Watching Elon Musk finally reveal what a dumb ass he really is is quite exciting, but this is an example of something troubling that’s going to happen with the internet generation.
We have a whole generation of people who mainly live their lives online. When these internet companies (like yahoo and geocities, and Twitter lol )and other internet company go under, all of the people’s data is lost with the company. MySpace is another example. There are peoples lives that just get deleted, and if most of your life was documented online. Your life history gets deleted when these companies fail.
Too many people think “the internet never forgets” means that it’s a large permanent data store, not that if you’re shitty, someone’s bound to bring receipts someday.
The internet is not a storage medium. The cloud is not permanent. There is no internet, there’s only other people’s computers.
“Glitch”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s unclear when the problem started, but it was highlighted on Saturday afternoon in a post by Tom Coates, and a Brazilian vtuber, @DaniloTakagi, had pointed it out a couple of days earlier.
As it is, it appears to affect tweets published prior to December 2014, judging by posts visible on my own account.
On Saturday afternoon, as Coates pointed out, the glitch claimed the picture from one of the most famous tweets ever (back when they were still called tweets), this selfie posted by 2014 Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres flanked by celebs like Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and others, taken during the show’s broadcast.
I haven’t seen any public comments from owner Elon Musk or X CEO Linda Yaccarino about the problem, but at some point on Saturday night / early Sunday morning, the picture in that post was restored.
Despite speculation that it could be an intentional cost-cutting move by Musk, the fact that the actual media posted hasn’t been deleted suggests an error or bug of some kind, one of many that have arisen since last year’s takeover and mass layoffs.
There’s also at least one other old tweeted image that still worked — the one posted to President Barack Obama’s account after winning his 2012 campaign for reelection, showing a hug between him and the First Lady.
The original article contains 394 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 44%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Looks like firing the people who know how to maintain the code wasn’t a good idea. Who could have knew!