Good to learn, thanks. "Everyone you follow" isn't quite what I was saying, but I also don't use twitter so I'm doubly in the dark here.
I'm surprised that someone with, say, a Twitter problem and tens of millions of followers - the two seem to go hand-in-hand - drives tens of millions of writes every time they post. But there you go, learned something today.
> These numbers are a bit better than Twitter’s numbers. Because of how unbalanced the social graph is, getting performance this good and this reliable is not easy. For example, when someone with 20M followers posts a status, that creates a huge burst of load which could delay other statuses from fanning out. How we handled this is described more below.
Huh. I haven't written myself a twitter, but I've always assumed that this problem is solved by a mix of fan-on-write and fan-on-read. Most people are fan-on-write, but those with a follower count > $THRESHOLD are fan-on-read.
The fan-on-read set is small enough to be easily cacheable, so the extra reads required to service a follower's feed are more than compensated for by the fact that the content is in RAM in a cache.
Sounds like RedPanda went exclusively with fan-on-write. I'd be surprised if Twitter does the same - but it sounds like OP has more knowledge about this than me, so I'm happy to be educated!
What do you expect incognito to change? That would presumably show the same content the author is seeing. Only Google sees the content that drives the ranking.
It is Google that needs "incognito" mode, not the author.
I'm surprised that someone with, say, a Twitter problem and tens of millions of followers - the two seem to go hand-in-hand - drives tens of millions of writes every time they post. But there you go, learned something today.