X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 729 points –
X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014
theverge.com

X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014::Ellen’s famous ‘most retweeted’ selfie from the 2014 Oscars has had its image restored, but most old tweets have broken short links instead of the media or links that should be there.

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Twitter, X, or whatever it’s currently called, did not respond to requests for comment.

The Verge is fed up lol

I figure they would at least mention the poop emoji auto reply.

They got rid of it.

Charitable assumption.

It probably broke.

No, they changed it to, "We'll get back to you soon." sometime after the new CEO came on board. Of course they never "get back to you soon". So, it might as well be a poop emoji.

might be best not to encourage that behavior

"Glitch"

Time to cut some storage costs!

This is exactly it. It also wouldn’t surprise me if certain accounts had images from then that might get request by law enforcement that are now “oops all gone!”

Someone noticed it knocked out most of the Arab Spring. Remember who also owns part of Twitter?

More like can't cancel me for something I said in 2012 if there's no record of it.

Is anyone still on twitter? Why?

Because of this fucking online press embedding tweets into every article, even weather reports

Momentum. It's still the most popular platform for many niches and it will stay popular as long as it's popular....

And English speakers are only a fraction of the user base. Current events in the US social media bubble barely penetrate the general public in the US, let alone across international and language barriers.

It's probably the largest social media platform in Japan, for example.

It's probably the largest social media platform in Japan, for example.

Really? 😯 I'm surprised they don't have a local solution, that's interesting!

Also reach and variety of users. Bussiness and self-employed people need it.

I think you overestimate the user base.

Unless you happen to be in one of the countries or niches where Twitter is really popular, you won't reach a relevant amount of people on there.

That goes without saying, I mean in places like the US/UK/Japan etc, it's useful. Many artists almost depended on it.

"It will stay popular as long as it's popular..."

You dont say? Yall are making it popular. If you y'all stopped using it, then it will not be popular and it would die.

I haven’t deleted my account - it’s 17 years old! But I also haven’t posted in a couple months other than saying I’ve moved to Mastodon. I said I’d hold on to the bitter end & I will. I’m not leaving, they’ll have to evict me.

I'm not leaving, they’ll have to evict me.

But... Why?

I can't speak for the previous comment but in my case they wanted me to remove 2fa (or pay to keep it) just to log in

I didn't remove it, and I've never been back

It’s the principle of the thing. I’m not going to delete myself, pretend I wasn’t there for all those years. The record stands. (Except for any media posted prior to 2014, which now exists only on my personal cloud storage, I guess.)

More power to you I guess, I think our brains just work differently on this subject. I used TweetDelete and nuked my entire account a few months back. I was going to let it just sit there with no activity but then he did another stupid thing (I forget which thing) so I wanted my content completely off the platform.

Because I like it.

Hope that clears things up for you.

Yes, but you're not a celebrity, government official, weather station or corporate marketing office. The question is why they remain on ex-Twitter when they really need a more stable platform.

It's fine that common folk like Gab or Parler or Truth Social, but they're not great for official business, And now, neither is the ex.

Weird response.

The question wasn't “why are you the celebrity on twitter?”

There are still seven million MySpace accounts as of 2019. So yes, any half-functional social media platform is going to be utilized by rando loyalists.

But Pre-Musk Twitter was the general announcement platform for most VIPs, what has been blighted with problems ever since Musk took over, and one-by-one, they're departing, as ex-Twitter becomes increasingly brand-unsafe.

So the question (as I read it) is not why is Twitter not empty? but why is Twitter still full well populated? Your answer because I like it doesn't clear things up. I can find seven million people who still like MySpace.

I think the answer is more nuanced than that. I also think as VIPs and services find alternative places to make their announcements and engage fans and constituents, we'll see ex-Twitter bleed out its general population.

Your answer because I like it doesn't clear things up.

It really does, though. Especially if you’re not looking for some ulterior motive and you just enjoy the platform.

I follow a bunch of scientists and I can’t think of another place that would allow me to, say, follow the LK-99 fiasco in real time the way twitter allowed me to.

I was able to watch people synthesize stuff pretty much live.

So to answer your question again, I like it, so I use it. I can only imagine lots of other people are also using it because they somehow like it.

Again, hope that helps you understand something so simple.

I can’t think of another place that would allow me to, say, follow the LK-99 fiasco in real time

Wait until you find out about IRC...

Haha, "glitch" about $10 million dollars in storage fee was cleared.

Not a glitch. Costs less to dump the data than maintain it, plus a lot of cringey Musk tweets were in there.

The images are still available through direct links. The t.co redirects are broken.

Lol. That's is? I hate this sensational bs.

Tweets were 140 characters including urls to photos. It means the photo or url linked no longer works because users would shorten links instead of the full image url.

How do I get the direct links from my old tweets? They have the t.co links in the tweet. I didn’t make a list of all the t.co links direct links across the whole site.

Anyone still using Twitter is a top tier masochist. It was always a pretty shit platform, but it's being made fun of by the toilet and the dumpster now for how shitty it is.

Hell, I think the sewage treatment plant is starting to blush at this point.

The images are still available. The redirects are broken.

So how do I get the direct links if all the tweets have the short link?

put someone in the server room with an axe and they could do less damage than Elon

3-2-1 Rule:
3 copies of the data.
2 Different media types.
1 of those off-site.

If you're relying on Twitter as the only place you have an image you care about, you're making a bad choice.

I don't think anybody seriously used twitter as storage.

Rather the point is that, similarly to every time a blogging platform or another online service with user content shuts down, a bit of internet history disappears with it. Links are broken, traces of opinions or bits of knowledge from another time are not available anymore...

It's not the end of the world, and at that point I wouldn't really care if twitter disappeared completely overnight, but still, some stuff will be lost.

I’m not sure “Twitter is not a backup service for your personal hard drive” is a point that needed to be made.

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I am kinda without words, need to check if one of my favorite post are still up. The poet was made by a trans women before she knew she was trans. She was sitting in a boat and said I feel like a girl in a 90s movie. She quote posted it recently and said we made it girlie.

If it went viral, it might be in the Wayback Machine. ᴰᵒⁿᵃᵗᵉ ᵗᵒ ᵗʰᵉ ᵂᵃʸᵇᵃᶜᵏ ᴹᵃᶜʰᶦⁿᵉ ᵃⁿᵈ ᴵⁿᵗᵉʳⁿᵉᵗ ᴬʳᶜʰᶦᵛᵉᵎ

Sure, a "glitch". More like further last ditch efforts to keep Twitter alive by cutting any costs necessary.

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!

Trying to decide if I care enough to check my account that I started in like 2009 and haven't looked at since probably 2012. After everything that has happened I almost feel like it would be impressive if it still existed.

At this point, I guess he is the most Mastodon support of all time, damn. He is really trying hard to make people quit his platform

That's very privacy friendly of them ;)

It's just that viewing tweets/xeets? Of the past are a premium feature. You can only see posts from the current second. It's to keep you really updated.

Could anyone please explain the meaning of the word "backup" to those people? Maybe with the help of a clue-by-four?