T
Twitter Blog
blog.twitter.com · Company blog · on HN since 2007
Twitter's official engineering and corporate blog, covering infrastructure, product changes, and moderation decisions.
What HN saysHN links it for infrastructure write-ups and policy announcements, and commenters praise the company's open source contributions and discuss its recommender system code.
1.0KHN people shared it
494linked it in comments
828stories submitted
20Kstory points
2 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Permanent Suspension of RealDonaldTrump (2021)26 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 2The Infrastructure Behind Twitter: Scale (2017)11 people · 11 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 3The Infrastructure Behind Twitter: Scale11 people · 6 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 4Company11 people · first shared 2014
- 5Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump10 people · 2.0K points · first shared 2021 · 1.9K comments on HN
- 6New Tweets per second record, and how10 people · 77 points · first shared 2013 · 6 comments on HN
- 7Twitter Launches Verified Accounts10 people · 6 points · first shared 2008 · 1 comments on HN
- 8Snowflake (2010)10 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 9Examining algorithmic amplification of political content on Twitter9 people · 11 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Introducing birdwatch a community based approach to misinformation9 people · first shared 2022
- 11Announcing snowflake9 people · first shared 2017
- 12Speedy Neural Networks for Smart Auto-Cropping of Images8 people · 127 points · first shared 2018 · 14 comments on HN
- 13Twitters excessive brand display rules8 people · 6 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 14Observability at Twitter7 people · 15 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 15Twitter's new collaboration with Google Cloud7 people · 12 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
elicash · 2022-04-23
Worth noting that political ads are already banned on Twitter and have been for a couple years:
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etf…
In practice, this leads to weird scenarios where Exxon can run promotional ads but climate groups can't run ads in opposition.
I'm not saying this is the wrong policy necessarily, just that "politics" is a tricky thing to define. Labor unions can't run ads saying workers should demand more pay, but Amazon can run ads saying their jobs pay good wages.
Edit: Also, I tried to find the original post but the blog is down, at least for the moment for me. https://blog.twitter.com -- anyway, here's a cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ADXc6Wf2sSAJ:htt…
mythz · 2012-04-17
They are perfect Role models since their a successful company who employee great talent who use and contribute back to open source. If something doesn't exist they'll build it and open source key parts of their technology platform and are more than open about what they use and how they're able to scale their incredible load:
http://blog.twitter.com /
http://highscalability.com/display/Search?searchQuery=twitter&modu…
Giving away your core-business is corporate suicide, they would be a shadow of themselves if 100 clones surfaced overnight offering the exact same service - and by extension be unable to contribute back to OSS as much as they have.
albahk · 2011-03-23
Since a blog can be an integral part of your company and the "voice" that people hear I think its worth doing a custom theme and Wordpress install to match your site design and host it on a sub-domain (but on a different server for security reasons, as mentioned in this thread).
If I see a http://webapp.posterous.com blog for a company with the default theme I think "Oh, this is probably another MVP this guy churned out over a weekend".
I've always like http://blog.twitter.com which is a blogger-hosted blog, but with a very nice design.
DemocracyFTW2 · 2024-10-20
Again, observe the missing data only concerns https://blog.twitter.com not https://twitter.com
throwaway9274 · 2023-10-24
I said “parts of the recommender system code.”
This is the kind of highly emotional reaction that’s not helpful.
Yes, I am quite familiar with building ML models, both training and building my own for which I’ve been paid large sums of money, and I’m here to tell you that you don’t know what you’re taking about.
There’s so much more information about an ML system than just the trained model that is important for understanding the effects of the system on a society, and its legal, ethical, and social ramifications.
Just seeing the type of RS being used, the ranking approach, and the information on SimClusters is enough for RAI folks to start to understand the ecosystem effects and how that can show up downstream in social effects.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023/twi…
dcunit3d · 2023-07-04
I tried to point this out below. It's not even a DDoS, it's fake news.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2019/…
it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"
retornam · 2023-05-12
Bookmarks launched in 2018 https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/28/twitter-launches-bookmarks-a-private…
Super Follows in 2021 https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-super-f…
Birdwatch (community notes) in 2021
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-birdwat…
all launched before Musk took over.
summarity · 2023-03-31
kevviiinn · 2023-03-07
US conservatives love crying and playing the victim, it gets them more attention and more votes because they don't have good policy
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-politicalconten…
blitzar · 2023-03-06
> "his subscription idea"
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/introducing-twitter…
Musk innovated at twitter years before he ever bid on twitter, amazing skills.
mtmail · 2023-02-18
They could've at least emailed the affected users. Seems like they just want to save costs again.
"Effective March 20, 2023, only Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to use text messages as their two-factor authentication method. Other accounts can use an authentication app or security key for 2FA."
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2023/an-update-on-two-fa…
Marazan · 2022-12-17
"
We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile).
"
They literally wrote a blog post about it 4 years ago[1]. This wasn't hidden.
Anyone who is "shocked" by Twitter's definition of shadow banning (which, in my opinion aligns with what I posted anyways) is doing performative outrage of an insincere nature.
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-the-record-…
rhaksw · 2022-12-17
> Every profession develops their own lingo over time.
In this case, Twitter packages up two objectively observable things, people you follow and people who are popular, along with Twitter's own opinion about who the bad-faith actors are. It's that last subjective part that is at issue here. Yet all three are lumped together under the term "rank" [1], and we are told it is the bad actors who are manipulating, not Twitter.
I'm not calling for the demise of Twitter's former leadership, just calling out corporate speak where I see it. YouTube is at least transparent in this respect. They openly say that they "reduce" content [2].
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-the-record-…
[2] https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/the-four-rs-of-responsibility-remo…
throwaway888abc · 2022-12-16
You should be able to speak your mind and find credible information easily.
Twitter is an open service that’s home to a world of diverse people, perspectives, ideas and information. We’re committed to protecting the health of the public conversation — and we take that commitment seriously.
Account and service integrity
We do our best to keep people with bad intent from creating or maintaining accounts, compromising the accounts of others, or artificially boosting harmful content. This helps us protect the safety, security, and credibility of Twitter accounts.
https://about.twitter.com/en/our-priorities/healthy-conversations
wcerfgba · 2022-12-14
A little under 2 years since it was acquired by Twitter.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/making-twitter-a-be…
Shame, I loved Revue, it was a great product. If they could release their code for self-hosting that would be great but, it's not gonna happen is it.
veec_cas_tant · 2022-12-09
That tweet is referencing this[0] blog post.
> We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.
It specifically mentions factoring in user behavior:
>What actions you take on Twitter (e.g. who you follow, who you retweet, etc)
> How other accounts interact with you (e.g. who mutes you, who follows you, who retweets you, who blocks you, etc)
How was Twitter hiding this?
[0]: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-th…
ihuman · 2022-11-23
Twitter already made that. They launched Subscriptions (previously Super Follows) a year ago.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-super-f…
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/subscriptions
steviesands · 2022-11-05
Twitter has ads serving infra, recommendation systems (timeline, notifications, events, users), user generated events, prediction systems (ads), user graphs. The complexity is from processing and persisting exabytes of data in company owned datacenters. eg. Twitter stores images, videos, user events, user data, tweets/replies. WhatsApp has little persistence outside of metadata maybe? But your messages are not stored in a FB datacenter and if they are I'd be concerned. You can read about their infra in their blog. Comparing p2p messaging versus a distributed social media site with mountains of data and years of iteration in ML systems does not make sense.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/…
ccorda · 2022-11-04
From Keith Coleman today, who authored the original post announcing birdwatch [1]
> The team is on a mission that has had the support of 3 CEOs. We're cranking.
> to all team members, contributors and advisors past and present — an amazing, mission-driven set of people.
https://twitter.com/kcoleman/status/1588611638655320064
Also, Elon has endorsed it:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587798343622737925
Hoping it stays, I love the bottom up nature of it.
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-birdwat…
kaesar14 · 2022-11-04
Elon has made no content moderation changes to Twitter yet. This feature has existed for 8 months and is community driven: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/building-a-better-b…
The worst part of this acquisition is the groan-worthy expansion of Elon worship in public discourse.
jpalomaki · 2022-08-26
This is quite valuable advise: "The original version of Discord was built in just under two months in early 2015. Arguably, one of the best databases for iterating quickly is MongoDB. Everything on Discord was stored in a single MongoDB replica set and this was intentional, but we also planned everything for easy migration to a new database"
Also the article links to Twitter blog, which gives similar point (it's from 2010): "We [Twitter] currently use MySQL to store most of our online data. In the beginning, the data was in one small database instance which in turn became one large database instance and eventually many large database clusters" [1]
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2010/announcing-snowflake
app4soft · 2022-07-14
Yup: http://downrightnow.com/twitter
Also, it seems like even https://blog.twitter.com was down right now for a moment (but just restored).
NDizzle · 2022-05-11
Take a look at the two tweets that twitter used to justify the perma ban of Trump. It's weak, at absolute best.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension
On January 8, 2021, President Donald J. Trump Tweeted:
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
Shortly thereafter, the President Tweeted:
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Those two tweets are perma-ban worthy? I'm glad nobody has paid attention to what I typed into region chat in MMOs for the past 20 years...
faeriechangling · 2022-04-21
I don't see any calls even in the article to censor, I see a call for compulsory editorialisation.
I think structurally, if I was going to devise some means of "Fact-checking", it would be conceptually similar to birdwatch [1] because I just don't think we need this cabal of privileged elite editors to counter the stories that the masses push to the top because they're fools prone to sensationalism. One of my favorite algorithms is Reddit's "sort by controversial" because that's how you can read what a real critic thinks about something. I just think promoting traditional journalism as the cure for social media isn't the answer, a social media problem needs a social media solution.
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-birdwat…
thenerdhead · 2022-04-03
To be fair a decade ago only 30% of the world was online. Now that number is closer to 65%. Back in 2012 was the first moment they decided to censor on a country by country basis. Fast forward ten years and it’s on a person by person basis. Laws and regulation corrupted Twitter with enough time, not the invention itself. At its best, social media puts a mirror to humanity and reveals the full complexity of the world. It shines a light on the dark aspects of human nature.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2012/tweets-still-must-flow
yreg · 2022-02-10
They are not fully "alive and well". Twitter and Reddit have APIs because they are old enough to have made them back when it wasn't clear it would hurt their business. Can you imagine TikTok or even Instagram to add APIs to support third party clients?
Twitter has been gradually killing their APIs.[0] Reddit doesn't offer APIs for the newer features, like polls.
[0] - https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2018/investing-…
basscomm · 2021-11-30
> There is one plan which they've never considered and probably never will: something like Twitch, where you can pay for the "content creators" you like.
Twitter rolled out Super Follows[1] and Twitter Blue[2] a few months ago
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-super-f…
[2] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/introducing-twitter…
alteii · 2021-09-02
Agreed. I’d love to hear some alternative examples to Twitter’s web app or how one could build it faster.
Also I’m curious if the original Twitter lite was well engineered. I generally share all the criticisms above about the web but I thought Twitter’s Scala back end actually made the response fast and resilient. I mostly use the iOS app but never had problems with the mobile (until recent changes).
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2017/introducing-twitter…
finiteseries · 2021-08-13
You are discussing reports to the UK Football Policing Unit, not tweets.
By 14th July, 1,961 Tweets had been removed proactively following the Final, with a total of 126 removed from reports.
the UK was - by far - the largest country of origin for the abusive Tweets we removed on the night of the Final and in the days that followed.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_gb/topics/company/2020/combatting-online-r…
EdwardDiego · 2021-03-31
Why though?
It's worth noting that Twitter built their own system (EventBus) that Apache Pulsar largely mimics in design (and the people who started Pulsar at Yahoo had worked on EventBus prior), with brokers decoupled from storage, and then eventually just decided to get rid of it and use Kafka.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2018/twitte…
> One catch to this is that for extremely bandwidth-heavy workloads (very high fanout-reads), EventBus theoretically might be more efficient since we can scale out the serving layer independently. However, we’ve found in practice that our fanout is not extreme enough to merit separating the serving layer, especially given the bandwidth available on modern hardware.