By nearly every measure Twitter is doing a lot worse than it was before those people were fired. It was growing in revenues and profit and since then has shrunk drastically in both measures.
Now one could reasonably argue that it wasn’t due to the firing. However, the burden of proof lies with the people claiming that the concurrent loss of revenue and profit had nothing to do with the firings.
And Twitter being a private company it’s unlikely anyone can ever get the data to support that claim. Further, Twitter’s unique nature as a vanity project for the owner makes even public statements bh thst owner highly suspect, since they have a vested interest in making this look like the right decision and disclosure laws don’t apply to private companies so he can basically lie and still be ok.
The people who said that had no idea what extent the Twitter tech team had gone to to build a robust application that wouldn't fall over. The fact it withstood 75% of the staff being removed is a testament to the good work they did, not a sign that they weren't needed in the first place.
>By nearly every measure Twitter is doing a lot worse than it was before those people were fired.
Care to share which measures are those you speak of?
From what I saw, Twitter's revenue went down only due to the post pandemic economic slump following the pandemic bubble, and due to advertisers leaving en-masse because Musk won't purge the platform of hate speech and other content that's non advertiser friendly, not due to the workers who got fired leaving.
> However, the burden of proof lies with the people claiming that the concurrent loss of revenue and profit had nothing to do with the firings.
No, if you want to establish correlation or causation, you have to prove it. Don't have access to the data to prove something? Sucks, but then you can't draw that conclusion, at least not definitively.
I can believe, though, that you're at least somewhat correct that the mass firings were responsible for Twitter's decline. But it's plausible that other things are also to blame, and possibly even primarily to blame: questionable product decisions made post-acquisition (Twitter Blue, lax moderation, requiring logins to view, ...), the volatility and offensiveness of the new owner causing advertisers to leave, etc.
From the 2019 annual report (one of the only years where Twitter posted any net profit):
> We have incurred significant operating losses in the past, and we may not be able to maintain profitability.
Since our inception, we have incurred significant operating losses, and, as of December 31, 2018, we had an
accumulated deficit of $1.45 billion. Our revenue has grown from $664.9 million in 2013 to $3.04 billion in 2018. While we
were profitable on a GAAP basis in 2018, we believe that our future revenue growth and our ability to maintain profitability
will depend on, among other factors, our ability to attract new users, increase user engagement and ad engagement,
increase our brand awareness, compete effectively, maximize our sales efforts, demonstrate a positive return on
investment for advertisers, and successfully develop new products and services. *Accordingly, you should not rely on the
revenue growth of any prior quarterly or annual period as an indication of our future performance.*
This is standard boilerplate that every public company puts in their official statements to pre-empt any shareholder lawsuits in case something goes wrong.
Imagine if a company told its investors: “Our growth is guaranteed! Nothing can affect our revenue and margins.” The only companies that give that kind of promises are ponzis (and to-the-moon cryptocurrency projects, which is not categorically too different).
It is actually quite remarkable that Twitter has kept functioning at a technical level. A lot of people expected the massive loss of engineering talent to doom them, but it seemingly hasn't.
However, the site is going through a serious cultural (maybe you could say spiritual) death, and that might have something to do with the lost institutional knowledge of what made Twitter tick at a level deeper than just the code.
On a technical level, I tend to agree. Never underestimate the skill of the employees to save their boss from horrible decisions.
That said, Twitter is no longer "open" like it used to be - I bet it just won't handle the public traffic anymore. That is directly tied to cratering revenue but it's hard to untangle from the owner's self-destructive drug-induced behavior.
It's a testament to the quality of the codebase in general. Good code is hard to kill, but it WILL be eroded to the point where it can no longer grow and be better.
That might be true about the traffic, but twitter wasn’t open before the musk purchase either, it would stop you from seeing posts if you weren’t logged in if you tried to scroll more than a few times. Its current behavior of showing just a few posts sorta, uh, randomly selected might be easier on the server, idk.
For most of its life, Twitter was completely open. You could see any tweet or user page with the URL, whether or not you were logged in. The only exception was if someone had “protected” their account.
Twitter as it runs now is far more locked down. And that happened after it experienced significant, noticeable outages.
Performance is not binary… Twitter is still “up” as a service but with a much smaller public footprint and handling much smaller amounts of traffic.
Do you know when they stopped being frictionlessly open? I’m curious when they started doing the to continue you have to log in pop overs. It preceded musk, as I said. I think every link still worked, but scrolling and navigating twitter like a typical website instead of typing in a link had log in gates.
That is NOT true. As a Twitter addict, I know that was not the case.
Also, Twitter had two notable Spaces problems, when launching the DeSantis campaign (into the ground) and the second fiasco, which I actually forget what it was, just recently. The system just cannot handle truly planet-scale traffic like before.
As someone who wasn’t a twitter addict, I know it was true because people would link me to twitter, I would see the tweet but attempting to scroll too much would result in a log in popover years before the musk buyout.
I'm skeptical, honestly. Within the first few months of the acquisition, it seemed pretty clear to my tech-friend group that Twitter was on its way out and was going to fail. But it's been 2 years, and many of those same people still use Twitter quite a lot. Maybe it'll still fail, of course... it'll just take longer than anyone expected.
I was never a big fan of it, and never used it much, so I can't judge any loss of quality over the past 2 years. And since they now require a login most of the time, and I don't feel like logging in, I don't bother clicking through links to Twitter that people post.
My friends who were passing around twitter links still seem to do it. And the content of those links hasn't changed (random nature/technical info that geeks like) so the twitter posters haven't left either.
The only thing that changes is i used to click on those that looked interesting and now i don't because i know i won't see the thread without a login.
I don't get why whole developer circles didn't leave the platform yet. You can't ask people something via DMs without paying for the blue checkmark and it's totally unhelpful, plus it sends the message you care not enough about the right wing messaging that is send by the platform now. Or these people are just ok with that, I don't know.
They have. Lots and lots of developers are now on the Fediverse. But there's a cultural schism between the types of developers that frequent Silicon Valley cafes and the ones that frequent the Chaos Computer Club.
It's not network effect. There is nothing valuable that happens on twitter that doesn't make it's way out of twitter to the rest of the internet and reality. Avoiding twitter is actually a great way to filter out literal nation-state produced misinfo and propaganda that doesn't pass the smell test, but seems rampant on twitter.
People are addicted to twitter because of FOMO, because god forbid they learn about breaking news an hour later than anyone else.
Software can work for a very long time with minimal maintenance. A different question is if it can keep making revenue without investing.
Quality content has disappeared on Twitter and there is a proliferation of Only Fans tweets. However if you love Musk and right wing conspiracies it is still a fine platform to use.
> A lot of people expected the massive loss of engineering talent to doom them, but it seemingly hasn't.
Not doomed, but lots of failures did follow. Timeline not loading or repeating forever, SMS auth issue, API performance, going down in Australia, etc. - they experienced quite a few problems early post-change, but managed to recover.
When SWEs in tech want to flex, they code Twitter on a whiteboard as an interview question. Major respect for the the work they're doing at xAI, but the hardest challenges building Twitter itself are social.
Uh, it has doomed them. Have you not heard about their massive drop in revenue as advertisers leave?
Sure, the advertisers say its because of the platform being a cesspool. But I mean anything on Twitter is on FaceBook or YouTube; you might have to look faster or harder. However, that stuff isn't where FaceBook / YouTube sends your ads. The targeting on Twitter is so bad compared to alternatives that advertisers just don't care to use it. This is an engineering problem caused by having nobody to fix it.
The revenue problem is mostly because of Twitter's new leadership, on the technical side the few people that remained have managed to keep the platform running quite well.
Sure, it has been plagued by the occasional random errors and downtime ever since Musk came in, but I don't expect most companies to remain operational on a technical level when 80% leaves.
An important lesson for tech companies: hire strategic H1B employees throughout your company so when times are real tough, you're sure you can maintain operations with desperate staff that can't afford to leave.
I was curious if this is true or not. Found this: https://www.investing.com/academy/statistics/twitter-facts-s... which came from before Twitter went private. It's technically correct that they did make a profit (e.g. 2022 Q1), but also made a lot of loss (e.g. 2022 Q2).
Comparatively, it's hard to find information about Twitter now. Most news articles mocks the revenue, but has no information about profit. However, given that Elon said Twitter "will be" profitable in 2024, I think it's safe to assume it isn't profitable yet?
This surprises me, I thought it became profitable from cutting expenses, but the truth is complicated. It used to be both profitable and not profitable at the same time (see the first link), but now it's mostly not profitable.
The massive debt Elon has set Twitter up with is probably driving their current losses. Advertisers wanting nothing to do with him after telling them to fuck off is one thing, but the interest on those billions of borrowed money aren't cheap to hold on to.
What also doesn't help Twitter's case is that employees are still fighting to get paid their severance fees. That's a couple hundred million dollars that Elon probably assumes he doesn't need to pay. Other fees on the order of tens of millions of dollars also include the rent that Elon decided he doesn't need to pay, as well as a bunch of other bunch of unpaid stuff.
My guess is that Twitter is banking on not having to pay all of its debts at once, slowly building up a profit and regaining its value so it can have the cashflow to pay back its arrears later, but that's a risky move that may lead to a debt spiral or bankruptcy.
The spam filtering system sure as shit isn't working. The amount of spam DMs I get is crazy. The trends section has also been busted for ages. Click on the "Show more" link and it shows you less.
- Scrolling after a while, the sound of a video doesn't stop anymore => force close
- A lot of violence, literally. I keep on blocking them ( recently logged in with another account due to a new phone and I had to do it again). It's nuts how much violence it promotes recently.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people who got fired did censorship and I miss it.
Now one could reasonably argue that it wasn’t due to the firing. However, the burden of proof lies with the people claiming that the concurrent loss of revenue and profit had nothing to do with the firings.
And Twitter being a private company it’s unlikely anyone can ever get the data to support that claim. Further, Twitter’s unique nature as a vanity project for the owner makes even public statements bh thst owner highly suspect, since they have a vested interest in making this look like the right decision and disclosure laws don’t apply to private companies so he can basically lie and still be ok.