> 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.
> now has a lot of financial incentive to make it function better as a business
Boy that's an understatement. It was already kind of a neutral value shithole, but now he's got to figure out how to wring a profit out of this $45 billion dollar dried up cow. And he's got to do it without his usual trick of nursing from the US government teat. Good luck, Elon. You're gonna need it.
When people subscribe to a service, they want a sense of the tangible and intangible aspects of the service and the company behind it... they want to know what they're paying for, and what they're getting for that money.
So far, Elon's been a dynamic and inconsistent figure. He's not representing a stable, known offering where things won't radically change with his whims.
IMO, he needs to stop tweeting and he needs to build a team who can represent the policies and offerings of the company. Obviously he has that in place at Tesla and SpaceX (in greater degrees than he has brought to Twitter so far).
Even if the $8/mo offering is a bargain, it also has to feel reasonable. So far, Elon's not making that case for himself, even while he's basically making the case that he is Twitter now.
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 hate this meme where Musk is somehow free speech advocate. He does not have history of tolerating criticism or opposition speech. I mean, not at all and he retaliated quickly and strongly. No way he could possibly create free speech platform
Twitter runs their own data centers, which means they own all of the THOUSANDS of machines in them. These machines, and all of their parts, have shelf lives and CONSTANTLY need replacement.
When they are replaced you can't just go to Best Buy with a credit card. At scale VERY SMALL changes matter: oh look they changed something in the disk firmware and haha now your databases corrupt data one out of 1M writes.
New machines need to be tested, burned in, installed. Old ones need to be cycled out.
Same goes for power equipment, networking, all that.
Because you built your own data center, and you were an early scale company it ALSO means a huge percentage of your systems are home grown - asset management, deployment, health checking, metrics, you name it. There are no articles on Stack Overflow. There is no blog post. How that shit works is mostly a function of what people knew about it and, well, at least half of those people are now poof - gone.
This hasn't even gotten to the services themselves, many of which are now running without an owner or any person at the company who has ever looked at them before. The remaining people are now up to their eyeballs in drama, survivor syndrome, fear, and, oh yeah, the work of many of their laid-off peers.
Even if you don't think you need that much operations labor at scale (and I'm assuming you are drastically under-estimating Twitter's current scale), when you do a 50% layoff before you even know your exact bus factor and are assuming a 100x/1000x redundancy (somehow), what are the odds you lay off one of those "few" people that are critical to operations? How do you know you haven't thrown out the needles in that big of a haystack?
At the scale of a company like Twitter, the product and infrastructure are less like a static bridge and more like a complex living, evolving organism. So the analogy is not a very good one.
So your patient might be ok if you fire Ned, but if you try to make changes and a critical system goes down, it might take you a lot longer to fix things without the specialists in that system.
You could keep one specialist around for each system, but then you have a very small bus factor.
It’s not one bridge it’s thousands of bridges, it’s just not know how critical each bridge is. Or how critical it becomes when another one is down.
Look at all the other major engineering failures in history, it’s always small things (a gasket) on a bad day (too cold?) that somehow works day after day until one day it magically doesn’t and you get the Apollo incident. Everything goes catastrophic over tiny things. Imagine if NASA fired half their team before that incident. The only guy who knew the gasket can’t get cold might not still be there because Ned got laid off.
To be fair this is how a lot of industrial engineering works too. Ol joe retired and now we don’t know what’s that special modification we need to make to smooth the flight of planes, cause Joe just knew. This is a lot of military and airplane production.
Yes, but if you happen to fire "the wrong" people it can take a while till the remaining one understand that component well enough for a hot fix, which for the original team had been easy and if ops are wieder to the specific dev team one can assume there are a few components with little attention now in the mix.
Maintain servers not maintain services. Twitter likely had thousands of services doing thousands of different things. At their scale yes you need to keep thousands of people on payroll at least to turn off all the “fluff”.
Even if you can refactor and simply their work to half the workload, you can’t do that within a week. Even the boring organizational stuff is crazy at this scale. They for sure slashed whole teams at once. Who turned off those services? Or if they’re meant to be running, who owns them, organizationally? Where is the code living, what repo, what part of the code base, when something goes wrong, what metrics are being watched? Overnight teams had to become responsible for twice the code/services, potentially stuff they have never seen before. Bloated or not, that’s not easy.
If Twitter never changed the product again, you might be right that they could keep the ship afloat with a skeleton crew. But it doesn’t sound like that’s Musk’s plan. He wants pretty substantial feature changes, which normally means less service stability.
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.
I'd be careful about that tweet. It is clear that Tesla competitors (GM, VW) stop funding Musk, but aside from that most big advertisers likely have longer running contracts, so immediate impact is unlikely. By such a statement Musk can however argue that the RIFs are "required"
It is very typical for big advertisers to have a change of ownership exit clause. It is also very typical for these contracts to only establish the unit rate, but without a required minimum spend amount.
The bigger nail in the coffin is IPG recommending their clients pull out; they probably represent a third of F500 ad spend. I would not be surprised if the other three firms in the big four are recommending the same. It's not just car brands.
edit: it'll also be interesting to see if other social media sites (primarily Facebook, Reddit, Snap, or TikTok) or advertising platforms (Google) retaliate against Tesla now that Elon owns a direct competitor. Tesla enjoys quite a lot of "free" word of mouth advertising on their platforms, and those platforms all have the means to bury positive sentiment and/or amplify negative sentiment towards Tesla.
Do companies have "contracts" for ads on the internet these days? I thought most ads on social media, Twitter included, were self service with an automated bidding system that allowed each advertiser to tweak how much they're willing to pay per ad view in real-time. You can essentially just login to your account and hit the big "OFF" button whenever you want.
> Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.
this reads like a Trump quote. People are free to use their speech to pressure advertisers into dropping Twitter. Or, rather, "voting" with their wallet.
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.
No, it's not. Essentializing incompetence, implying that he's incompetent at everything, that's foolish. But the supposition that he's incapable of being incompetent at Twitter because of his successes elsewhere has already been disproven.
It's possibly not that foolish depending on how hard you believe the Peter Principle applies to billionaires. Musk didn't start Tesla, he swooped in and meddled exactly like Twitter, because he had extra money and wanted to swing it around. Is picking a good bet, one that survives your meddling, a skill or just luck? It's possible to believe the Peter Principle applies and it was entirely luck.
He came in years before the first car was shipped and, like, 15? years before they got to sustained profitability with their third-gen cars.
I'm not trying to dickride the guy, obviously a lot of people contributed, but this literally just happened and we all saw it. How are people rewriting it successfully?
Most of Tesla's current profitability is still in carbon credits trading with other manufacturers. Their own manufacturing is still not stably profitable. Where it is profitable it in part relies on continuing sales of a feature that has yet to be delivered (and may not be ever delivered).
Tesla has done a great job to shake up a complacent status quo of car manufacturers, and to especially lead the curve of EV adoption in the US. That's not nothing, yes, and is absolutely a team effort. It's also not the best run business model and there's a lot of questions still about the long-term sustainability in their cost cutting and their over-reliance on credits and promised but not delivered features. If we want to credit Elon as the sole "business guru" and the company is relying on business models that are less than stellar, it's fair to criticize Elon's role in Tesla with respect to their ongoing business model issues.
There have been times where Tesla's stock, to generate additional liquidity, has had SEC violations alleged against it and most of those were directly "great business man" Elon Musk posting SEC violations directly to social media and pretending they were honest mistakes (and having enough reasonable doubt to not get the "Martha Stewart treatment").
I don't think there's "rewriting". There's 15 years of questionable business practices that was criticized at the time, yet seem easy to sweep under the rug now that Tesla looks popular and is a darling of certain investors.
I don't care how instrumental he was to Tesla, because it doesn't have anything to do with how successful he'll be with his stated plans for Twitter, a company he desperately tried to avoid acquiring but was forced by his own mistakes.
The "gigafactory" in Nevada—built, owned, and operated by Panasonic—is similar in size to other Panasonic battery factories in Japan and around the world.
I disagree. I think that the assumption of incompetence makes sense if you're also assuming that a tech company like twitter is different enough from a tech company (hardware focused) like tesla or space x, that the same operating principles apply.
Intelligence comes in a lot of ways - clearly Elon Musk is incredibly intelligent, but only in some ways and not in every way.
Trying to play devils advocate here, I don't fully believe that Musk will be incompetent in handling Twitter, but I definitely think given the current evidence it's possible his understanding of how to operate Twitter is less comprehensive than how to operate a hardware driven tech company.
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.
There’s no evidence he wanted to walk away altogether - he just wanted to get the fairest price, and surely his investors/financiers would have been demanding he negotiate the best price he legally could.
I’m honestly flummoxed that you think there is no evidence and that you think this was his plan all along. We’ve all been very aware of what’s been happening since he made the deal in the first place. The ability to negotiate stopped then.
You don’t need to make excuses for him or pretend he is infallible!
The emotionally charged words and false/baseless assertions of my position and motivations in your comment indicate a strong attachment to a position.
I didn't say and don't think "this was his plan all along". I've done nothing to make excuses for him and I don't pretend he is infallible (indeed I once wrote an op-ed in a national daily newspaper examining his flaws [1][2]).
Occam’s razor requires us to believe what all the evidence indicates and nothing more: He was originally willing to buy it at the price offered in the prevailing market conditions in April, then the market crashed and suddenly the price he offered was too high, so he tried to negotiate/force a lower price (and we must assume his investors/financiers were demanding this as any professional investor/financier would), and when this failed he just went ahead with the purchase, which he always said he was committed to.
The only thing there is evidence for is that he wanted to reduce the price, just as anyone would after such a market decline. To believe anything else requires mind-reading, which you seem to be trying to do not only of Musk but also of me.
So, please, stop trying to read people's minds and just look at the evidence before us!
> 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.
So basically, you don't mind right wing toxic sites that bread enough radicalization to actually kill people, but you do mind the one platform that actually hosts groups from across political spectrum.
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.
Of course this is true, and isn't really a surprise. Very few outages are caused by existing code in a system that was otherwise working perfectly. It's almost always due to some change – whether a bug in newly deployed code, bad config update or whatever else. An untouched system is absolutely more stable than one in flux.
Of course the solution can't really be "let's not deploy anything, just to be safe", because then your competitors are going to launch new features and leave your product behind.
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.
Services that are on the hot path of serving requests and generally keeping the site up and running are a tiny, tiny fraction of overall infra costs at companies like Twitter. The majority of spending is on storage and processing of logs, metrics and analytics data. Now you can argue that Twitter will be worse without this data, but it isn't as simple as "Twitter will go down more if you cut infra costs".
I don't think you understand what you're talking about or Twitter's business model. Those log and metric, analytics are the reason for advertisers paying Twitter. What's the point of saving $1B if you lose $2~3B of advertising revenue?
Oh and good luck with cutting dependencies on those storage while firing all those engineers with knowledge on those infrastructure. From my experience, migration and deprecation is usually much harder (I would say 2~3x difficulty) than launching a new stuff especially in an established big company.
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.
Is it possible that Elon's intention here has little to do with his personal fortune, or that of his employees? Maybe he simply sees the current situation as Twitter as a cancer on society, and sees himself in a unique position (ie. rich enough) to actually do something about it. Forget about the numbers, the digital marketing/pseudo-journalism industry pretty much needs to be cut down a notch, (or stop calling itself tech!). I see your point that he has a good chance at failure, but pretending the company /was/ successful or on some great path up until last week is just sad.
Yeah, I think a lot of people are missing that these layoffs are not necessarily about Twitter's financial situation. They are very much about it's cultural situation -- both the culture within the company (reputation for being unable to ship), and the relationship of the company with the wider culture (blue checks, narrative control, cathedrals, etc).
Copy pasting my reply from a different thread on that topic:
You think that if he paid completely up front he wouldn't care about cutting costs? Why? The pressure would still be there -- it would just be in the form of pressure to recoup his investment
With debt interest he needs to squeeze money NOW versus in the future. In either case he overpaid severely for a company and now needs to squeeze money out of it at some point. Point stands that this is 99% Elon.
I mean, some pressure would still be there. I don’t think it’s at all comparable to the minimal cashflow and $85MM interest payment due in a month kind of pressure.
He approached twitter and signed a binding contract to buy them. They simply made him follow what he himself agreed to do in writing. If it's a dumpster fire then what does that make Elon for willingly signing a contract to buy it for $45 billion?
Actions have consequences which is a basic thing that it seems some people have a really hard time understanding.
edit: If one can ignore contracts at will then much of modern society implodes.
They didn't force him. He could have backed out by paying the contract breaking fee. Once you sign you have to stick to it one way or the other. He could have written in a due diligence clause, but did not.
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.
I was referring to the favorable state of Twitter OP was describing, which doesn’t hold up IMO.
> Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using
I‘m an ex heavy Twitter user. I primarily use it for keeping up to date with tech, but the signal/noise ratio is not great nowadays. I can see myself switching to Reddit and HN completely.
> the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse
That remains to be seen, no? What’s the use of writing that a week after an acquisition?
The author is definitely projecting, but he's basing his projection on real signals: increases in hate speech, advertisers leaving, mastodon currently trending, etc.
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.
I don’t think it’s unfair to call out the first sentence of the argument, if you’re trying to persuade with several paragraphs of content and the very first sentence has a gross error, it transcends pedantry in my opinion.
Rather, I think it makes the original argument look irrational if they have an extreme exaggeration if they have to use that to make their point.
It's a typo. There isn't some kind of grave epistemic problem with the first sentence where everything that follows is predicated on a falsehood. We don't discard the contents of books just because the publication has a typo.
As noted in their other reply, it is actually not a typo. A central part of their point is in that first sentence they note the extra eyes on marginalized people making more money than other marginalized people, but it’s blown out to being extremely exaggerated.
So yes, I think there is a “grave epistemic problem” with the first sentence that hurts the argument and its credibility as a whole, without having to get into the details of the argument itself.
That you called the first replier “stupid” or even their argument “stupid” is wholly unjustified.
What I get from this whole experience is big tech employees, likely on a wage double 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.
Now that I've done the hard work of fixing the typo that apparently invalidates the argument, it ought to be trivial to provide a counter-argument.
Orders of magnitude are typically in log 10, 2^2 being 4 is in the same order of magnitude.
The national average wage for the USA is roughly 70k according to a quick Google search, unless you’re suggesting the devs are making $4.9 billion per year I think you’re not using exponents correctly.
> What I get from this whole experience is big tech employees, likely on a wage x^2 their national average
> According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median wage for workers in the United States in the second quarter of 2022 was about $1,041 per week or $54,132 per year
Which puts your estimate of the average silicon valley wage at $2,930,273,424 per year.
> 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.
Cutting costs in a company that's almost never been profitable is failure? A huge layout isn't a suggestion of an unhealthy start, it's a suggestion of an unhealthy status quo.
What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions?
> Cutting costs in a company that's almost never been profitable is failure? A huge layout isn't a suggestion of an unhealthy start, it's a suggestion of an unhealthy status quo.
Maybe? It's not just that's an early layoff. It's that it is an early layoff of a huge magnitude. Again, a 50% layoff means that the previous status quo had upwards of 100% redundancy. That is unbelievable for any company, no matter how unprofitable. (I could believe it of a very profitable company with money to "waste", but a publicly traded company getting asked every quarter why they aren't profitable yet? I can't believe it. If it were that simple to cut overhead, shareholders would have demanded it years ago.) Feel free to give Musk the benefit of the doubt and assume Twitter really was that unhealthy. I feel there's a lot more reason to be skeptical here.
> What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions?
I may be a bit hyperbolic claiming that the Peter Principle must especially apply to billionaires.
But, it is entirely possible to believe that Musk succeeded entirely on luck and his decisions didn't matter (for good or bad) in the long run. EVs were a huge gamble 15 years ago, but it also didn't take that much of a crystal ball to know that they were "the future". Space is always a giant gamble and the most successful always seem to just be the luckiest. (That was one of Heinlein's hypotheses early in the space race. I think a lot of sci-fi writers still believe it to be true today. Admittedly sci-fi writers don't have the most hard data to prove/disprove such a hypothesis, but it is still a useful hypothesis.)
None of that requires "proving" that the companies were successful "despite" Musk. I think there is evidence of some questionable business model practices, too (and there's plenty on Musk's business decisions out there to find; it's not "new" criticism), and I have provided some of it in at least one other thread, but at the end of the day: when you are judging someone based on the number of poker chips they have on the table, it's fair to question if it was all just random luck, especially when that someone is also acting a bit as the Dealer and getting a chunk of House money too.
The measure of success isn't how much Twitter fell before he had anything to do with it. It's where it ends up after he's had more than a couple days to improve it.
By any measure, Twitter is currently far worse off than a week ago. Yes, a measure of success is purchasing something for 3x the price, losing $30b because someone was foolish enough to initiate that purchase. You should question the competence of someone doing that.
"...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.
Twitter is a cesspool so ruining what it is is a positive thing. It cannot get worse from here. At worst, it dies; at best, it returns to its former glory circa 2012. Both sound like wins to me.
It's a huge undertaking, that's for sure, which is probably why Musk wanted to back out. But $44B may seem like pocket change if it can get Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok level engagement and monetization. Twitter has been stagnant for a decade and the rot has set in.
It has already been proven Twitter will stop being the Twitter its users have enjoyed for the past decade. You are free to argue Twitter will be better for it but there is absolutely no disputing the old Twitter is dead.
I haven't heard a single proclamation on this that isn't likely to be reversed at some point in the near future. People may quit using Twitter in protest and come back in a week. Or they may all leave for good. Or they may join mastodon, or whatever. Remember the mass Facebook departure to ello?
The point I was making is that nobody seems to think any particular thing, other than that which can be post-rationalized from their feelings, pro or anti Musk. The whole thing has the loosened-reality-grip feel of a culture war battle.
> Firing the leadership and a massive percentage of the workforce at once changes who the company is. I am not entirely sure why this needs to be explained.
Sure. QED. But not a point related to mine.
> That just means what you wrote is not related to anything I wrote
Firing the leadership and a massive percentage of the workforce at once changes who the company is. I am not entirely sure why this needs to be explained.
>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
I wouldn't call it "playing" geopolitics when his company is sinking money into the conflict via starlink, and he presumably has no choice in the matter. Peace is always better than war, I'm not sure when we started valuing life so cheaply. Or is it just Ukrainian lives we'll happily write off? Overwhelmingly men, and not the children of the oligarchs that are funnelling money out of the country. Ultimately, every one will pay the price for this war, except for the political elite that are profiting from it.
If science had demonstrated that telepathy is possible even on one-to-one basis let alone at massive scale, it would be far easier to take this popular meme (and the hundreds of others like it) more seriously.
Maybe that's a bit too much to ask of humanity at this stage of its development, but a person can always dream!
I think the split around that is that people like me didn’t see his appeal as wanting peace. Russia was de-facto allowed to annex huge swathes of Ukrainian territory in 2014 - what did we learn from that?
To me, Musks calls are equivalent to saying “ok, now freeze the frontline until Russia has had time to rearm and rebuild for the next push”.
We tried the “peace” proposal Elon put forth in 2014, thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians are now dead as a result.
“I say, Théoden King: shall we have peace and friendship, you and I? It is ours to command."
"We will have peace," said Théoden at last thickly and with an effort. Several of the Riders cried out gladly. Théoden held up his hand. "Yes, we will have peace," he said now in a clear voice, "we will have peace, when you and all your works have perished--and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us. You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter a men's hearts. You hold out your hand it to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor. Cruel and cold! Even if your war on me was just--as it was not, for were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired--even so, what will you say of your torches in Westfold and the children that lie dead there? And they hewed Háma's body before the gates of the Hornburg, after he was dead. When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you and Orthanic. So much for the house of Eorl. A lesser son of great sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers. Turn elsewhither. But I fear your voice has lost its charm.”
Everybody wants peace. Peace is a good thing. But what most people agree on is that you don't give an autocrat anything they want just for the promise of peace. Most people remember that lesson from 1938.
You are just arguing methods, I am arguing absolutes. I have no idea what the best way to achieve peace on an international scale, so my argument is pure because I don't pretend to know.
Looking back on history should give us clarity for today. The genocides that I know of were not the same as military invasions.
And in light of past civil wars, what is the best solution for neighboring nation? I am fairly certain every country has taken land this way, so maybe we should give Texas and California back to Mexico?
Russia is NOT in the right, but Russia's actions don't change how we should be pushing for peace.
ISIS went on a genocidal rampage, and they were clear about this. Western forces supported their expansion.
The American invasion of Iraq, that was kicked off with a night of bombing destroying nearly everything, that was much more than anything Putin opened with
I don't agree at all with Putin's actions, but could you please explain how they are genocidal?
The Ukrainian treatment of ethnic Russians, the incessant shelling of civilians in the separatist regions, the widespread embrace of actually Nazi ideology, and the cutting off of freshwater supply to those areas seems a bit closer to genocidal to me. Just a bit.
Putin won't stop though, the war with the Georgians in 2008, 2014 Ukraine invasion and now this Ukraine war. Is it really peace when one side calls for peace?
Don't forget WW2, when Nazi Germany under Hitler annexed Czechslovakia in 1938, invaded and split up Poland in 1939 and all the Great Powers did not do anything due to either appeasement or isolationism. We need to learn from history, expansionist dictators do not stop and conceding to them only leads to further war and likely world war.
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.
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 sure if Elon is considered as center-left anymore.
I know I was center-left for a long time, but the same values that I had 10 years ago as center-left are considered center-right at this time. I believe it's the same with Elon.
I'm not sure where you are getting this from. He was literally pushing for peace talks in the Ukrain-Russia war, where lots of people are dying right now.
Also he has manufacturing plants all over the world (China), so he would lose the most from violence (while many other billionaires are profiting from war).
The "radical and literally proviolence people pressuring you" refered to Alex Jones and Trump pressuring. Them pressuring Musk does not make Musk center left.
> He was literally pushing for peace talks in the Ukrain-Russia war, where lots of people are dying right now.
That does not make Musk left nor anti violence. It rewards violence. It makes him either naive or pro Russia.
It allows Russia to torture and continue genocide in territories it has. It rewards it for invasion and creates situation in which Russia will logically invade again.
Nope, centre right at best. Or, if he is actually centre-left (neither of us will know), he has (for the last couple of years) been sucking up to the right. The effect is the same. I assumed he was playing each side off against each other so, again, the effect is the same as if he is right wing.
Calcanis maybe a lib, but his actions are hard core capitalist ... so for the sake of this situation, his actions will be right wing.
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.
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.