Ask HN: Why aren’t Twitter outages showing up on the front page anymore?

15 points by staccatomeasure 3 years ago | 8 comments

HN used to be a great source for quick insight into major outages. Feels like lately - and with Twitter in particular - big outages, like the one happening now, never make it to the front page.

rsynnott 3 years ago |

Naughty Ol' Mr Car has fairly comprehensively returned Twitter to the barely-functional state it enjoyed in the late noughties, and no-one bothered posting about Twitter outages then, either. "Kinda broken, might work, who knows" is once more Twitter's default state.

mtmail 3 years ago |

A HN discussion can add value when there's a known reason (DNS?, SSL certificate expired) or work-around, but often the discussion is second guessing or bashing the company.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34980805 has 50 upvotes, 25 comments now and maybe I'm missing the quick insights (I still upvoted).

rsynnott 3 years ago | |

I mean, I think the main insight is that no, Victoria, you can’t fire most of the staff and expect everything to keep working properly. Thought it’s not a very interesting one; everyone sensible knew this already.

joegahona 3 years ago |

I have to search HN for “Twitter” and sort by “last 24 hours” to get my fix of Twitter Gossip. It seldom appears on the front page anymore.

petodo 3 years ago |

Yeah, I was surprised I didn't find anything about this outage here since it affected even me in Europe.

pwb25 3 years ago |

Was just wondering the same thing. Ususally HN was the fastest place to find those things in an unbiased way

r721 3 years ago |

Some people flag these posts, and flagging affects HN ranking.

sidibe 3 years ago | |

I think this is it. A lot of critical Tesla stuff over the years also would get lots of votes/comments but be off front page, the benefit of a diehard fan base