[TazeTSchnitzel]

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.

[renegade-otter]

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.

[uxp100]

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.

[snowwrestler]

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.

[uxp100]

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.

[renegade-otter]

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.

[uxp100]

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.

[kelnos]

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.

[nottorp]

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.

[KptMarchewa]

I don't expect it to "fail" in a financial way because Elon Musk can just bankroll his political addiction.

[myspy]

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.

[immibis]

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.

[lupusreal]

Network effects are a hell of a drug.

[mrguyorama]

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.

[oxfordmale]

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.

[viraptor]

> 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.

[jart]

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.

[immibis]

Either Joel or Jeff wrote about this in the context of Stack Overflow. A developer who thinks of making Stack Overflow imagines writing SQL:

create table users (id integer autoincrement primary key, username varchar(32), password_hash varbinary(32)); create table questions (id integer autoincrement primary key, user integer references users(id), title varchar(256), body bigtext); create table answers (id integer autoincrement primary key, question integer references questions(id), user integer references users(id), body bigtext);

but actually that's just a tiny fraction of actually making Stack Overflow.

[lesuorac]

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.