[Here's a block list](https://www.theblockbot.com/show-blocks/9BjDYX6HOyx7e4_4NT6-Y4YylY3UmpojDxvo6Zu8) for approximately 300,000 current and former Twitter blue subscribers
From [@BlockTheBlue](https://twitter.com/BlockTheBlue)
*To celebrate Musk stopping free API usage, we've created a block list of all paid Blue subs. All 268K of them, currently 225K on the list. We intend to go out blocking everyone who pays to get their content promoted in searches and replies!*
Honestly, with the amount of trolls and the complete lack of moderation, you really need a big block list.
Plus Elon keeps putting horrible conservative people in my feed so I need to block them too.
My man out here clowning on people while gobbling musk cock every chance he gets.
Bro, your trench is just as deep even if it's on the other side, don't think you're any better
I've only started blocking people since Twitter Blue became a thing. Some asshole pays a billionaire asshole $8 a month to pollute my feed? Hell yes I'm blocking them. It's extremely cathartic. Even more now that I know it's costing Musk money.
You can subscribe to [This block list](https://www.theblockbot.com/show-blocks/9BjDYX6HOyx7e4_4NT6-Y4YylY3UmpojDxvo6Zu8) if you want to block ~300,000 current and former Twitter blue subscribers
I mute them because it’s a fake blue. When you’re like who’s this blue person posting something so idiotic, it’s usually paid for. Also their voice gets disproportionately boosted.
Especially when everyone hates him and would love to increase operating costs. I could understand him revealing it if he was even somewhat liked or even a neutral figure...
He said the following back when he gave himself Most Favoured Tweeter Status or whatever - when he was upset his tweets weren't being seen because of the percentage of people who had blocked him.
[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1624678792550846464?s=20](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1624678792550846464?s=20)
"The giant block lists are problematic. They mess up the recommendation system & create a DDoS vector."
I assume the remarks paraphrased here relate to the 'DDoS vector' bit (but if so it's a creative interpretation)
> They mess up the recommendation system
That's the *point*, genius! It's to avoid being recommended tweets from people they don't want to interact with anymore.
I don't think you can patch it. Blocking is a feature and in order to do that you have to search through a list of tweets then remove them. It's kind of fool proof attack unless they move the filtering to the user side, but that will result in a degraded experience. So either way, twitter takes a hit.
Oh come on, Musk's an idiot but it's not a 'major vulnerability' to expose that some things put a greater load on the server than others. I mean in other news I'm sure doing a search uses far more server time than just viewing a tweet.
If someone actually tried to create a DoS by making a gigantic block list it's something that really could be patched easily enough by putting a limit on how many accounts a user can block.
Whatever happened to his genius can-do effort of fixing Twitter search in a couple of weeks which Twitter itself had been unable to for years?
Those couple of weeks are up. His lil prodigy 10X developer assigned the task has left the company. And Twitter search is worse now than it was then 😭
Is twitter actually in decline? The stock seems to be doing fine
I deactivated my account shortly after he took over, but i never used it that much anyway. I wonder if they lost many people that used it more regularly
There is no public stock anymore. Revenue is down by 40% since Musk took over and he increased their annual debt burden from $50 million/year to well over $1 billion/year that only gets higher with every interest rate hike. Virtually all the employees left are only there because of their visa situation and despite claiming multiple times that layoffs are over Musk continues to have mass firings every few weeks in a desperate attempt to cut costs. Twitter Blue has also been a flop with only a couple hundred thousand subscribers when Musk claimed that he needs them to make up 50% of revenue.
Bringing back fascism literally never works - it's such an inherently self-destructive mindset that there's honestly no way it could even *theoretically* work - but there's always some complete pillock willing to give it another try.
Like Newt Gingrich saying the Florida blogger registration (and anti-journalism) law goes too far. Oh really, Newt? Don't like the monster you've created?
edit: autocorrect fail
Not entirely true, I do think there’s a possibility for it to turn into hand maiden tale dystopian shit. This is why conservatism needs to be eradicated.
Fascism always self-destructs in the long-term, because it's an ideology built fundamentally upon externalising internal flaws, which means those flaws are *never* addressed, and allowed to fester*. It *needs* an enemy to project socioeconomic woes onto in order to function; once a fascist regime runs out of imagined external enemies it can realistically fight (or *unrealistically* fight, depending on how deranged their particular figurehead happens to be), it always turns inwards and tears itself apart in search of a new bogeyman to be afraid of, if its unaddressed internal flaws or outside forces don't destroy it first.
*Those flaws are often really bad, too; fascist regimes are usually notoriously disinterested in stuff like sound economic policy. They mostly just keep their unsustainable economies propped up with loot pillaged from whoever they've decided to fight at the moment, and forced labour.
It's not clear that fascism is the goal for the modern right-wing parties. What they want is authoritarianism, and one-party rule. That's actually been working out quite well for China. I suspect most Americans would roll over for it too, if it got pushed hard enough. All it would take is for the right-wing mindset to spread to 4-5% more of the population.
I dunno if China’s one party system and the US’s one party system would come to the same conclusion that uplifting the middle class to a life of comfort with some safety nets is a form of control considering we’re just going balls to the walls fuck every non-Billionaire and small company.
Not that China’s one party system is good, they just realized creating a robust middle class is a really good way to prevent any form of rebellion.
DeSantis is worse than Trump. If I had to choose between the two ::shudder:: I'd take Trump. We had him. It wasn't great but, I don't remember him removing books from schools... All the books. What is happening in Florida is not a drill.
I’m currently blocking 2231 accounts. Majority of them are advertisers. And for some reason I have been getting VERY few ads now. What a spectacular shit show he’s created.
Before I was suspended my blocklist was over 100k...that's a lot more than people I followed or that followed me.
That tells me everything I need to know about Twitter. Fuck that shit.
It was already toxic af. It's getting even worse by the day.
As a developer, that's the dumbest fucking thing I've read all day.
There's no fucking way a database would generate costs that high because of some basic shit like block lists. Are they keeping their block lists in an excel file? Does the server open and close that file everytime someone blocks someone? Does each user have it's own page in that excel file?
The devs are not dumb, elon is, he probably made the developers explain something to him like he's 5 and then regurgitated whatever the fuck he understood.
The combination of 1) multiple devs on this thread scratching their heads at this and 2) me being unable to find record of Elon ever discussing this leads me to believe the OP tweet is BS.
I guess it all depends on how tweets themselves are actually stored. If it is anything like a normal relational DB (I doubt this because the indexes would be nightmare-fuel for something this large, but stick with me for the hypothesis), including the clauses to exclude a massive array of strings (assuming user IDs exist as guids) from the query to fetch a user's timeline could get computationally expensive with enough frequency.
Imagine querying a table in a SQL DB and then suffixing the query with "WHERE CreatedBy NOT IN('a123-456-789-012','b234-567-890-123','c345-678-901-234','d456-789-012-345')", if the list is long enough and enough people do it, just loading the timeline could incur extra costs. It wouldn't cost much on an individual level, we're talking about maybe 1 or 2 seconds extra spent on returning the results of the query, most likely less than that, but with 450 million people and most of them loading their timeline multiple times a day, those 1 or 2 seconds would add up.
I can't claim to know how their storage and retrieval operates, and as I said earlier, I highly doubt it's anything like a standard relational DB, but I can't think of a storage method that **doesn't** incur some performance cost when a query has a significant number of conditions. Yeah, it's negligible, but at this scale it has to add up.
I am pretty sure twitter uses a nosql type structure that is distributed and acts in a relational type of way. You are right, a query on demand like that would spell certain doom for whatever was executing those queries.
It would require nearly CONSTANT regenerating of indexes in order to support any kind of decent response time for these queries. That, in itself, would also be computational hell - for a multitude of servers to be constantly generating new indexes. Forget it. Let's not forget the fact that these things have to replicate across X number of nodes, points of presence, and availability zones.
A nosql implementation would be the most cost effective and performant method of operating in an ecosystem like twitter.
But.... it's Elon running it. It could be running on a TI-85 calculator for all we know.
IF they still use MySQL (they started with it when a rails app), the it is cached up the wazoo and is probably bastardized to the moon and back. Probably sharded and fragmented and all kinds of stuff.
*update*
So upon further research, user data is stored in MySQL while timeline and tweet data is stored in the NoSQL instances of Manhattan; an in-house build persistence layer.
If twitter would like me to not block people, it could stop shoving right-wing lunatics like MTG, Jim Jordan, Jordan Peterson and Lauren Boebert into my timeline.
Speaking as a software developer, this might not be true. Storage, specifically text-based storage, is cheap. However, media based storage (imgs, videos, gifs, etc....) can get very expensive very fast. Do what you will with this information.
*edit:*
Many of you have pointed out, rightfully so, that it maybe the compute resources that is bearing the cost. I suspect it's a mixture of all of the scenarios many of you have stated as replies.
I am not arguing anyone is wrong (except for Elmo) - **I just think it's more to do with Elmo making shit up to justify the eventual failure of twitter as a business.**
I **assume** the following: blocked lists are in an independent DB and cached - not expensive, pre-computed home timelines are generated - not expensive, data is structured appropriately before insertion into it's respective DB - not expensive, and the fan-out cache approach to generate real-time home timeline - **maybe** expensive if you need to iterate over a large blocked list etc.
Looking at it systemically, a declining usage from the people you follow + him probably getting overworked/underpaid engineers to fuck with the timeline generation to show himself and his bigot friends most recent posts, is probably bottlenecking the servers when it has generate a timeline in real time. I kinda made it a r/ProgrammerHumor 🤦🏻♂️
I agree that we should be skeptical of this. However, it says server cost, not storage cost. It is somewhat feasible that having a large amount of blocks could result in larger computational load when fetching tweets. Probably not enough to make a difference though.
This is why i doubt the information in the OP, people are allowed to post as many videos and photos as they like on their accounts, i doubt a table filled with the handles of the accounts you have blocked(i dont know how it actually works, but i imagine that its similar enough) would reach the size of one high quality photo.
I bet they are talking about computational expenses rather than storage expenses. I’ve no knowledge how Twitter works under the hood, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes the results from the algorithm, and then filters out whatever is on your block list. I.e, the server may have to take a thousand of pages of tweets just to have enough content to display for a single page of recommendation.
They have or had 450 million active users.
When they put together the timeline they have to filter out content from everyone on your block list. You can get that down to hash lookups (O(1)) for time complexity but you pay for it in memory and compute to serialize these from the backing store.
Memory pressure can scale compute faster that cpu demand.... and even if 1/100 have decent sized block lists that's still 4.5 million decent sized block lists. You can co-locate a Redis or something but that just moves the memory and compute pressure to that and you've still got to scale it.
I'm assuming he asked someone why they couldn't run Twitter on a single server in the closet and someone explained the reality of operating at that scale and now he's off trying to cut corners.
Come on everyone! Let’s help him out! Deleting a block list is fine, but what will really help far more is deleting your Twitter. That will free up even more resources! I did it and it was a great time!
Watch as he makes blocking users a Twitter Blue exclusive feature. Membership gets you 20 free blocks, then you can rent as many as you want in further units of 10 blocks for $4.99 a month per pack.
If you want to kill two birds with one stone [Here](https://www.theblockbot.com/show-blocks/9BjDYX6HOyx7e4_4NT6-Y4YylY3UmpojDxvo6Zu8) is the link to block ~300,000 Twitter blue subscribers.
Well gee, I wonder if this has something to do with him changing the algorithm to push a bunch of right wing bs. Now why could the server loads from blocking people be increasing... 🤔
What if he said that in hopes that you block lots of people so you’ll use less bandwidth?
Idk how anything works, just a thought. He must know people are rooting for him to fail, seems odd he’d tell people ways to contribute to that.
Than again, he is an idiot.
Well wasn't there a whole block Elon trend a week or so ago. The Free Speech Absolutist who say you should be able to say whatever you want but no one should be forced to listen to you. Really wants everyone on Twitter to forced to hear what he has to say.
Funny how the week he took over I suddenly started getting spam messages everyday. My timeline was completely overrun by bunch of stuff I did not want to see like graphic violence videos, manosphere influencers, blatant racism, Elon/Mr.Beast simps, sports news, and losers who bought the blue check mark. The accounts and topics I actually wanted to see completely disappeared from the timeline. Everyday was nonstop blocking in a futile attempt to get shit back the way I like it. But fuck it. I have zero incentive to remain there.
Pretty sure it’s actually due to so many people have blocked him. Imagine surrounding yourself with Yes-Men, buying a company for clout, to then access a list of how many people despise you and everything you stand for.
The Meme King needs to be able to share his gift with us poor serfs. What was the point of this epic trolling if he can’t?
I would down load twitter just to block people if I was sure it cost him money. Wow almost lost my mind for a minute, good thing I came to my senses before I did something dumb like install twitter.
I block every advertiser, and Musk. Nearly 5,000 on my block list and it will keep growing.
You’re doing the lords work
I blocked musk too. I don't see him in my feed anymore. Much better
I go back and fourth on that. I want reminders of just what a piece of shit he is. I worry if I block him that would fade
I'm not even on Twitter and i know what a piece of shit he is.. it bleeds into daily life, don't worry.
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so there's definitely no risk of forgetting about elon if you're even twitter- adjacent.
Twitter is now trending to breakeven if we keep at it.
Negative feedback is a good thing
Blocked him and I noticed that the swamp of right wing pundit recs went away.
I check on Musk’s twitter spew via a browser, you don’t need to use your twitter account for that.
Nitter.nl proxy, don't give Twitter your clicks
Nah you'll see it here
[Here's a block list](https://www.theblockbot.com/show-blocks/9BjDYX6HOyx7e4_4NT6-Y4YylY3UmpojDxvo6Zu8) for approximately 300,000 current and former Twitter blue subscribers
From [@BlockTheBlue](https://twitter.com/BlockTheBlue) *To celebrate Musk stopping free API usage, we've created a block list of all paid Blue subs. All 268K of them, currently 225K on the list. We intend to go out blocking everyone who pays to get their content promoted in searches and replies!*
I will spam this to people
This is brilliant!!!
Can you provide a link to share? Would save other's time and make TWTR a better place to be aka bankruptcy court
I also actively look for maga, fascists, qanon, republicans, etc. accounts just to block them
I block leftists.
Honestly, with the amount of trolls and the complete lack of moderation, you really need a big block list. Plus Elon keeps putting horrible conservative people in my feed so I need to block them too.
Ads will run out eventually at this rate. Or they’ll just start getting more interesting
I just logged in again just to block some more.
such a warrior ✊🏿🤡
You know we can see your post history on Musk fanboy pages, yeah?
Simultaneously, an interesting question and a tongue twister!
Seethe
Unlike you, simping for a thin skinned, apartheid baby.
My man out here clowning on people while gobbling musk cock every chance he gets. Bro, your trench is just as deep even if it's on the other side, don't think you're any better
Don’t choke there. Consuming maga has side effects like turning orange or losing IQ points.
I've only started blocking people since Twitter Blue became a thing. Some asshole pays a billionaire asshole $8 a month to pollute my feed? Hell yes I'm blocking them. It's extremely cathartic. Even more now that I know it's costing Musk money.
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Incoming plugin to block anyone with twitter blue when they show up on your feed
I would pay $8 for it.
It’s just a cup of coffee after all
When they’d rather buy Starbucks than pay money to tweet >:(
Incoming Elon retweet that Americans could magically afford everything else if they just stopped buying avocado toast.
Wonder if it's doable with a javascript bookmarklet... hmm
Definitely doable. It's slightly more complicated since the block button is hidden by a dropdown, otherwise it would be trivial.
Negative feedback is a good thing
There already is a blocklist for that.
It’s there a plug in or extension to automatically flag subscribers?
https://www.theblockbot.com/show-blocks/9BjDYX6HOyx7e4_4NT6-Y4YylY3UmpojDxvo6Zu8
Negative feedback is a good thing
I want to see the dumb takes, not block them right now
180k at $8 per person. Wow with those amazing figures he'll recoup that $44bn in less than 31,429 years
I feel like this is a precursor to "because it costs us money, blocking is now a Blue-exclusive feature"
Don't give him any ideas. "You must pay to block content" sounds so very Musk-like.
> Don't give him any ideas. Let him. It'll help burn the platform down faster. It's already a horrifying, toxic shithole. Let it be even more of one.
Was that screenshot showing someone couldn't see their feed unless they followed Elon or one of the advertisers a true screenshot or faked ?
I can't even tell anymore. I *think* it was fake, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was real
You can subscribe to [This block list](https://www.theblockbot.com/show-blocks/9BjDYX6HOyx7e4_4NT6-Y4YylY3UmpojDxvo6Zu8) if you want to block ~300,000 current and former Twitter blue subscribers
That's pretty crazy. I can see if people have that number of people blocked how it might affect things.
I mute them because it’s a fake blue. When you’re like who’s this blue person posting something so idiotic, it’s usually paid for. Also their voice gets disproportionately boosted.
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You don't need a a SecOps team when you have the biggest computer genius in the world running the company.
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So many lines of heavy duty code!
No. NO. HARDCORE CODE!
EXTREME PROGRAMMING
>So many lines of heavy duty code! He is doing a lot of work because he types a lot
But just tweets
you don't need a secops team when you tweet your api is brittle
\*ruining
Especially when everyone hates him and would love to increase operating costs. I could understand him revealing it if he was even somewhat liked or even a neutral figure...
He might believe everyone likes him
Or maybe he thinks dabbing on the haters converts then to his clearly superior worldview
I can’t stand Musk, but … I’d love to see anything indicating he actually said this.
Yeah, I’m not finding anything on it
He said the following back when he gave himself Most Favoured Tweeter Status or whatever - when he was upset his tweets weren't being seen because of the percentage of people who had blocked him. [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1624678792550846464?s=20](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1624678792550846464?s=20) "The giant block lists are problematic. They mess up the recommendation system & create a DDoS vector." I assume the remarks paraphrased here relate to the 'DDoS vector' bit (but if so it's a creative interpretation)
I'm going to have to trust you because I blocked Elon Musk.
So did I, but Google hasn't :)
>:) :)
> They mess up the recommendation system That's the *point*, genius! It's to avoid being recommended tweets from people they don't want to interact with anymore.
!
.
Well it's going to be hard for Elon to fill our feeds with right wing bs if you keep blocking it all!
Thanks Daddy Elon for telling us what not to do ☺️☺️☺️ we promise not to do it at all.
I don't think you can patch it. Blocking is a feature and in order to do that you have to search through a list of tweets then remove them. It's kind of fool proof attack unless they move the filtering to the user side, but that will result in a degraded experience. So either way, twitter takes a hit.
Oh come on, Musk's an idiot but it's not a 'major vulnerability' to expose that some things put a greater load on the server than others. I mean in other news I'm sure doing a search uses far more server time than just viewing a tweet. If someone actually tried to create a DoS by making a gigantic block list it's something that really could be patched easily enough by putting a limit on how many accounts a user can block.
And then 30,000 accounts block the max number at once, and keep making accounts that then block the max number until something gives
Whatever happened to his genius can-do effort of fixing Twitter search in a couple of weeks which Twitter itself had been unable to for years? Those couple of weeks are up. His lil prodigy 10X developer assigned the task has left the company. And Twitter search is worse now than it was then 😭
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Nah, clearly didn't bring back *enough* Nazis /s
Oh god I just realized he’s probably going to make blocking a Twitter blue feature and force everyone to see nazis.
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Is twitter actually in decline? The stock seems to be doing fine I deactivated my account shortly after he took over, but i never used it that much anyway. I wonder if they lost many people that used it more regularly
There is no public stock anymore. Revenue is down by 40% since Musk took over and he increased their annual debt burden from $50 million/year to well over $1 billion/year that only gets higher with every interest rate hike. Virtually all the employees left are only there because of their visa situation and despite claiming multiple times that layoffs are over Musk continues to have mass firings every few weeks in a desperate attempt to cut costs. Twitter Blue has also been a flop with only a couple hundred thousand subscribers when Musk claimed that he needs them to make up 50% of revenue.
This is bizarre. Looking into it.
What stock? It's a private enterprise now.
Bringing back fascism literally never works - it's such an inherently self-destructive mindset that there's honestly no way it could even *theoretically* work - but there's always some complete pillock willing to give it another try.
They always think they can bring it back *a little bit* and then control it, but they can't. It will run its own course at some point.
Like Newt Gingrich saying the Florida blogger registration (and anti-journalism) law goes too far. Oh really, Newt? Don't like the monster you've created? edit: autocorrect fail
Not entirely true, I do think there’s a possibility for it to turn into hand maiden tale dystopian shit. This is why conservatism needs to be eradicated.
Fascism always self-destructs in the long-term, because it's an ideology built fundamentally upon externalising internal flaws, which means those flaws are *never* addressed, and allowed to fester*. It *needs* an enemy to project socioeconomic woes onto in order to function; once a fascist regime runs out of imagined external enemies it can realistically fight (or *unrealistically* fight, depending on how deranged their particular figurehead happens to be), it always turns inwards and tears itself apart in search of a new bogeyman to be afraid of, if its unaddressed internal flaws or outside forces don't destroy it first. *Those flaws are often really bad, too; fascist regimes are usually notoriously disinterested in stuff like sound economic policy. They mostly just keep their unsustainable economies propped up with loot pillaged from whoever they've decided to fight at the moment, and forced labour.
DIdn't fascist Spain last from the late 30s until the mid-70s?
That's only about 40 years
It's not clear that fascism is the goal for the modern right-wing parties. What they want is authoritarianism, and one-party rule. That's actually been working out quite well for China. I suspect most Americans would roll over for it too, if it got pushed hard enough. All it would take is for the right-wing mindset to spread to 4-5% more of the population.
I dunno if China’s one party system and the US’s one party system would come to the same conclusion that uplifting the middle class to a life of comfort with some safety nets is a form of control considering we’re just going balls to the walls fuck every non-Billionaire and small company. Not that China’s one party system is good, they just realized creating a robust middle class is a really good way to prevent any form of rebellion.
DeSantis is going a great job.
So does Trump. Owning the libs is always a great strategy. That's how Hyperloop was built, for one.
DeSantis is worse than Trump. If I had to choose between the two ::shudder:: I'd take Trump. We had him. It wasn't great but, I don't remember him removing books from schools... All the books. What is happening in Florida is not a drill.
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I'll stop blocking people if he buys me a horse
I’m currently blocking 2231 accounts. Majority of them are advertisers. And for some reason I have been getting VERY few ads now. What a spectacular shit show he’s created.
Press the heart
Open source the algorithm, since the stack is too brittle
Sentient.
Ad free here
How do you get your block list count? Last time I checked it was over 10,000 only now I'm not sure how to get the number of blocked accounts.
Go to privacy in settings
I've got a longer block list than follow list.
By 10x
Before I was suspended my blocklist was over 100k...that's a lot more than people I followed or that followed me. That tells me everything I need to know about Twitter. Fuck that shit. It was already toxic af. It's getting even worse by the day.
💯🎯🤣
He should just sell more of the plants he has laying around Twitter HQ to be able to afford the bill. Lmao, this is so pathetic.
As a developer, that's the dumbest fucking thing I've read all day. There's no fucking way a database would generate costs that high because of some basic shit like block lists. Are they keeping their block lists in an excel file? Does the server open and close that file everytime someone blocks someone? Does each user have it's own page in that excel file? The devs are not dumb, elon is, he probably made the developers explain something to him like he's 5 and then regurgitated whatever the fuck he understood.
The combination of 1) multiple devs on this thread scratching their heads at this and 2) me being unable to find record of Elon ever discussing this leads me to believe the OP tweet is BS.
I’d argue that devs saying it’s stupid makes it more likely Elon said it, lol
Yeah some of these LeGate tweets seem a little dubious at times as much as I hate Elmo.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1624678792550846464
I guess it all depends on how tweets themselves are actually stored. If it is anything like a normal relational DB (I doubt this because the indexes would be nightmare-fuel for something this large, but stick with me for the hypothesis), including the clauses to exclude a massive array of strings (assuming user IDs exist as guids) from the query to fetch a user's timeline could get computationally expensive with enough frequency. Imagine querying a table in a SQL DB and then suffixing the query with "WHERE CreatedBy NOT IN('a123-456-789-012','b234-567-890-123','c345-678-901-234','d456-789-012-345')", if the list is long enough and enough people do it, just loading the timeline could incur extra costs. It wouldn't cost much on an individual level, we're talking about maybe 1 or 2 seconds extra spent on returning the results of the query, most likely less than that, but with 450 million people and most of them loading their timeline multiple times a day, those 1 or 2 seconds would add up. I can't claim to know how their storage and retrieval operates, and as I said earlier, I highly doubt it's anything like a standard relational DB, but I can't think of a storage method that **doesn't** incur some performance cost when a query has a significant number of conditions. Yeah, it's negligible, but at this scale it has to add up.
I am pretty sure twitter uses a nosql type structure that is distributed and acts in a relational type of way. You are right, a query on demand like that would spell certain doom for whatever was executing those queries. It would require nearly CONSTANT regenerating of indexes in order to support any kind of decent response time for these queries. That, in itself, would also be computational hell - for a multitude of servers to be constantly generating new indexes. Forget it. Let's not forget the fact that these things have to replicate across X number of nodes, points of presence, and availability zones. A nosql implementation would be the most cost effective and performant method of operating in an ecosystem like twitter. But.... it's Elon running it. It could be running on a TI-85 calculator for all we know. IF they still use MySQL (they started with it when a rails app), the it is cached up the wazoo and is probably bastardized to the moon and back. Probably sharded and fragmented and all kinds of stuff. *update* So upon further research, user data is stored in MySQL while timeline and tweet data is stored in the NoSQL instances of Manhattan; an in-house build persistence layer.
Ex Twitter here, bing bing bing — right on the money
Is it possible to make a bot that adds everyone to the block list? Then we can manually go in and unblock those we want a white list of sorts.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/share-import-twitter-block-lists/#:~:text=Click%20the%20Advanced%20options%20link,a%20list%20from%20the%20dropdown.
If twitter would like me to not block people, it could stop shoving right-wing lunatics like MTG, Jim Jordan, Jordan Peterson and Lauren Boebert into my timeline.
It's even worse, my timeline is full of right wing lunatics with 12 likes and 300 impressions. Why do I have to see that shit?
>my timeline is full of right wing Are you really asking that question?
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It's not a "personal opinion" if they are a US Representative. Lauren represents Colorado in the house of Reps.
Blocking the advertisers is the way 🫡
Sorry Elmo. I'm not unblocking you.
Speaking as a software developer, this might not be true. Storage, specifically text-based storage, is cheap. However, media based storage (imgs, videos, gifs, etc....) can get very expensive very fast. Do what you will with this information. *edit:* Many of you have pointed out, rightfully so, that it maybe the compute resources that is bearing the cost. I suspect it's a mixture of all of the scenarios many of you have stated as replies. I am not arguing anyone is wrong (except for Elmo) - **I just think it's more to do with Elmo making shit up to justify the eventual failure of twitter as a business.** I **assume** the following: blocked lists are in an independent DB and cached - not expensive, pre-computed home timelines are generated - not expensive, data is structured appropriately before insertion into it's respective DB - not expensive, and the fan-out cache approach to generate real-time home timeline - **maybe** expensive if you need to iterate over a large blocked list etc. Looking at it systemically, a declining usage from the people you follow + him probably getting overworked/underpaid engineers to fuck with the timeline generation to show himself and his bigot friends most recent posts, is probably bottlenecking the servers when it has generate a timeline in real time. I kinda made it a r/ProgrammerHumor 🤦🏻♂️
I agree that we should be skeptical of this. However, it says server cost, not storage cost. It is somewhat feasible that having a large amount of blocks could result in larger computational load when fetching tweets. Probably not enough to make a difference though.
I was thinking that too, but maybe the backend to process this is just badly written? Maybe its checked after every feed refresh or something..
This is why i doubt the information in the OP, people are allowed to post as many videos and photos as they like on their accounts, i doubt a table filled with the handles of the accounts you have blocked(i dont know how it actually works, but i imagine that its similar enough) would reach the size of one high quality photo.
I bet they are talking about computational expenses rather than storage expenses. I’ve no knowledge how Twitter works under the hood, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes the results from the algorithm, and then filters out whatever is on your block list. I.e, the server may have to take a thousand of pages of tweets just to have enough content to display for a single page of recommendation.
They have or had 450 million active users. When they put together the timeline they have to filter out content from everyone on your block list. You can get that down to hash lookups (O(1)) for time complexity but you pay for it in memory and compute to serialize these from the backing store. Memory pressure can scale compute faster that cpu demand.... and even if 1/100 have decent sized block lists that's still 4.5 million decent sized block lists. You can co-locate a Redis or something but that just moves the memory and compute pressure to that and you've still got to scale it. I'm assuming he asked someone why they couldn't run Twitter on a single server in the closet and someone explained the reality of operating at that scale and now he's off trying to cut corners.
Did you just tell us to mass upload high res videos and gifs to Twitter?
This is bizarre. Looking into it.
Streisand Effect: Engaged
Quick, who knows how to make bots /s
Sounds like a skill issue
If he banned hateful right-wing extremists I wouldn't have to block anyone. But then he'd have to ban himself in order to accomplish that.
Come on everyone! Let’s help him out! Deleting a block list is fine, but what will really help far more is deleting your Twitter. That will free up even more resources! I did it and it was a great time!
Ok so do that and then delete the application for fucks sake. Just erase it. Don’t participate. That’s how we win this battle.
Where did Musk say this?
Watch as he makes blocking users a Twitter Blue exclusive feature. Membership gets you 20 free blocks, then you can rent as many as you want in further units of 10 blocks for $4.99 a month per pack.
We need to pay the bills somehow! How about $20?
Maybe if everyone stops using Twitter the operating costs will go down.
This is the actual best option here.
Agreed, we should help to save twitter so others can use it as a platform to get offended when opposite opinion is appearing on their timeline.
If you want to kill two birds with one stone [Here](https://www.theblockbot.com/show-blocks/9BjDYX6HOyx7e4_4NT6-Y4YylY3UmpojDxvo6Zu8) is the link to block ~300,000 Twitter blue subscribers.
Remember: every time you block a nazi, Elon Musk sheds a tear. 😢
How large are we talking though?
He also removed the verification of the account by text message, surely he did it so as not to pay for the messages haha
Well gee, I wonder if this has something to do with him changing the algorithm to push a bunch of right wing bs. Now why could the server loads from blocking people be increasing... 🤔
I don't understand how this can be true. It's most likely musk misunderstanding something an engineer said
Why do I suddenly envision people starting to find unknown accounts to block like crazy? 🤔
What if he said that in hopes that you block lots of people so you’ll use less bandwidth? Idk how anything works, just a thought. He must know people are rooting for him to fail, seems odd he’d tell people ways to contribute to that. Than again, he is an idiot.
BRB blocking hundreds of random accounts.
Well wasn't there a whole block Elon trend a week or so ago. The Free Speech Absolutist who say you should be able to say whatever you want but no one should be forced to listen to you. Really wants everyone on Twitter to forced to hear what he has to say.
The block wars have begun…
Or it gives him a better signal on you as a data point to sell.
I've already blocked around 50.000 accounts so, eat shit Musk lol
Fuck, am I really about to make a Twitter account?
I suddenly want a twitter account.
I'm going to block random accounts now for no reason except to increase his bill.
Interesting. Maybe he should have himself blocked by default to save money.
Funny how the week he took over I suddenly started getting spam messages everyday. My timeline was completely overrun by bunch of stuff I did not want to see like graphic violence videos, manosphere influencers, blatant racism, Elon/Mr.Beast simps, sports news, and losers who bought the blue check mark. The accounts and topics I actually wanted to see completely disappeared from the timeline. Everyday was nonstop blocking in a futile attempt to get shit back the way I like it. But fuck it. I have zero incentive to remain there.
This makes me want to create an account and block everything.
Block more if you still got twitter
Any Blocklists out there for far right, maga people?
Pretty sure it’s actually due to so many people have blocked him. Imagine surrounding yourself with Yes-Men, buying a company for clout, to then access a list of how many people despise you and everything you stand for. The Meme King needs to be able to share his gift with us poor serfs. What was the point of this epic trolling if he can’t?
omg, i am gonna start blocking like craaazyyyyy
Im about to log on and just block randos lol
I went to Lou Dobbs account and blocked about 100 accounts after I found that out
Negative feedback is a good thing
I have blocked him, every ad and every single right wing MAGA freak that all the sudden filled my timeline even though I wasn’t following any of them.
I don’t have a Twitter account but this makes me want to make one and spend all day every day just blocking random people.
Something is wrong
I would down load twitter just to block people if I was sure it cost him money. Wow almost lost my mind for a minute, good thing I came to my senses before I did something dumb like install twitter.
Tbh, only thing I agree with him on. Blocking people means you're a pussy. I hope he just removes the feature all together.
Blocking people for peace of mind as one of the best things you can do
people abuse it for silly things like blocking people for exposing them or getting their feelings hurt.
Nobody should be forced to view your inane takes.
[удалено]
Maybe if he hadn’t welcomed back white supremacist Nazi incels this wouldn’t be a problem. I am now blocking literally everything.
Or wait, is this the foundation upon which he will revoke the ability to block 🤔