It’s amazing. Everyone complained when Twitter wasn’t saying enough about their downtime. Now that they are working to be more transparent, they are being harassed for it.

Alex Payne (no relation, as far as I know, though my youngest son’s name happens to be Alex) posted on the Twitter dev blog some answers to questions people had regarding the problems that Twitter has been experiencing. One of the answers he gave has Robert Scoble up in arms.

Alex posted:

charles asks if there’s anything users can do to lighten our load. The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when “popular” users – that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they’re following – perform a number of actions in rapid succession. This usually results in a number of big queries that pile up in our database(s). Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time would be a help, but that’s behavior we have to limit on our side.

This post, combined with the previous post detailing Twitter’s architecture problems, leads any rational person to come to a fairly well-informed conclusion: Twitter has some architectural issues, and the weight of power users on the system have brought those issues to light. Now, Twitter needs to work to fix those problems. Period. End of story. RIght?

Unfortunately, Scoble’s haranging is far too loud for its own good, and it’s completely drowning out intelligent and informed responses, creating a heated, fairly one-sided debate that’s been hanging out at the top of Techmeme. And Scoble’s army of followers seem to be acting like nothing more than sheep, bleating out his message across the internet, though it’s especially bad within the confines of FriendFeed, where the flaming fields of anti-Twitter sentiment have been burning at their absolute hottest. I understand that not every one of his followers is necessarily a mindless drone, incapable of individual thought that isn’t fed to them via the approved Scoble Communication Channels™. Obviously I’M not. There’s hopefully more that are equally immune to his vitriol.

Scoble is wrong on this, but good luck getting him – and many others – to see that. The Twitter hate machine has been in full force lately, I don’t see it stopping anytime soon. I can tell you this much, though: I was happy when I stopped following Techcrunch; I’ll bet I will even be happier still when I stop following Scoble.