[throwntoday]

But Twitter/Musk's detractors are moving the goalpost. The initial argument was that twitter would not be able to function without much of the staff that were fired, that they were somehow imperative to the site staying up. Now that it's been over a week, and the site is taking on more traffic than it has in a while, the goalpost is being moved to "this will never be profitable".

I understand people hope it will fail, because they don't want to admit how useless much of the staff these big tech companies have accumulated over the years are to the core products. But, you will only be setting yourself up for disappointment. Elon has done much more impressive things with a small team of "hardcore" engineers (as he puts it). I think many sticking around are the type not to shy away from a challenge, though again I understand many are not in a position to be playing competing in the workplace.

[dspillett]

> The initial argument was that twitter would not be able to function without much of the staff that were fired,

You are missing out some important nuance there: no one said it would fall off the earth immediately, that it would cease to function right now. Many, myself included, have said we think it can't function long term, or even medium term, like this.

Day to day running of the main app is all automated when things are OK so it will keep ticking over as long as someone says the infrastructure invoices. The real test comes when there is next an infrastructure issue or some other fault: are the right sort of people there to resolve it quickly? Also do they have a good combination of people around to work on those bugs those advertisers are concerned about and other maintainence & improvement (of both the app and the other infrastructure it and the company relys upon)?

If we get rid of all car mechanics your car won't break down immediately, but good look getting it sorted easily when it eventually does develop a fault.

Twitter was somewhat bloated, I agree there. But what has happened to it in recent weeks is far more damaging than that could ever have been. It needs to turn around very quickly to survive financially and technically, and I think the chances of that happening are small.

[throwuwu]

> no one said it would fall off the earth immediately

This is very disingenuous, there were hordes of people claiming it would be down in 24 hours, 48 hours, after the weekend etc. and there are still masses of people still saying it won’t last two weeks. At this point so many people have cried wolf loudly and repeatedly that I think the best option is to believe no one unless they are reporting first hand facts that can be independently verified. Everything else is just hot air.

[lamontcg]

And we know that social media amplifies extreme voices.

[throwntoday]

IIRC an entire team within the org resigned with a member claiming "twitter cannot run without us" over a week ago.

[lamontcg]

That isn't a counterexample.

[dspillett]

> > > The initial argument was that twitter would not be able to function without much of the staff that were fired,

> > You are missing out some important nuance there: no one said it would fall off the earth immediately,

> This is very disingenuous,

Fair, I matched hyperbole (the implication that a majority were saying something) with hyperbole (staying no one was).

Let's go with no one with a clue who is unbiased by direct connection.

> there were hordes of people claiming it would be down in 24 hours, 48 hours, after the weekend etc

If this pot may comment on the a kettle's underside for a moment: "hordes" may be as disingenuous "no one". It was said by some angrily¹ on their way out and repeated and amplified by the mob that is Twitter² users.

And that outgoing team didn't say it would fall down in any time frame IIRC: just that things could not run without them. I would read this as a medium/long term view, the social media amplifier read it as "it dies in 3, 2, ...".

----

[1] rightly so, but the emotion does reduce the ability to maintain objective reasoning

[2] one of the selection of reasons I have for not using Twitter aside from occasionally looking at a message linked elsewhere: it is too full of certain types who think Twitter is a good idea!

[wyclif]

Yes, and you can easily find these tweets right now with a search. People claiming it would crash and burn within a week or less.

[oaktrout]

"no one said it would fall off the earth immediately, that it would cease to function right now"

Quite a few people said that it would crash essentially immediately.

[stouset]

You can find “quite a few people” to say literally anything.

[wyclif]

But the point is that enough people were saying it that it quickly became something to be mocked and pushed back on.

[stouset]

From my perspective, most people were saying something along the lines of Musk is going to tank the company within a week. Or something along those lines.

Which… by all evidence he has. The corpse of Twitter might shamble on for awhile. He might even sell it down the line for pennies on the dollar. But he’s got to turn a billion in profit just to pay down the debt. Best of luck with that.

[Ekaros]

Tank can be many things. Like for example. Would the ex-shareholders buy back the company at stock value it had before Musk completed the transaction? Or where would the company in current shape be valued at?

[oaktrout]

So you agree with me then, I was replying to a post that said "no one".

[stouset]

> The real test comes when there is next an infrastructure issue or some other fault

My money is on certs for critical services expiring.

[HWR_14]

My money is a critical hardware failure somewhere. Certs are known to be an issue and many companies have them. Twitters hardware is probably far more bespoke.

[whateveracct]

Mine is on some resource leaks. Some team knows about it and they're all fired/left now.

[throwntoday]

As the sibiling comments have already stated, that nuance was entirely absent in the claims people were making.

Twitter is a glorified message board. You don't need more than 50 engineers to oversee that. Wasn't instagram and whatsapp overseeing >250m DAU with around that many engineers before their acquisitions?

[vkou]

You don't need more than 50 engineers to run a glorified message board, but you sure as hell do to run the ad spend management front-ends that actually pay the bills.

Twitter-as-140-characters-shouted-into-the-ether can be 'built in a weekend'. Twitter-as-a-business-that-makes-money is an entirely different machine.

[shagie]

You don't need to pay bills.

As Elon Musk Cuts Costs at Twitter, Some Bills Are Going Unpaid - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/technology/elon-musk-twit...

> ...

> Mr. Musk also issued an order to slow or in some cases halt transfers of funds to Twitter’s vendors and contract services, the people said. Any expenditures for services need to be approved by Mr. Birchall, three people said. Mr. Musk has since declined to pay for the travel services incurred by the former Twitter executives, the people said.

> ...

> Mr. Davis, the president of the Boring Company, has also directed Twitter employees to renegotiate the deals that the company has with firms such as Amazon and Oracle, which provide computing and tech services, the people said. The employees were told to suggest to those companies that Mr. Musk’s firms would not work with them in the future if they refused to renegotiate, the people said.

> After Twitter’s contract with one software vendor expired under Mr. Musk’s ownership, that company voided a discount it had given to Twitter, one engineering manager said.

[HWR_14]

WhatsApp was point to point personal communications at that point. It's a lot easier than a broadcast system with discovery.

[cdf]

Having millions of DAU is potentially hard, but not the most manpower intensive part.

The hard part is monetizing.

What was the revenue Instagram and Whatsapp were collecting at the time of their acquisition? Likely 0.

The moment you start collecting money, signing contracts, besides the non engineering work like legal and finance, not to mention sales, you will need to do a lot of tracking whether you delivered what you claimed you sold.

Didnt Facebook get in trouble for exaggerating ad metrics?

And that's on top of all sorts regional compliance requirements over GDPR, cookies, which require both engineers building stuff as specified by legal, which wasnt required before because if you have no revenue, you dont really need to worry about getting sued or banned in the region.

[sroussey]

For perspective, the staff in 2018 was 3700. Now maybe 2700.

Of course, if you were vital to Twitter, then you likely left before he took over.

Because you could. Plenty of people would rather have severance.

I base this on experience. I was a consultant so I did what all good consultants do when holding together a sinking ship: I doubled my rates. Twice.

[dilyevsky]

They had ~2900 before the ultimatum with severance. I'd guess they have less than 2k now if not 1k

[jmspring]

Staffing count != properly staffed

[sroussey]

Absolutely. Also even if the staffing count is good, the mix between departments may be bad.

[JacobThreeThree]

And suddenly everyone is extremely concerned about the state of Twitter's finances.

Hating on Twitter has become just another political in-group signal. Yawn.

[matthewmacleod]

I hope the outrageous irony of this comment is not lost on you.

[RC_ITR]

> The initial argument was that twitter would not be able to function without much of the staff that were fired, that they were somehow imperative to the site staying up.

Again, what does this even look like? Twitter.com returns 404 and everyone gives up?

At least make straw man arguments that are reasonable.