[mjr00]

> 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.

[matwood]

> 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.

[ryandvm]

> 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.

[browningstreet]

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.

[gonehome]

At the very least it's nice to see a power user in control of the platform.

The status quo was so bad - I'm really curious what's going to happen. I'm optimistic.

[vineyardmike]

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.

[watwut]

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

[arein3]

You need a few people to maintain the servers, not a few thousand people.

[shawnb576]

It's not a few people.

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.

Few people, pfft, give me a break.

[WorldMaker]

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?

[sillysaurusx]

Software engineers: we’re engineers

Also software engineers: be sure not to fire Ned or else the whole bridge might collapse

[jljljl]

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.

[ZeroGravitas]

Bridges have ongoing inspection and maintenance work that will lead to collapses if you decide to just skip it for no good reason too.

[vineyardmike]

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.

[WorldMaker]

Management: Ned didn't print enough code from the last 60 days. There weren't enough pages of paper. Firing Ned.

Software engineers: We did document he was a load-bearing Ned. He was Ops, of course he doesn't code regularly.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

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.

[johannes1234321]

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.

[arein3]

So then you have to keep 6k engineers on payroll?)

[johannes1234321]

Depending on what you want to do. But it's unlikely you can fire 50% after a weekend in, even if you are willing to let quite a lot of projects die.

[vineyardmike]

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.

[giaour]

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.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Unfortunately not too early to tell. Blue tick and all.

https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1588604338330800128

[seydor]

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.

[jeffbee]

I don't think you use it the way I use it. For me, it's just a place to talk to people I personally know. It very much is socializing in public.

[grammers]

> 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.

Exactly, these people use it for their own exposure/benefit. If it harms them if they stop, they will not stop.

[btbuildem]

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.

[rufus_foreman]

>> Twitter was a unique spot where journalists, celebrities, titans of industries, your family, friends and co-workers, would join a daily mosh pit

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]

Regarding the Facebook algorithmic feed.

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]

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.

https://twitter.com/DerrickNAACP/status/1588600470259789824

[phpisthebest]

>>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.