[manholio]

> Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business?

After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it.

The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to scale.

The problem with Twitter, and what Musk doesn't seem to understand, is a sociological and political one. Social networks are the crack cocaine of tabloid media, left to the whims of bad actors they can destroy democracies, incite lynchings, distribute hate and misinformation on scales without historical precedent. "Free speech" just doesn't cut it, social networks are publications not mediums, they chose what people get to see and react to, and the fact that the choice is made by an algorithm does not absolve them of responsibility for the consequences, especially if the algorithm is tuned for revenue maximization and easily gamed by bad actors to spread their content.

By firing the watchers, Musk is setting Twitter up as an menace to stable democracies around the world.

[invalidname]

At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple. Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff.

But the current staff needs to maintain code from a MUCH larger staff. That's hard. Especially with microservices where every team did "their own thing" and some teams just vanished completely. You have "dark areas" where no one knows how stuff works and what's going on.

Normally when you downsize at this scale you do this in an orderly way. Every person hands off their work and responsibility. Spends a couple of weeks writing docs and instructions and then leaves. This was done quickly and violently. I'm sure there's many repercussions we don't see simply because the systems are simply running. Once the team looks at some containers and decides to pull the plug to "see what happens" we'll find out...

[0898]

> “At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple“

Elon should get real experts like Infosys or Wipro in to rebuild it.

[invalidname]

Sometimes it's really hard to tell if people are joking or serious in HN...

[0898]

I thought adding /s would kill the joke ;-)

[KptMarchewa]

They are seriously joking.

[manholio]

> Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff.

So you are essentially saying Twitter has an over-complicated architecture with regards to its real technical needs, so Musk was right to axe the microservice zealots. Good we can agree on that.

The next step is to acknowledge that code and data-centers continue to work long after their original designers have left the company, that's what computers are, tools for automation. Keeping the lights on and services in a roughly functional state is an activity that requires much less people of relatively lower qualification, even if they couldn't have engineered it themselves.

Yes, there is a long term risk of code rot and entropy if Musk does not plan for a gradual transition to a better engineered architecture with competent maintainers. But we are not there yet, far from it.

Meanwhile, schadenfreude people have rooted for a twittocaplipse from day one, nay, predicted it as inevitable. There is absolutely no sign it's going to happen, and Twitter turned out sufficiently simple after all on the technical side.

[ponow]

People choose to use social media, as they choose all media. People are individually responsible for the physical actions they make, even if a little bird told them what to do. It may be easier to control people by limiting what thoughts they're exposed to, but a people isn't free if that's done.

[manholio]

It's all fun and games until you are slain in the street because people chose to regard you as subhuman after a little bird told them so.

Disseminating politically extreme misinformation kills people - look no further than Russia, where a state run propaganda campaign has made people no more stupid or immoral than you or me support a vicious war of aggression against their neighbors.

[ponow]

No, the killer kills physically. Being told to is no excuse.

[PixyMisa]

No.