A new record: Iām now following -2 people on Twitter.
Ever since I unfollowed everyone ā why? For my peace of mindā¦ see https://ar.al/2021/05/10/hell-site/ āTwitterās lost the plot. Today it showed me following two people. When I clicked through, it was four. Unfollowed them andā¦
(If theyāre messing this up, what else are they messing up while filtering and moderating your reality and analysing and categorising you?)
@stux Yeah. Very odd. Documenting them; will write a post about it soon.
@aral Nice! Keep is informed, Iām interested in what happensšøā„ļø
@stux @aral hello! What you've come across here is one of the compromises for large data storage: you can be fast, or you can be consistent. Take a few minutes to read up on what database sharding (with a D) is all about
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/sharding-with-amazon-relational-database-service/
@thamesynne @aral @stux "followers" probably uses an algorithm rather than an actual database lookup, a bit like how the Google search results are usually approximate and rarely spot-on; it would explain why they're always inconsistent. Numerical certainty suffers from a fairly extreme "last mile" problem in that the more precision, the more resources it takes to work out and the less valuable it is (off by thousands = cheap and bad if you get wrong vs off by 10 = expensive and meaningless if wrong)
@aral So I understand how Twitter has to use front-end caches for message distribution, because a SQL join on followers would destroy their servers. But I would've expected profiles would be database truth. But no, it's doing something like sending a delta to all the front-ends and they show an estimate. If you observed it from another part of the world I bet it'd have a different wrong number.
@aral Iāve never been on Twitter so I might have been one of those negative followers. Sorry, friend.
@onan Haha, no need to be sorry; you dodged a bullet :)
@aral oh wow! It keeps going! I thought it was an UI bug one time but this seems more
Birdsite is breaking down 