> But, what is gone? Twitter was a unique spot where journalists, celebrities, titans of industries, your family, friends and co-workers, would join a daily mosh pit filled with a mix of truly important cultural moments and the most inane things you’ve ever seen. [...] Twitter will likely go from Elon’s new toy that is too difficult for him to play with, to being passed on to his legal and finance advisers to sort out.
Regardless of your opinion on Elon, it's simply too early to conclude that this is "likely" to happen, or that all those people will stop using it.
For those old enough to remember, major social media platform changes have happened and users have sworn that it was (effectively) the end. Sometimes they are right: see new Digg causing a mass Reddit migration, or banning adult content on Tumblr, turning a dying platform into a dead one. Sometimes they are incredibly wrong: see new Reddit[0], or, amusingly, people who claimed that Facebook switching to an algorithmic news feed instead of chronological was the end of the platform. I can't remember how long ago that was, but I imagine Facebook has increased in userbase and value 3 or 4 orders of magnitudes since that change.
[0] Yes, I'm aware old reddit is still accessible, but the vast majority of the userbase is on the mobile website or app.
> Regardless of your opinion on Elon, it's simply too early to conclude that this is "likely" to happen, or that all those people will stop using it.
Agree. Twitter was a going nowhere dumpster fire before the purchase. It's going to be a bumpy ride, but it could end up better or disappear. Either would be fine with me.
Everyone on this site (and even many non-tech people) had their own ideas on how to fix Twitter. It was a given that it was a mess. Musk had the money and hubris (I don't think he wanted to really buy it), to actually say hold my beer.
Regardless of what you think of Musk, he loves Twitter and now has a lot of financial incentive to make it function better as a business. So we'll see.
It’s too early to claim it’s dead but he’s right that it’s a coin toss to see if the service can stay running (without downtime). With 50% layoffs (and the rumors of how lax their security was) it’s only a matter of time before the on-call needed to save some issue won’t exist. A breach or bug or something is inevitable. Remember when meta -a far bigger and richer company- messed up basic networking and took the company down for a day?
Regardless of how you feel about free speech, not everyone likes it. Even the perception that twitter is getting toxic will drive people away… except the toxic people. The only thing holding twitter up is that there’s no alternative for the people that matter - the “blue checks” who drive most of their traffic and engagement. Yet Elon managed to piss them off anyways.
I don't even consider Twitter a social medium. Most people don't tweet, they treat it as an RSS feed with emojis. Only the rich and the famous use it to "socialize publicly". There are no real friendships or social networks, just subscription lists. It's more of a modern-era mass medium, with an agenda and all, and a feedback button.
I dont think twitter changes caused much of uproar in the past, like when they extended the character limit painlessly (unlike facebook). The audience is there mostly for the narrative, not the format.
I think the prediction of "it will go down" is more related to the fact that Twitter (like any company with a web-facing product and a large userbase) is basically a sieve of a boat with a team constantly bailing out the water, frantically plugging holes as new ones appear -- and the new management is firing most of the team. From that perspective, yes it's likely to simultaneously catch fire and sink.
It kind of was the end of that platform and the beginning of a new one.
One likely much more profitable and also much more destructive to liberal democracy.
(Liberal as in the real, proper sense, not the newer slightly illiberal liberals)
The NAACP is officially calling for an advertiser boycott of Twitter
> It is immoral, dangerous, and highly destructive to our democracy for any advertiser to fund a platform that fuels hate speech, election denialism and conspiracy theories. Until actions are taken to make this a safe space, we call on companies to pause all advertising on Twitter.
>>but the vast majority of the userbase is on the mobile website or app.
proving that the world truly is insane, I use old reddit on mobile as well as new reddit is more or less unusable on a mobile browser they hard force you in to their terrible app. If I need a mobile app I use a 3rd party app as the offical app is TERRIBLE
When/if they kill old.reddit is the say I stop using reddit, I would say my usage is already down 80% since the launch of reddit, as I pretty much only use the technical subreddits for news now, staying away for all other area;s of reddit.
I believe Elon will learn the hard way that yes you can solve tech problems by throwing humans at them but you can't solve human problems by throwing tech at them.
I think Elon is already feeling the blowback from immediately misunderstanding it based on this tweet[1]. It's going to be interesting to see how he intends on making up that $5b/year.
Creating the giga factories and making space x a success were as much a technical success as a human success. At this scale in the game, everything is.
We can be critical of his actions, but at this point, assuming incompetence is foolish.
I think this is nothing except shitposting. The whole blog reads like an angry rant of someone who didn't get what he wanted. This is not new. Layoffs are not a new thing. New management, new rules, it's always been like this.
Do I feel sorry for the people who got layed off? Of course I do! I wouldn't want to be them right now. I feel for them. But the consequences mentioned in this post is completely unreasonable. These are the kinds of points you hear from a depressed person who thinks the world is going to end because all the toilet rolls are suddenly out of stock.
The amount of doomsaying I see everywhere regarding the Musk takeover is baffling. I am no Musk fanboy but this is completely irrational. The fact of the matter is, people don't like change. That's all there is to it. Change automatically makes people cry out.
Here's a scenario for you:
What if the new Twitter is better? What if it isn't the toxic place you expect it to become? What if you are completely wrong? Have you considered that? Here's how I see this situation:
Musk is not an idiot. He must know exactly what he needs to do. This isn't his first rodeo and comments like "running a service of this scale and size is incredibly complex with downtime and uptime and blah blah" is incredibly naive. Musk runs at least 2 companies that require a huge network & availability guarantees. He knows what's needed there.
Twitter is going no where and if you think it'll go down in the coming years, you have a surprise coming your way. I am optimistic because of Musk isn't known to give up. This can fail for sure but I don't think that'll be the end of it.
The next step in my opinion is cutting down on the Twitter codebase. Trimming features. Shutting down unnecessary stuff. They laid off 25% of the workforce so at least 25% of Twitter will be affected. Let's see which parts though. There's a lot of unnecessary junk in there (communities, spaces etc.) that I'll be happy to say goodbye to.
> Musk is not an idiot. He must know exactly what he needs to do.
How does this square with the attempts to get out of the deal? I think your points would make a lot more sense if he hadn’t signalled extremely clearly that he thought the deal was terrible.
> Twitter was a unique spot where journalists, celebrities, titans of industries, your family, friends and co-workers, would join a daily mosh pit filled with a mix of truly important cultural moments and the most inane things you’ve ever seen.
It’s a toxic pit where people with boosted self-importance exchange silly reactions and replies, with no meaningful conversation whatsoever.
I can tell you that there are lots of great conversations among people from same domains of expertise or interest. The general exchanges with random folks are indeed meaningless and quickly devolve into rants. But once you find experts in niche areas, it is great stuff to follow, read, and interact with.
Which wouldn't be half as bad if it wasn't for the potential for echo chambers and tribalism fostering political radicalization.
This seems to be a person that thinks that they had something beautiful and nice that contributed to the public sphere and doesn't realize that for many this event in which twitter may change drastically or die is a good thing either way.
Then again if I was in a server room where 4chan, kiwifarms and twitter were hosted and I had a revolver with two bullets I'd shoot the twitter server twice. I'd be baffled if I ever learned in some quantitative way that the site was a net good.
What's most interesting to me is that for both sides of the (U.S.) political landscape, Twitter is a hellscape that is full of nothing but "The Other." From where I stand, both sides are correct.
there is meaningful conversation, as always when a lot of people are in a pulic square. The question is what is driving people to visit the square. Well, so far it has been the general progressive politics causes that twitter's management directly or indirectly supported. Now i don't know if the square has something attractive to keep people there anymore.
> Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop.
Is this true?
Shouldn't giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?
I'm former AWS. Yes, it's true. You'd be surprised how much human intervention is needed for large-scale SaaS/cloud stuff. A lot of it's just scale and probability. If an IT problem has a 0.0001% chance of happening on any given day for an org, a single organization will likely never see it happen during its entire existence. But if you're managing IT for 10 million organizations, it'll statistically happen 10 times per day!
Giant tech companies do obsess about reducing the need for human intervention. Teams in my org at AWS kept track of failures/intervention rates per thousand instances. If it gets too high, it means you're spending too much engineering effort resolving on-call issues and need to fix it.
Sure they should, but there are a lot of moving parts, written in different decades. Bugs are found every day even in projects that have 100% code coverage
PagerDuty is a multi billion dollar company for a reason, and they're not even the only company doing what they do.
I don't think it's relevant if one has worked in a giant company to understand how bad on call can be, every engineer knows that. I personally assume on-call is much worse/harder/nerve wracking in bigger companies
> Shouldn't giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?
They do. You automate recovery for all the failure modes your system has encountered. Then the system promptly fails in a new way you've never seen before.
Often because some totally different part of the system fails when scaling to new levels.
Yes, but complex systems are always changing and in some ways in a constant process of degrading. A lot of the biggest companies are growing exponentially faster than their processes and it ends up being nearly impossible for the tooling and supporting software to keep up. At that scale all the automation software you buy off the shelf won't scale with you. With over a billion dollars a year in surplus infrastructure costs, I would have to imagine Twitter is at that scale.
For example, one day SRE got alerted that a bunch of expensive accelerators were unexpectedly shutting down and not restarting production. SRE has to reach out in this case to the SWEs who build/designed the system to ask some clarifying questions. Together, the SREs and SWEs form a series of hypotheses about the cause, ultimately discovering an entirely unanticipated failure mode.
I think I'm one of the few people in the world who has attached a $100K oscilloscope to the voltage regulator on a machine learning accelerator to debug why a specific training job that did a series of convolutions at a highly specific rate would cause a DC-DC regulator to act like an AC source. It took far, far longer to write and deploy the rule that detected this problem in prod than it took us to identify the problem and stop the killer job.
The general philosophy at these orgs is that the same failures should never happen _again_. So you build automation and safeguards protecting the system from the failure modes you know.
However, any complex system will have failure modes you don't know. There might be new software, new features, new APIs etc. going out that interact in complex ways. So complex systems will fail in very interesting ways. So the general philosophy in operating these systems is:
1. First get the system back into a state in which the problem is mitigated.
2. Apply some short term hacks, rollback any suspicious recent changes.
3. Have someone go a bit deeper and try to root cause what caused the failure, have a discussion about it with impacted teams (often called a postmortem) and come up with long term fixes that reduces or eliminates the root cause from happening again.
I have worked in companies that it was true. And others where it was not. Even in one company we moved from not true to true, in about 8 years (there was of course not a hard cut).
The companies where it was not true, was a pleasure to work in. The management, from C-suits downwards knew what they were doing. In the others, it was a total chaos.
Of course, if everything is fixed with duct tape, you need firemen ready to act. If everything is solid and robust, there can be small outages, but nothing too critical.
Both are true — if a team can figure out how the reduce the need for human intervention, they generally will. In the limit, what's left is the really-hard-to-anticipate/automate stuff.
I don't think this is a great opinion piece. IT jumps to conclusions about what Musk's team has done without being able to see any evidence of its effectiveness. All we have is groans from people that pretty much spend their days complaining about everything anyways.
And then there's this idea that Twitter was some great, happy place until the last week. That's simply not true and Twitter hasn't changed in any way whatsoever yet.
What we know so far:
- Twitter will rollout a paid account system where if you pay $8/month your tweets will actually be visible to people and you'll see less ad's. This will ensure bots/scammers have difficulty posting to Twitter because their non-paid posts won't be seen by many people. People are more likely to casually browse Twitter now and people who profit from writing on Twitter will have better engagements.
- Twitter is working on ideas to let users seta threshold for what they want to read/see. If you want a G-rated stream, then you'll be able to do that. For people that get triggered or don't want their ideas challenged then they can mute that much like you can avoid music and movies/media you don't want to be exposed to.
- Twitter fired a lot of staff. Unsure how this pans out. Some people think it was ridiculous to have that many people. Others think it will cause the entire thing to break. No one really knows anything here. I have to assume Elon's team has spent months analyzing what they believe is lean muscle and what is the fat they can cut.
How can people draw these impossibly detailed predictions on its future from these actions? Musk has a history of being bet against and proving the doubters wrong. Anyone there in 2013 when TSLA shipped the first Model S batch knows how much he was hated and bet against then. He has also failed to deliver on some promises. We'll see.
Twitter is given an outsized and undeserved amount of attention. It has over-powered a tiny minority of users to get vastly over-represented and repeated to the rest of the people who don't give a damn about it.
If you don't like twitter stop using it and stop taking "news" about tweets seriously, because they are not serious.
I'm very unconvinced by Elon's $8 plan, but even to me "smothering it within weeks" seems wildly pessimistic. Even if his strategy doesn't work out, would things really come crashing down so quickly?
I've been a daily user of Twitter since 2011. I mostly use it to keep up with the entertainment industry/Hollywood as I live in Los Angeles and that's where the sausage in this town is made (which when HN talks about Twitter, I think on the whole completely forgets about that huge contingent of Twitter), so not really into the whole politics/tech sphere there (that's what HN is for). Most people in that sphere don't really _want_ to care one way or the other who runs Twitter.
And yet from a technical perspective, I've already noticed broken links. Duplicate tweets being posted. False notifications... the cracks are already showing and its one day in. Others have too.
This has a cascading effect that people who previously do not necessarily care on the whole about who runs Twitter are now seeing the app simply not work how did yesterday, and attributing it to the new management.
The claims in this article assume a lot. To pick just one, regarding stability/uptime: without knowing the distribution of layoffs by department, this may not just be incorrect, but the opposite might be true: if most SREs were retained, and engineers who know the systems well are still around, stability will likely improve as there will be fewer changes to the systems (usually the number one source of outages). If PMs were heavily cut then it’s possible they have infra that was slated for future projects that will no longer happen which gets them extra capacity.
Not saying any of what I spelled out above is what happened. But it is entirely plausible that thousands of jobs across the organization could be cut, and stability and uptime could improve.
Musk wants to save $1B from infrastructure costs, so the service quality will very likely degrade. The current business focus is money saving at all cost so I don't think SRE or whatever engineers are not very safe from layoffs.
True, but given that he's looking for $3 million a day in savings from servers and cloud services[1], I'm not wildly optimistic about how busy the remaining SREs are going to be. No matter how many of them there are.
There's always money in the AWS bill but that's a lot of money to expect to be able to find. And, um, this kind of thinking is one of the things Mudge was talking about.
The anger at Elon et al is understandable -- but I hope they can spare some anger for the years of stagnation (if not outright neglect) wrought by the former operators that led up to this moment.
They led to a stagnant company with -$200m in profits. Elon instantly led to a company that is now $1-2 billion in the red a year, and needs to aggressively cut costs and increase revenue to make it up. I'd say the current situation is 99% on Elon.
edit: For those not aware, the buyout included $13 billion in debt to Twitter which they need to pay $1-2 billion a year for in terms of interest alone.
OP makes it sound as if Twitter were a good platform for public discourse - it’s not. It’s a cesspool of indignation, racism, faux wokeness (white-knighting to feel superior over others) etc.
If you don’t have a thick skin like Musk, you must self-censor yourself pretty heavily to avoid backlash and sometimes humiliation. Just liking a controversial tweet or following a problematic account can get you on the bad side of people.
I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving.
> It’s a cesspool of indignation, racism, faux wokeness
> I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving.
Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using. Either way, the point isn't how bad Twitter is in your personal opinion, the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse.
Here is my prediction. After raging for awhile and trying other apps that will all disappoint people will log back onto twitter again to get their dopamine hit and that will be that.
For verification it will no longer be a status symbol for anyone and will let Twitter get higher ad rates as they will be pushing to self verified real people. Say pay a higher ad rate for advertising only to verified users.
Elon is taking a big risk here, and I doubt that he truly knows what he is doing.
None of what he is doing with Twitter seems to be rational. The rational thing for him would have been to stay away from Twitter as this is clearly a harmful distraction for his mental health and his other endeavors.
But that does not mean the outcome will be as catastrophic as some are predicting.
It has been a mere days since the acquisition closed. The results of what Musk is doing today will play out over months, maybe years. Yes it may all crash and burn at some point, but if you are already declaring it a failure with zero backing data then it is simply your bias talking.
If there was some way to wager my own money that this blog post will age poorly, I would.
One of my hobby horses is pointing out people that bend themselves in knots predicting that Uber will fail tomorrow (still waiting!) because they, personally, _don't_ _like_ Uber. There's a similar phenomenon with Elon Musk. Behold, Elon Musk, the guy who runs a car company and a space rocket company, will be completely stymied by keeping high availability on a website? THAT's the bridge too far that he just won't be able to build a team to solve? This is either extreme self-delusion based on an emotional need OR just an example of a classic web engineer who is too wrapped up in their own world to understand that other hard problems exist.
> One of my hobby horses is pointing out people that bend themselves in knots predicting that Uber will fail tomorrow (still waiting!) because they, personally, _don't_ _like_ Uber.
Just 3 days ago, Uber announced another quarterly loss of over $1 billion. They are failing, if you judge by profit and loss.
Normally I’d agree with you, it’s exactly his MO and it works - BUT- the 50% job cuts and massive revenue issues they’re rumored to already face is actually news on it’s own. His fluff about changes are just outrage marketing.
> They were dumped unceremoniously, the result of the addled whims of a walking meme
How is that different from Stripe layoffs from yesterday? I believe Stripe employees also didn't know that they will be laid off, and they got similar compensation to what Twitter employees got.
- Pay until at least February 21, 2023
- 2022 annual bonuses even if you're not around at bonus time
- Pay for unused time off
- Six months of healthcare
- Accelerated stock-option vesting
- Career support
- Immigration services support for visa holders
That's public, since Stripe published the relevant email.
Twitter didn't make their terms public (there's a difference), but reports are:
- Pay for 60 days (January 3rd, 2023)
- One additional month of severance if you sign a release
Those two packages are not similar.
Note that Musk's merger agreement included some other things:
- Performance bonus paid out at target
- Cash contribution for healthcare
- Equity vesting accelerated by three months
But so far I haven't heard anyone saying they got those. We'll see.
What I get from this whole experience is big tech employees, likely on a wage x^2 their national average, are able to communicate more widely to the world about their disenfranchisement about being unemployed than others made unemployed who are not.
Slightly ironic that they're employed by social networks. Said tongue in cheek because these are people with livelihoods and looking after families.
There are others that are concerned with big tech in general and its role that have been marginalised in mainstream news. Is there actually any pioneer in these companies that thinks social media on a global scale can work for good, apart from Elon Musk, apparently?
The whole centralisation of the net was a problem in the first place.
> The illusion of Elon Musk, David Sacks and Jason Calcanis as savvy operators is completely gone.
Elon has owned Twiter for less than a week. How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure? How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?
> How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure?
The article does touch on this a bit. Elon went in "with a red pen": his entire first week from an outside perspective was spent looking for costs to cut, departments to toss, and things to shutdown. It culminated in a 50% (!) layoff in the first week. That's not usually the sign of a healthy start, especially if you assume that the previous owners weren't that crazy and had somewhere upwards of 100% redundancy where you can just fire 50% of the company without consequences.
> How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?
1) The Peter Principle: incompetency has a way of failing upward in businesses.
2) The "Gravity" Constant of Money: once you've made enough net worth it attracts more automatically. Billionaires are basically "black holes" of passive income no matter what they think their day job is.
"...to balance their own version of “free speech”"
Nail on the head for what really bothers me. None of this (or the Trump/Freedom/Truth Social) opinions comprehend the fundamental concepts behind free speech. At best, they're ignorant, at worst, they've co-opted the concept to wield it against those whose speech they don't like.
As a relatively disinterested observer (don’t tweet, don’t own a Tesla, don’t feel particularly strongly about Mr Musk), I’ve found the media/commentariat reversals of position on this funny.
Musk’s initial Twitter takeover talk was met with general opprobrium, to put it mildly. I must have read more than one take that it was a threat to democracy itself.
Then, after a stock market downturn, and when the Twitter acquisition looked more like an impulsive decision that Musk might regret, the prevailing mood was gleeful. He was stuck with a white elephant. Schadenfreude. And since he clearly no longer wanted it, the consensus now he was legally and morally obligated to buy. Twitter itself demanded it. They weren’t going to let him weasel out of that one.
Now that he seems to have accepted his obligation and the sale has gone through, we’re back to opprobrium.
It’s callous to laugh when so many people have lost their livelihoods (although I’m confident any former Twitter employee has plenty of employment options). But the commentariat consistently outdoes what a satirist could invent.
That is because most Twitter users knew Musk would ruin what made Twitter Twitter. Twitter users just assumed the process of "muskifying" Twitter would be subtle and over the course of years. Watching him speed run the destruction of a $44 Billion company in a matter weeks has been absolutely shocking.
>Then, after a stock market downturn, and when the Twitter acquisition looked more like an impulsive decision that Musk might regret, the prevailing mood was gleeful. He was stuck with a white elephant. Schadenfreude. And since he clearly no longer wanted it, the consensus now he was legally and morally obligated to buy. Twitter itself demanded it. They weren’t going to let him weasel out of that one.
Now that he seems to have accepted his obligation and the sale has gone through, we’re back to opprobrium.
Could be part of a pump of the stock. Something he's done in the past, see FSD,coast to coast trip with no driver, battery swaps, the Cybertruck roadster and Semi, whatever that robot was,4680 batteries..........
The image of Elon Musk turned sour after he decided to play geo-politcs and play the Putin's peacekeeper puppet. That event, at least for me showed the true colors of Musky
If he's right (too soon to know), then nothing of value was lost.
Twitter wasn't profitable and probably was never going to be. Those tweeting will probably lead healthier and more productive lives doing other things. Those consuming content may have to actually read substacks, blog posts, reddit posts and other means of delivering content that are less a knife fight, and more a reasoned argument.
Twitter was rarely the Budapest cafe. It was more the favala rival gang war. If it dies at Elon's hands then its another boon to society, along with electric vehicles and comparatively cheap and reuseable space flight.
It's telling that "journalists" was put first. I've heard many times that Twitter is "useful" to journalists, who I assume feel like they have their finger on the world's pulse. It might explain why so many news stories include random opinions from unknown Twitter users, and why they are so out of touch with (at least my) reality.
Are we not allowed to voice our opinion on your words in the form of an upvote or downvote? I am assuming those are buttons you never use on hackernews yourself.
Sympathy can still be something you can have for people you disagree with.
The deconstruction has begun. Twitter management is too rightwing to last. Soon the MSM will pick up the story and will suggest the right alternative to twitter that you can use.
David Sacks is to the right, Elon is center-left, and Jason Calcanis is a bigtime lib. For the past three days, rightwing Twitter has been screaming that Elon has "caved" and so on because Trump, Alex Jones and a few others haven't been unbanned. (Personally, I'd like to see the Babylon Bee brought back as a gesture of good faith, pun intended.)
How is the combination of those three "rightwing?"
I'm not a fan of Elon Musk and his vaporware vehicles.
I'm not a fan of Twitter, but have been using it more than usual recently.
I am a fan of free speech and associated universal laws whether online or off based on a level discourse playing field.
I feel terrible for all the people suddenly left at the beginning of winter in one of the most expensive places on the planet without a job, and hope they all go on to better and brighter things!
"They thought they were rolling out some grand experiment in social discourse, forgetting that brands, users, and speech are all tightly intertwined in somewhat important things like revenue and profit."
..but Twitter wasn't turning a profit to begin with.
Ahh yes doomed to fail. When your speach isn't as protected because others are allowed to talk. Jack Dorsey literally bet the farm on the Elon could fix twitter. Twitter jobs seemed like the comfy lets push 1 feature a quarter. The amount of ex gov employees is also an astonishing statistic. Makes you wonder what this article is even talking about. The only thing I think elon really gets wrong is the "Work from Home" deal.
mjr00|3 years ago
Regardless of your opinion on Elon, it's simply too early to conclude that this is "likely" to happen, or that all those people will stop using it.
For those old enough to remember, major social media platform changes have happened and users have sworn that it was (effectively) the end. Sometimes they are right: see new Digg causing a mass Reddit migration, or banning adult content on Tumblr, turning a dying platform into a dead one. Sometimes they are incredibly wrong: see new Reddit[0], or, amusingly, people who claimed that Facebook switching to an algorithmic news feed instead of chronological was the end of the platform. I can't remember how long ago that was, but I imagine Facebook has increased in userbase and value 3 or 4 orders of magnitudes since that change.
[0] Yes, I'm aware old reddit is still accessible, but the vast majority of the userbase is on the mobile website or app.
matwood|3 years ago
Agree. Twitter was a going nowhere dumpster fire before the purchase. It's going to be a bumpy ride, but it could end up better or disappear. Either would be fine with me.
Everyone on this site (and even many non-tech people) had their own ideas on how to fix Twitter. It was a given that it was a mess. Musk had the money and hubris (I don't think he wanted to really buy it), to actually say hold my beer.
Regardless of what you think of Musk, he loves Twitter and now has a lot of financial incentive to make it function better as a business. So we'll see.
vineyardmike|3 years ago
Regardless of how you feel about free speech, not everyone likes it. Even the perception that twitter is getting toxic will drive people away… except the toxic people. The only thing holding twitter up is that there’s no alternative for the people that matter - the “blue checks” who drive most of their traffic and engagement. Yet Elon managed to piss them off anyways.
TheOtherHobbes|3 years ago
https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1588604338330800128
seydor|3 years ago
I dont think twitter changes caused much of uproar in the past, like when they extended the character limit painlessly (unlike facebook). The audience is there mostly for the narrative, not the format.
grammers|3 years ago
Exactly, these people use it for their own exposure/benefit. If it harms them if they stop, they will not stop.
btbuildem|3 years ago
rufus_foreman|3 years ago
I served in the mosh pit. I knew the mosh pit. The mosh pit was a friend of mine. Twitter, you're no mosh pit.
Swenrekcah|3 years ago
It kind of was the end of that platform and the beginning of a new one. One likely much more profitable and also much more destructive to liberal democracy.
(Liberal as in the real, proper sense, not the newer slightly illiberal liberals)
fooey|3 years ago
> It is immoral, dangerous, and highly destructive to our democracy for any advertiser to fund a platform that fuels hate speech, election denialism and conspiracy theories. Until actions are taken to make this a safe space, we call on companies to pause all advertising on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/DerrickNAACP/status/1588600470259789824
phpisthebest|3 years ago
proving that the world truly is insane, I use old reddit on mobile as well as new reddit is more or less unusable on a mobile browser they hard force you in to their terrible app. If I need a mobile app I use a 3rd party app as the offical app is TERRIBLE
When/if they kill old.reddit is the say I stop using reddit, I would say my usage is already down 80% since the launch of reddit, as I pretty much only use the technical subreddits for news now, staying away for all other area;s of reddit.
plazmatic|3 years ago
[deleted]
theCrowing|3 years ago
kenhwang|3 years ago
I think Elon is already feeling the blowback from immediately misunderstanding it based on this tweet[1]. It's going to be interesting to see how he intends on making up that $5b/year.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880
BiteCode_dev|3 years ago
We can be critical of his actions, but at this point, assuming incompetence is foolish.
unknown|3 years ago
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longrod|3 years ago
Do I feel sorry for the people who got layed off? Of course I do! I wouldn't want to be them right now. I feel for them. But the consequences mentioned in this post is completely unreasonable. These are the kinds of points you hear from a depressed person who thinks the world is going to end because all the toilet rolls are suddenly out of stock.
The amount of doomsaying I see everywhere regarding the Musk takeover is baffling. I am no Musk fanboy but this is completely irrational. The fact of the matter is, people don't like change. That's all there is to it. Change automatically makes people cry out.
Here's a scenario for you:
What if the new Twitter is better? What if it isn't the toxic place you expect it to become? What if you are completely wrong? Have you considered that? Here's how I see this situation:
Musk is not an idiot. He must know exactly what he needs to do. This isn't his first rodeo and comments like "running a service of this scale and size is incredibly complex with downtime and uptime and blah blah" is incredibly naive. Musk runs at least 2 companies that require a huge network & availability guarantees. He knows what's needed there.
Twitter is going no where and if you think it'll go down in the coming years, you have a surprise coming your way. I am optimistic because of Musk isn't known to give up. This can fail for sure but I don't think that'll be the end of it.
The next step in my opinion is cutting down on the Twitter codebase. Trimming features. Shutting down unnecessary stuff. They laid off 25% of the workforce so at least 25% of Twitter will be affected. Let's see which parts though. There's a lot of unnecessary junk in there (communities, spaces etc.) that I'll be happy to say goodbye to.
meheleventyone|3 years ago
How does this square with the attempts to get out of the deal? I think your points would make a lot more sense if he hadn’t signalled extremely clearly that he thought the deal was terrible.
Zanneth|3 years ago
That's assuming that those 25% were actually putting in work at Twitter.
bluetomcat|3 years ago
It’s a toxic pit where people with boosted self-importance exchange silly reactions and replies, with no meaningful conversation whatsoever.
warkdarrior|3 years ago
Levitz|3 years ago
This seems to be a person that thinks that they had something beautiful and nice that contributed to the public sphere and doesn't realize that for many this event in which twitter may change drastically or die is a good thing either way.
Then again if I was in a server room where 4chan, kiwifarms and twitter were hosted and I had a revolver with two bullets I'd shoot the twitter server twice. I'd be baffled if I ever learned in some quantitative way that the site was a net good.
CharlesW|3 years ago
bmj|3 years ago
seydor|3 years ago
tomlue|3 years ago
> Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop.
Is this true?
Shouldn't giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?
mjr00|3 years ago
Giant tech companies do obsess about reducing the need for human intervention. Teams in my org at AWS kept track of failures/intervention rates per thousand instances. If it gets too high, it means you're spending too much engineering effort resolving on-call issues and need to fix it.
shmatt|3 years ago
PagerDuty is a multi billion dollar company for a reason, and they're not even the only company doing what they do.
I don't think it's relevant if one has worked in a giant company to understand how bad on call can be, every engineer knows that. I personally assume on-call is much worse/harder/nerve wracking in bigger companies
jimbokun|3 years ago
They do. You automate recovery for all the failure modes your system has encountered. Then the system promptly fails in a new way you've never seen before.
Often because some totally different part of the system fails when scaling to new levels.
mikkergp|3 years ago
dekhn|3 years ago
For example, one day SRE got alerted that a bunch of expensive accelerators were unexpectedly shutting down and not restarting production. SRE has to reach out in this case to the SWEs who build/designed the system to ask some clarifying questions. Together, the SREs and SWEs form a series of hypotheses about the cause, ultimately discovering an entirely unanticipated failure mode.
I think I'm one of the few people in the world who has attached a $100K oscilloscope to the voltage regulator on a machine learning accelerator to debug why a specific training job that did a series of convolutions at a highly specific rate would cause a DC-DC regulator to act like an AC source. It took far, far longer to write and deploy the rule that detected this problem in prod than it took us to identify the problem and stop the killer job.
pm90|3 years ago
The general philosophy at these orgs is that the same failures should never happen _again_. So you build automation and safeguards protecting the system from the failure modes you know.
However, any complex system will have failure modes you don't know. There might be new software, new features, new APIs etc. going out that interact in complex ways. So complex systems will fail in very interesting ways. So the general philosophy in operating these systems is:
1. First get the system back into a state in which the problem is mitigated. 2. Apply some short term hacks, rollback any suspicious recent changes. 3. Have someone go a bit deeper and try to root cause what caused the failure, have a discussion about it with impacted teams (often called a postmortem) and come up with long term fixes that reduces or eliminates the root cause from happening again.
f1shy|3 years ago
The companies where it was not true, was a pleasure to work in. The management, from C-suits downwards knew what they were doing. In the others, it was a total chaos.
Of course, if everything is fixed with duct tape, you need firemen ready to act. If everything is solid and robust, there can be small outages, but nothing too critical.
feifan|3 years ago
nemo44x|3 years ago
And then there's this idea that Twitter was some great, happy place until the last week. That's simply not true and Twitter hasn't changed in any way whatsoever yet.
What we know so far:
- Twitter will rollout a paid account system where if you pay $8/month your tweets will actually be visible to people and you'll see less ad's. This will ensure bots/scammers have difficulty posting to Twitter because their non-paid posts won't be seen by many people. People are more likely to casually browse Twitter now and people who profit from writing on Twitter will have better engagements.
- Twitter is working on ideas to let users seta threshold for what they want to read/see. If you want a G-rated stream, then you'll be able to do that. For people that get triggered or don't want their ideas challenged then they can mute that much like you can avoid music and movies/media you don't want to be exposed to.
- Twitter fired a lot of staff. Unsure how this pans out. Some people think it was ridiculous to have that many people. Others think it will cause the entire thing to break. No one really knows anything here. I have to assume Elon's team has spent months analyzing what they believe is lean muscle and what is the fat they can cut.
How can people draw these impossibly detailed predictions on its future from these actions? Musk has a history of being bet against and proving the doubters wrong. Anyone there in 2013 when TSLA shipped the first Model S batch knows how much he was hated and bet against then. He has also failed to deliver on some promises. We'll see.
liveoneggs|3 years ago
If you don't like twitter stop using it and stop taking "news" about tweets seriously, because they are not serious.
Imnimo|3 years ago
thebradbain|3 years ago
And yet from a technical perspective, I've already noticed broken links. Duplicate tweets being posted. False notifications... the cracks are already showing and its one day in. Others have too.
This has a cascading effect that people who previously do not necessarily care on the whole about who runs Twitter are now seeing the app simply not work how did yesterday, and attributing it to the new management.
sylens|3 years ago
DoneWithAllThat|3 years ago
Not saying any of what I spelled out above is what happened. But it is entirely plausible that thousands of jobs across the organization could be cut, and stability and uptime could improve.
summerlight|3 years ago
Musk wants to save $1B from infrastructure costs, so the service quality will very likely degrade. The current business focus is money saving at all cost so I don't think SRE or whatever engineers are not very safe from layoffs.
BryantD|3 years ago
There's always money in the AWS bill but that's a lot of money to expect to be able to find. And, um, this kind of thinking is one of the things Mudge was talking about.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-i...
smarcellus|3 years ago
stagger87|3 years ago
One can only hope!
dnissley|3 years ago
marcinzm|3 years ago
edit: For those not aware, the buyout included $13 billion in debt to Twitter which they need to pay $1-2 billion a year for in terms of interest alone.
lapcat|3 years ago
Ironically, Musk rewarded the owners of the company by paying an inflated price for it.
manmal|3 years ago
If you don’t have a thick skin like Musk, you must self-censor yourself pretty heavily to avoid backlash and sometimes humiliation. Just liking a controversial tweet or following a problematic account can get you on the bad side of people.
I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving.
slantedview|3 years ago
Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using. Either way, the point isn't how bad Twitter is in your personal opinion, the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse.
christkv|3 years ago
For verification it will no longer be a status symbol for anyone and will let Twitter get higher ad rates as they will be pushing to self verified real people. Say pay a higher ad rate for advertising only to verified users.
notfromhere|3 years ago
I think the idea that Twitter can somehow boost ad revenues while removing moderation is just that.
stephc_int13|3 years ago
Elon is taking a big risk here, and I doubt that he truly knows what he is doing.
None of what he is doing with Twitter seems to be rational. The rational thing for him would have been to stay away from Twitter as this is clearly a harmful distraction for his mental health and his other endeavors.
But that does not mean the outcome will be as catastrophic as some are predicting.
paxys|3 years ago
slt2021|3 years ago
very productive start
h43z|3 years ago
f1shy|3 years ago
sebastos|3 years ago
One of my hobby horses is pointing out people that bend themselves in knots predicting that Uber will fail tomorrow (still waiting!) because they, personally, _don't_ _like_ Uber. There's a similar phenomenon with Elon Musk. Behold, Elon Musk, the guy who runs a car company and a space rocket company, will be completely stymied by keeping high availability on a website? THAT's the bridge too far that he just won't be able to build a team to solve? This is either extreme self-delusion based on an emotional need OR just an example of a classic web engineer who is too wrapped up in their own world to understand that other hard problems exist.
lapcat|3 years ago
Just 3 days ago, Uber announced another quarterly loss of over $1 billion. They are failing, if you judge by profit and loss.
stainablesteel|3 years ago
elon is playing you, everything is fine, he just wants free attention to spread platform news to people without spending $
all the complainers are his new marketing network and it's glorious
vineyardmike|3 years ago
usaphp|3 years ago
How is that different from Stripe layoffs from yesterday? I believe Stripe employees also didn't know that they will be laid off, and they got similar compensation to what Twitter employees got.
BryantD|3 years ago
Twitter didn't make their terms public (there's a difference), but reports are:
Those two packages are not similar.Note that Musk's merger agreement included some other things:
But so far I haven't heard anyone saying they got those. We'll see.gwbas1c|3 years ago
Stripe's layoffs were part of the business climate; Twitter's layoffs are the result of the new owner deciding to fire half the company.
exogeny|3 years ago
ricardo81|3 years ago
Slightly ironic that they're employed by social networks. Said tongue in cheek because these are people with livelihoods and looking after families.
There are others that are concerned with big tech in general and its role that have been marginalised in mainstream news. Is there actually any pioneer in these companies that thinks social media on a global scale can work for good, apart from Elon Musk, apparently?
The whole centralisation of the net was a problem in the first place.
Invictus0|3 years ago
93po|3 years ago
Elon has owned Twiter for less than a week. How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure? How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?
WorldMaker|3 years ago
The article does touch on this a bit. Elon went in "with a red pen": his entire first week from an outside perspective was spent looking for costs to cut, departments to toss, and things to shutdown. It culminated in a 50% (!) layoff in the first week. That's not usually the sign of a healthy start, especially if you assume that the previous owners weren't that crazy and had somewhere upwards of 100% redundancy where you can just fire 50% of the company without consequences.
> How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?
1) The Peter Principle: incompetency has a way of failing upward in businesses.
2) The "Gravity" Constant of Money: once you've made enough net worth it attracts more automatically. Billionaires are basically "black holes" of passive income no matter what they think their day job is.
reducesuffering|3 years ago
Waterluvian|3 years ago
Nail on the head for what really bothers me. None of this (or the Trump/Freedom/Truth Social) opinions comprehend the fundamental concepts behind free speech. At best, they're ignorant, at worst, they've co-opted the concept to wield it against those whose speech they don't like.
baryphonic|3 years ago
throwaway82388|3 years ago
Musk’s initial Twitter takeover talk was met with general opprobrium, to put it mildly. I must have read more than one take that it was a threat to democracy itself.
Then, after a stock market downturn, and when the Twitter acquisition looked more like an impulsive decision that Musk might regret, the prevailing mood was gleeful. He was stuck with a white elephant. Schadenfreude. And since he clearly no longer wanted it, the consensus now he was legally and morally obligated to buy. Twitter itself demanded it. They weren’t going to let him weasel out of that one.
Now that he seems to have accepted his obligation and the sale has gone through, we’re back to opprobrium.
It’s callous to laugh when so many people have lost their livelihoods (although I’m confident any former Twitter employee has plenty of employment options). But the commentariat consistently outdoes what a satirist could invent.
wnevets|3 years ago
skybrian|3 years ago
That's bad for him and so far it seems bad for Twitter, but it was good for the shareholders, and it's good generally that contracts get enforced.
thedrbrian|3 years ago
Could be part of a pump of the stock. Something he's done in the past, see FSD,coast to coast trip with no driver, battery swaps, the Cybertruck roadster and Semi, whatever that robot was,4680 batteries..........
tushonka|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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howmayiannoyyou|3 years ago
Twitter wasn't profitable and probably was never going to be. Those tweeting will probably lead healthier and more productive lives doing other things. Those consuming content may have to actually read substacks, blog posts, reddit posts and other means of delivering content that are less a knife fight, and more a reasoned argument.
Twitter was rarely the Budapest cafe. It was more the favala rival gang war. If it dies at Elon's hands then its another boon to society, along with electric vehicles and comparatively cheap and reuseable space flight.
unknown|3 years ago
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kranke155|3 years ago
vagab0nd|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
intrasight|3 years ago
No. The results of failed management (said management has now departed)
unknown|3 years ago
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fdsafdewe|3 years ago
It's telling that "journalists" was put first. I've heard many times that Twitter is "useful" to journalists, who I assume feel like they have their finger on the world's pulse. It might explain why so many news stories include random opinions from unknown Twitter users, and why they are so out of touch with (at least my) reality.
unknown|3 years ago
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plazmatic|3 years ago
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jabthedang|3 years ago
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NaturalPhallacy|3 years ago
If this was a HN comment it would get flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
pvg|3 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Better to apply the guidelines to actual HN comments.
nickthegreek|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
reactspa|3 years ago
[deleted]
nickthegreek|3 years ago
Sympathy can still be something you can have for people you disagree with.
renonn|3 years ago
[deleted]
seydor|3 years ago
baryphonic|3 years ago
David Sacks is to the right, Elon is center-left, and Jason Calcanis is a bigtime lib. For the past three days, rightwing Twitter has been screaming that Elon has "caved" and so on because Trump, Alex Jones and a few others haven't been unbanned. (Personally, I'd like to see the Babylon Bee brought back as a gesture of good faith, pun intended.)
How is the combination of those three "rightwing?"
olivermarks|3 years ago
I'm not a fan of Elon Musk and his vaporware vehicles.
I'm not a fan of Twitter, but have been using it more than usual recently.
I am a fan of free speech and associated universal laws whether online or off based on a level discourse playing field.
I feel terrible for all the people suddenly left at the beginning of winter in one of the most expensive places on the planet without a job, and hope they all go on to better and brighter things!
b800h|3 years ago
..but Twitter wasn't turning a profit to begin with.
o_1|3 years ago
slantedview|3 years ago