

it's a goddamn tragedy that billionaires never really suffer for their choices, but i think this is as close as we're gonna get before we start beheading them in the streets

The really funny thing? For as bad as it gotten, as quickly as it has... None of the current problems are what's going to kill Twitter.

Like yes, users are leaving because they have no trust in the site. Executives are resigning. Advertisers are pulling their ads. Companies are getting impersonated and are going to sue them. The FTC is going to fine them a bazillion dollars.

But all those things take time. They're all bad, bad things, but they won't kill Twitter overnight. They're a slow bleed, an eventual demise when a court case resolves, that kind of thing.

But one of the first things Musk did was fire much of the SRE teams, the on-call staff. These are the people who work to keep the site up and running, and they're the kind of people you pay to do nothing most of the time because what you're really paying them for is to be there at 3am when some server goes down and you need someone to log in and quickly fix it.

They're the server administration equivalent of firefighters. Musk fired THOUSANDS of them. And just like getting rid of all the firefighters, this might seem to be going fine for a little while... Because there's not a fire yet. But once there is, oh boy. Things are going to get Real Exciting fast.

Twitter is one bad day away from just ceasing to LOAD at all. Someone hacks a server, someone famous dies and a system gets a little too overloaded due to the traffic spike, or hey, maybe a server just fills up with junk files because the person who had been manually cleaning them up lost their job a week ago... And Twitter dot Com is just gonna be a big message saying "sorry we couldn't load that information, try Twitter/help or try again later".

For hours. Or days. Because the other thing about firing all your SREs... They're also the people who know the weak points of the system, and know where things go wrong when they do go wrong. You can't just replace them with any warm bodies, elm sku just had a ton of institutional knowledge walk out the front door and it's not coming back.

Yes, Twitter is the titanic, but we haven't even hit the iceberg yet. The CEO has demanded full speed on a dark night and no one has the binoculars. It's only a matter of time.

"Twitter, whose communication department has been laid off, did not respond to a request for comment."

This line from a NYT article published yesterday just got me about how big the trash fire is over there.

so true bestie

This goes hard

Elon is bad for business.

Twitter is not going to survive this asshole.

Banning pain meds because they are abortion adjacent is brutal and vile.

#a collection of my favorite tweets

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