[rhyzomatic]

Not an SRE but I admit to saying that I expected Twitter to have some serious outages in the coming months after firing all those people. Honestly, how did the remaining engineers at Twitter pull it off? I can't really imagine losing more than half of my coworkers and not having the wheels fall off pretty quickly.

[shiroiushi]

Twitter was overstaffed, but much of the "extra" staff the elon fired weren't SREs keeping the systems running, they had to do with things like moderation. Elon doesn't believe in moderation, so out they went, and the skeleton crew was able to keep the site running, for the most part, but now the user experience has gone to hell unless you're a right-wing nutcase, so everyone who isn't is fleeing, as well as advertisers who Twitter even threatened to sue because they weren't buying advertising (!).

[instagraham]

a lot of what made X worse since Musk is not easily quantifiable. fewer high-quality posts, much higher spam, next to zero moderation, more misinfo - while it's possible to get some data on this, it's subjective enough that the fans will wave it away.

the problem is that Twitter has been such an invaluable part of the daily doomscroll that i suspect even those who have 'left' it for BlueSky or Threads are still opening X a few times a day - keeping those MAU numbers up.

[xbmcuser]

Twitter for what it is had too many engineers. I think part of the problem was the fad of more workers more hiring will generate more revenue but that was not true and just was a way to prop up the stock value.