ExTwitter Broke Yet Again, Disappearing Nearly All Images From 2011 Through 2014
from the humanity's-what-now? dept
A few days Elon Musk tweeted that “X as humanity’s collective consciousness” and then pinned that meaningless platitude that would only sound profound to a stoned high schooler.
Anyway, if you’re going to be “humanity’s collective consciousness” you should maybe try to to avoid making years worth of images inaccessible. But that’s what Musk did a day after tweeting that.
It was first noticed by Tom Coates who claimed that Musk had “removed” all media posted before 2014.
And, indeed, if you look at most (but not all) such old tweets, the images associated with them don’t show up at all. However, it does not appear that the images have been deleted, but that exTwitter screwed up it’s t.co link shortener (again, since it broke in March as well), which is used in association with media postings. And whatever broke made all of those old t.co links stop working, which has the impact of making all those tweets no longer show the images.
The Verge is reporting that some images have been restored, including the famous (infamous?) Oscars selfie that Ellen Degeneris and Bradley Cooper took at the 2014 Oscars which, for some period of time, was the most retweeted tweet on the platform. However, when I look at that tweet at time of writing, I still see it displayed as broken:
Anyway, I’m guessing that this is yet another bug on a platform that is now regularly full of bugs. It will hopefully get fixed soon if it’s not by the time this post goes live. And, yes, things break all the time, but the frequency with which major and important things break on exTwitter is quite phenomenal and again should raise questions about why anyone trusts the platform for, well, anything, let alone having anything to do with “humanity’s collective consciousness.”
Filed Under: broken, elon musk, history, images, link shortener
Companies: twitter, x
Comments on “ExTwitter Broke Yet Again, Disappearing Nearly All Images From 2011 Through 2014”
Thank you Musk, for showing us how not to run a website or a business.
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Truly, a Harvard Business School case study in the making. Live, right before our very eyes.
Someday we’ll be able to tell our grandchildren that yes, we were there when that rat bastard Musk personally destroyed one of the largest social media platforms of its day. It was a sight to behold as day after day, he made decisions that even stoned high schoolers couldn’t understand.
What’s that? What does “stoned” mean? Ah, you kids these days….
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I think it means “one fucked up dude wrecking the Techdirt comments sections with long-winded back-and-forths with trolls”.
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Getting stoned significantly improved my ability to ignore most of the trolls.
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Are you saying you “got stoned and you missed it”?
Or it could be what happens when one doesn’t pay their storage hosting fees.
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Pretty sure Musk’s “4D chess” plan is to break everything in front of external services. That way, when services get shut down due to non-payment, nobody will (be able to) notice.
Musk wants X/Twitter to be “humanity’s collective consciousness.”
But so far, it’s looking very much like an embarrassing memory we’d like to repress.
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More like an appliance of sentimental attachment that is finally falling apart for good.
Like that vacuum cleaner you had for longer than your spouse.
Ok, bad comparison since Xitter sucks more than ever.
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Alzheimer’s of the internet. X has some lucid days still, but more and more it is retreating into its past.
“Elon Musk tweeted that “X as humanity’s collective consciousness””
.. and then showed everyone what he thought of your consciousness.
In before Musk asskissers tell us how this is actually a genius gambit to make Twitter profitable again.
I think many people who read techdirt probably have worked for software companies big and small where there are large swarths of engineers who just don’t really understand how programming works. And these people will just cut and paste something they got from stack exchange or just keep adding * to a variable until it compiles (seriously, one of my coworkers told me he did this). But with good projects or products you usually have the one or two people who understand that you can’t just mess with code without understanding what it does and they can keep everything running smoothly. TwitterX obviously fired those engineers, and so they’re left with people who just do what Elon tells them to do without really caring what it breaks.
ExTwitter, full of bugs, and in desperate need of some Raid…
Continuing my periodic reporting from the cesspool.
Yesterday, one of the trending things were variations of the sentence “Elon has blocked Catturd”. The latter being one of the RWNJs he tends to reply. Naturally, the irony of Elon using the feature that “doesn’t make sense” was not lost on the public. What was kinda lost in all the commotion is the implication of Musk Xeeting this:
“Pretty fun blocking people who complain that blocking is going away.
How does the medicine taste? 😂😂”
The guy views the usage of this feature as a punishment. Not as a self-defense measure, but as something “painful” to the blocked person. Telling, isn’t it?
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That comment wasn’t lost, it was the point – that people complaining about not being able to block others would not like it if they themselves were blocked. I guessed well see how that works out.
Oh, and uber-woke TechDirt deadnaming X? How gauche!
And now for something completely different...
Anybody else getting seriously distracted by the look of the stylized X in Musk’s avatar? I mean, it is likely supposed to represent the new company logo, and it bears more than a superficial similarity with the X Window System logo.
It seems very likely that twitter is the collective consciousness of elmo and everyone he keeps around him.
Well, humanity’s collective consciousness is usually pretty fucked up, so not entirely an inapt comparison in the form of a claim.
To quote National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, “Xitter’s broke!”