There were many different hypotheses on the outcome of Elon firing 80%+ of Twitter employees:
1. The site would crash and burn the next day.
2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around.
3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various system quirks was gone.
I think 3 is happening but the thing is that can this HC-twitter build knowledge and code back so that site functions stay about same before users leave is the real battle.
Yes, but my recollection is that the whale fail was usually due to huge growth or unprecedented traffic peaks. I don't think Twitter is growing at a fast rate any longer.
> At the very least per tweet it’s possible to see really view patterns, which to my knowledge what’s possible before.
Those numbers have been proven to be incorrect, by people who are posting from locked accounts with 0 followers racking up large nonzero view counts within a few minutes.
Some part of my brain immediately replied to this with the theory "what if those view counts are real and Twitter's just kind of ignoring whether an account is locked now" and damn that is a hell of a possibility to ponder.
There's another plausible theory that the just implemented it by counting database reads. So of course a locked test account will have more reads every time you look.
> There's another plausible theory that the just implemented it by counting database reads. So of course a locked test account will have more reads every time you look.
It'll have one, maybe two more reads every time you look. Not dozens. One person posted an example that had literally over a hundred alleged "views" within a minute, despite not refreshing their timeline after posting the tweet.
> Musk claims often that Twitter engagement numbers are at record highs. I don't believe these are lies.
You're talking about a man who has more than once been fined by the SEC for making false statements about public securities. What makes you think that he'd be a more reliable narrator for a private company for which he has no external accountability and a large personal financial interest?
"Record high" in an established business like Twitter isn't quite the same thing as a traffic spike in the growth phase of a startup (i.e. Twitter in 2011).
Record engagement these days is most likely measured in single digit percentage points over average engagement (at most maybe 10-20%), where when you're early and your traffic is spiking, it can be an order of magnitude more traffic than what you're used to seeing. The absolute numbers are larger yes, but from the perspective of "what can my infrastructure / architecture handle", relative changes are far more relevant.
Rails was never meant to be run on such a massive load. It was the perfect framework to get twitter take over the market but once that goal was reached a rewrite was unavoidable with a tech stack that can sustain such a load.
The fail whale was very common during a time of sustained growth when Twitter did not have the infrastructure it has today, but it all but disappeared in recent time.
The fact that things start to fail after that infrastructure has been put on place and running find for a while is noteworthy.
The fail whale was also a very specific case - I have no idea what was going on in the backend, but from a user perspective it was all "twitter's not available". Now we have inconsistent behaviour and countless small bugs that detract from the overall experience.
I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality. People seem to be acting as if Twitter was good prior to 2022 until Musk ruined it, but my experience has always been that Twitter is awful, both from an engineering and content viewpoint.
Maybe it's because I use an Android, but I've always found the experience terrible. I get notifications, but when I click them and they don't take me anywhere; the back button is completely broken; mentions randomly don't produce any alerts; it resets me to the algorithmic timeline every few days; replies often fail to load; the spam problem is completely out of control and most adverts are irrelevant crypto-spam; search never finds what I wanted; it's constantly putting tweets on my timeline from people I don't follow; and the whole app seems optimised to produce as much hatred and outrage as possible. Nowhere on the planet is as toxic as a Twitter thread, and yet the media and political sphere collectively decided that reporting on and catering to Twitter spats is the most important aspect of their career.
Frankly, if Musk destroys Twitter, it might be the best thing he could do for society. I may be misremembering, but I thought that prior to Musk buying Twitter, everyone was decrying it as toxic and lots of people were suggesting the government should step in to reduce its influence. Now it seems to be imploding by itself, yet everyone's upset.
This is one of several different glitches and downtime seen this year.
A revenue collapse of 40% with a surge in fake verified profiles does not make Twitter better than ever. It is crazy to see a sudden sharp 40% revenue decline being described as better than ever.
While I've no trouble believing revenue dropped, where are we getting this 40 percent number and surge in fake verified profiles data from? With Twitter now in private ownership, Musk doesn't need to disclose real data and to best of my knowledge hasn't really.
"Meet the new Boss, same as the old Boss" -- and that's a slam on Elon who promised a ton of things like open sourcing the algorithm, etc. All I get now is a bunch of right-wing weirdo crap in my feed that I didn't subscribe to or ask for.
And this thing he was complaining about back in May, he completely f'd it up post-purchase:
I blocked him and I don't see his posts any more. What did you try to do?
I'm the opposite of an Elon fan, but so many people don't seem to know how to actually use social media. Who/what you follow and who you block can completely change your experience.
I thought I scrubbed things by hitting "I am not interested in Elon Musk". Prompted by your tweet I checked what it says, and the offending post on my timeline has an option "I am not interested in Business People".
So that's probably how it got through. I still stand by my grossly hyperbolic diatribe about how twitter is definitely getting shittier, though.
Social media growth is all about recommendations and algorithms, people actually curating their network a la 2010 facebook is dead, so your idea of "how to use social media" is also aligned with completely not knowing how to make a growing social media platform where almost >99% of users are consumers and automatically are recommended things and curate their experience implicitly. People do not want to manually do anything for the most part.
The general issue of forcing recommendations and the general population not doing anything manually anymore is separate from the fact that as an individual you have lots of tools to curate your feeds on twitter/facebook/etc.
It's also just really silly to have conversations like:
You're missing the point, recommender algorithms are supposed to show people what they want. Even if what you said is true, the experience is absolutely doomed, because its a shitty UX
> How is it better than ever? I told the damn thing I have no interest in seeing ol' Muskrat's posts, yet there it is on my timeline: [0]
I bet that's by design. His posts weren't getting as much engagement as he thought they should, so his tweets now get an artificial boost to "fix" the algorithm.
We're just pretending it doesn't now take the better part of 10 seconds for twitter.com to load now? That response times have gotten perceivably, measurably worse over the last few months? Or that these glitches aren't now a weekly occurrence?
I don't use it anymore but the odd time a friend will send me a link to it, and it is horrifically slow. I wonder if anyone will write about this time at twitter in a few years. Would be a case study in how to decimate a websites popularity and what not to do to avoid that.
Interesting to me that when Twitter was ascendant the same predictions of doom were not made so frequently when the fail whale was a regular occurrence.
It's possible Twitter didn't need to be spending all the money they were to be maintaining five nines or whatever, given the shift in product focus (humans and not a general/universal message bus - bots can't @-mention anymore, etc).
Given that they are unprofitable, if I were a shareholder I would be upset if I did not see experiments being run to see how much cost can be cut and where. I doubt people will abandon the platform en masse over a few minutes of downtime here and there. They will lose 100% of users and be down forever if they don't stop the bleeding, however.
> Given that they are unprofitable, if I were a shareholder I would be upset if I did not see experiments being run to see how much cost can be cut and where.
Twitter will never get to $44bn market cap again (much less a valuation with a decent IRR) by cutting costs alone. They need to grow way more than they need to cut costs.
If any of those experiments lead to less growth (which I’d argue is true of a broken Tweetdeck), then they are wholly not worth it.
If I were a former Twitter shareholder, I'd be extremely grateful to the board for selling the whole thing for 44 Bn. No way tje company would have reached this evaluation without Musk. And Musk knew it, he just signed himself a contract he couldn't het out of.
So, shareholders got paid the pre-downturn price after the downturn? At a time big tech went down double 10+%? Sounds like an incredibly good deal to me.
> Interesting to me that when Twitter was ascendant the same predictions of doom were not made so frequently
... wait, they absolutely were, though? I remember at the time people saying that Twitter was doomed for this very reason, by analogy to Friendster, an early MySpace-ish/Facebook-ish thing which was never able to stay up.
It was a pretty common belief at the time that unreliable Twitter would be replaced by Pownce/Google Buzz/something entirely different.
4. Something in between? In short term we'll see some issues but overall nothing important will change and these downtimes and small issues are a justifiable cost for letting such massive cut in the payroll.
lol, I guess every tech company that has major KPIs for availability is wrong and people are totally fine with apps being down constantly, and new users will totally come back after trying to signup and failing. It's a tech company, a few thousand employees supporting perhaps hundreds of millions of users is pretty standard economies of scale.
What keeps Twitter up as a major social network is not %99.99 uptime. It's strong network effects in play.
What will sink Twitter is not %99.8 uptime. It's those network effects fading away.
For example, if people stopped using MySpace, Facebook, etc it was not because of their availability.
Again, I'm not saying this is cool. Im just saying if that extra %0.2 downtime (in short term) costs you 80% of your work force costs, a business manager may consider that acceptable.
>these downtimes and small issues are a justifiable cost for letting such massive cut in the payroll.
Well we're not even a year in and these "small issues" seem to be repeatedly occurring. Let's get a little further out with some more stability before we call them justifiable lol
4. The institutional knowledge is not gone, in the event of any massive catastrophe employees who previously worked at Twitter can return as “consultants” and charge very high rates to fix issues as they occur. It’s pay as you go.
Massive catastrophes are averted by people with institutional knowledge correctly adding to the hardware/codebase over time, with new features that integrate well with old one, knowing how to scale hardware correctly, patches being applied, etc.
Not by bringing people in during a fire and pointing into the smoke and saying "fix that!"
> return as “consultants” and charge very high rates to fix issues as they occur.
I'm sure there are some people who would do that, but those opportunities become very expensive-to-impossible when you burn bridges the way certain new management has. People hold personal value on things like respect and principle that can make them behave "irrationally" in naive analyses like this.
> 4. The institutional knowledge is not gone, in the event of any massive catastrophe employees who previously worked at Twitter can return as “consultants” and charge very high rates to fix issues as they occur. It’s pay as you go.
What you're describing is the loss of institutional knowledge with a fantasy tacked on the side.
1) There's no reason to expect those employees would come back, even at rates far higher than Musk is likely willing to pay. Everything indicates Musk has destroyed a lot of goodwill with his shambolic layoffs, and getting people to come back is one of the situations where you need goodwill.
You're basically talking about gig-work on a shitty boss's terms. Only desperate people would play that game, and the people Musk would need probably aren't the desperate ones.
2) Any employees that come back are going to be rusty and lack the institutional of what happened after they left, so their effectiveness at immediate fire-fighting will be greatly reduced.
3) If there's a "massive catastrophe" at Twitter, do you think they even know who to call back? I wouldn't be surprised if they've lost a lot of the institutional knowledge about who knew what, at this point.
Most of those people will presumably have other jobs now, which would tend to preclude this. You do _not_ want to be in the position of begging employees you fired to come back as consultants; it's not at all as easy as you seem to think.
Also #4 they are shipping features much more than before. Shipping more always will likely lead to more errors happening. IMO it's a combo of #3 and #4
1. The site would crash and burn the next day.
2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around.
3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various system quirks was gone.
We are now seeing #3 play out in front of us.
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