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Twitter is Just Randomly Deleting People's Lists -- and No One Knows Why (theregister.co.uk)
Twitter has silently, and without warning, deleted reams of lists users have spent months curating. These lists are used by journalists, activists, and loads of other people, to organize and manage twits they follow and aggregate their tweets, links, photos, and videos, reports The Register. From the article: They are, in a way, personalized RSS feeds of information from the Twitter firehose. For the past several days, though, lists have been disappearing from folks' profiles with no notification, and no explanation from Twitter thus far. Some private, or locked, lists have been made public. Among those impacted by the cockup is Australian freelance journalist and Cryptoparty founder Asher Wolf, who said the issue appears to be tied those who use the mobile Twitter App. Switching to different platforms doesn't help, however.
... to move over to Gab. They've seen the writing on the wall.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
then you pray
"Pfffft, us big webbies ain't need no stinkin' ACID."
Table-ized A.I.
That's what you get for putting all your eggs in the basket of a single private corporation that doesn't ow you anything, has absolutely no responsability towards you whatsoever, and, basically, doesn't give a rat's ass about you because you have no contract with them, you agreed to a TOS agreement that contains only protections for said corporation, and you didn't pay a single cent for the service.
Now get off my lawn.
I couldn't have summed up Twitter any better than that. /.
Thank you
Has anyone consider the walrus? Who ever thinks the walrus did it? A perfect cover.
No way we should have to pay so much for this!
If you spend time on twitter you are a twit.
twit (n) - One who bites their own fart bubbles in the bathtub.
The Apper app is simply apping apps while apping other apps, something LUDDITE software can't do!
Apps!
Yeah, I'm old.
Some coastal democrat was unpleased, and viola! list is history!
I thought it was just another way for people to be passive aggressive on the web.
"User @Snowflake92 has added you to the list 'fucking assholes plz die'"
I basically don't log in anymore and NEVER on mobile*, yet I logged in recently and several people I would never ever consider not following, I was no longer following.
Furthermore, those people are still following me, so they didn't do the "block, then unblock" trick to stop me following them.
This has been going on for years. Very frustrating.
* (on the mobile web version, or app, it can be easy tho accidentally hit the unfollow button.
I've said from the beginning that if you have something to say that can be said in 140 characters, you have nothing to say.
From the linked article:
Wolf added that in her case, the deleted lists represented thousands of hours worth of work and were a critical professional tool. "I have three locked lists that I scan for journalism, infosec and Middle East news. Those lists are gone," she tweeted. "My three biggest lists just disappeared. Decade of work. Other ppl also reporting lists disappearing."
This is a valid use case, although I'm skeptical about the "thousands of hours" figure unless the lady is a total retard.
lucm, indeed.
Where were their backups? They *did* keep backups, right? Or did they just trust a third party to not have an incident such as this?
So you have something you put thousands of hours of work into, and you have no form of backup under your control? You're an idiot, lady.
That's the magical thinking of the cloud. Free, always up, never lose a byte of data.
lucm, indeed.
On my reading list is "American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road" by Nick Bilton. The author previously wrote "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal", a great read about the accidental founding of Twitter, the shenanigans of the four cofounders who wanted to CEO, and everyone else who wanted to buy a revenue-less Twitter.
Despite being called "conservative", people on the right tend to value free expression for all, even when it involves ideas that they don't agree with. They find the concepts of censorship, content moderation and banning people to be abhorrent concepts, and won't even subject their opponents to such things.
Let me see if I understand what you wrote: Is Parents Television Council a "conservative" organization? If so, how does a mission "to protect children and families from graphic sex, violence and profanity in the media, because of their proven long-term harmful effects" mesh with "free expression"?
Valid case of what? Of someone relying on a free service ("If you're not paying for the service, you're not the customer, you're the product.") to act like a professional service (and you now, keep backups and shit) because they're clueless? Yeah, it's that.
Valid case of what?
It's a valid use case of twitter lists. She's using it to monitor various topics that are relevant to her work.
lucm, indeed.
1. [Redacted]
Have gnu, will travel.
We call it "a bug".
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
If it matters, and you don't keep backups, you are an idiot. If it matters, and your only copy is on a free service like Twitter, you are an even bigger idiot, and deserve whatever misery you get, and more.
Those idiots at Twitter are in love with key-value storage solutions. What is probably happening is a new set of tools that generate unique keys to store some type of data is probably colliding with existing tools that generate keys for the list feature. But because the architecture is designed to be fault tolerant in the event of a missing key, or a returned key value that doesn't make sense in the "list" context, the results get thrown out and the system pretends that there is no data there.
Do not use proprietary services for anything mission critical without a total backup and fallback in place.
Better yet:
Do not use prorietary services. Period.
It's not that difficult, is it?
Besides, I really don't get Twitter at all. Besides the marginal case of continuos mindshare within smaller distributed teams working on one larger problem/product. A purpose it orignially was designed for. I remember when Twitter just came out. I looked into it for about 3 minutes, thought to myself "Who needs this?" and used it maybe twice ever since. And those times it was just fooling around. I fundamentally don't get it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
based on recent events with GoogleFacebookTeitter et al I must say I wonder if there is a correlation between deleted lists and political views that are outside their prescribed norms. I am simply asking because the person sited happens to be in a fringe minority political group so...
This is probably some algorithm that a developer came up with when the OutOfDiskSpaceException gets thrown. They probably took a WAG at what it ought to do and this is what they came up with. It reclaims the least important disk space usage to allocate space for new usage. If the Product Owner cared about this scenario, they should have made better acceptance criteria.
We'll make great pets
help me! i've finally lost the ability to tell a practical joke from a real news article! which is this?
[Redacted] will [Redacted]:
1. [Redacted]
Fixed that for [Redacted]
Are they sure no one knows? That would mean it's a bug.
If this is instead Twitter intentionally purging lists for some reason, then someone knows why, they just aren't saying. That's a really different thing.
Nope, no sig
Exactly this. Relying on a third party to ever get anything right, or even to be there, is just absolutely stupid. Kind of like most internet users, who constantly play with dangerous things they don't understand.
#bluepill. Join twitter now and "resist at any cost"*
* please note terms and conditions apply. Resistance is in fact compliance to the destruction of freedom of speech and support of the treason against legitimately democratically elected officials, and support of slanderous mainstream fake news.
I did a quick search and while I found ways to export Twitter lists to csv, I didn't find a way to restore them. That's the thing with those online tools, you don't control everything.
You can decide not to use a product that you can't backup/restore, but then you're in the same situation as someone using it without a backup, except for the fact that the person who uses it enjoys it while you don't.
lucm, indeed.