15 ms·

Thoughts about Twitter

127 points by mncaudill 4y ago

renonn 4y ago
NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
>They were dumped unceremoniously, the result of the addled whims of a walking meme. If this was a HN comment it would get flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  as would many of musks tweets. not sure your point.
- pvg 4y ago
  Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Better to apply the guidelines to actual HN comments.
stagger87 4y ago
> This endeavor will be one of their lasting legacies: taking a much-loved, revenue-generating cornerstone of the web and smothering it within weeks One can only hope!
93po 4y ago
> The illusion of Elon Musk, David Sacks and Jason Calcanis as savvy operators is completely gone. Elon has owned Twiter for less than a week. How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure? How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  > How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure? The article does touch on this a bit. Elon went in "with a red pen": his entire first week from an outside perspective was spent looking for costs to cut, departments to toss, and things to shutdown. It culminated in a 50% (!) layoff in the first week. That's not usually the sign of a healthy start, especially if you assume that the previous owners weren't that crazy and had somewhere upwards of 100% redundancy where you can just fire 50% of the company without consequences. > How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses? 1) The Peter Principle: incompetency has a way of failing upward in businesses. 2) The "Gravity" Constant of Money: once you've made enough net worth it attracts more automatically. Billionaires are basically "black holes" of passive income no matter what they think their day job is.
  - beeboop 4y ago
    Cutting costs in a company that's almost never been profitable is failure? A huge layout isn't a suggestion of an unhealthy start, it's a suggestion of an unhealthy status quo. What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions?
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      > Cutting costs in a company that's almost never been profitable is failure? A huge layout isn't a suggestion of an unhealthy start, it's a suggestion of an unhealthy status quo. Maybe? It's not just that's an early layoff. It's that it is an early layoff of a huge magnitude. Again, a 50% layoff means that the previous status quo had upwards of 100% redundancy. That is unbelievable for any company, no matter how unprofitable. (I could believe it of a very profitable company with money to "waste", but a publicly traded company getting asked every quarter why they aren't profitable yet? I can't believe it. If it were that simple to cut overhead, shareholders would have demanded it years ago.) Feel free to give Musk the benefit of the doubt and assume Twitter really was that unhealthy. I feel there's a lot more reason to be skeptical here. > What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions? I may be a bit hyperbolic claiming that the Peter Principle must especially apply to billionaires. But, it is entirely possible to believe that Musk succeeded entirely on luck and his decisions didn't matter (for good or bad) in the long run. EVs were a huge gamble 15 years ago, but it also didn't take that much of a crystal ball to know that they were "the future". Space is always a giant gamble and the most successful always seem to just be the luckiest. (That was one of Heinlein's hypotheses early in the space race. I think a lot of sci-fi writers still believe it to be true today. Admittedly sci-fi writers don't have the most hard data to prove/disprove such a hypothesis, but it is still a useful hypothesis.) None of that requires "proving" that the companies were successful "despite" Musk. I think there is evidence of some questionable business model practices, too (and there's plenty on Musk's business decisions out there to find; it's not "new" criticism), and I have provided some of it in at least one other thread, but at the end of the day: when you are judging someone based on the number of poker chips they have on the table, it's fair to question if it was all just random luck, especially when that someone is also acting a bit as the Dealer and getting a chunk of House money too.
bluetomcat 4y ago
> Twitter was a unique spot where journalists, celebrities, titans of industries, your family, friends and co-workers, would join a daily mosh pit filled with a mix of truly important cultural moments and the most inane things you’ve ever seen. It’s a toxic pit where people with boosted self-importance exchange silly reactions and replies, with no meaningful conversation whatsoever.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  That depends on who you follow and how you follow them. If you follow non-toxic people using Lists instead of the algorithmic timeline, it's not bad.
- warkdarrior 4y ago
  I can tell you that there are lots of great conversations among people from same domains of expertise or interest. The general exchanges with random folks are indeed meaningless and quickly devolve into rants. But once you find experts in niche areas, it is great stuff to follow, read, and interact with.
- Levitz 4y ago
  Which wouldn't be half as bad if it wasn't for the potential for echo chambers and tribalism fostering political radicalization. This seems to be a person that thinks that they had something beautiful and nice that contributed to the public sphere and doesn't realize that for many this event in which twitter may change drastically or die is a good thing either way. Then again if I was in a server room where 4chan, kiwifarms and twitter were hosted and I had a revolver with two bullets I'd shoot the twitter server twice. I'd be baffled if I ever learned in some quantitative way that the site was a net good.
  - philosopher1234 4y ago
    What political radicalization specifically are you concerned about?
    - 4y ago
dnissley 4y ago
The anger at Elon et al is understandable -- but I hope they can spare some anger for the years of stagnation (if not outright neglect) wrought by the former operators that led up to this moment.
- marcinzm 4y ago
  They led to a stagnant company with -$200m in profits. Elon instantly led to a company that is now $1-2 billion in the red a year, and needs to aggressively cut costs and increase revenue to make it up. I'd say the current situation is 99% on Elon. edit: For those not aware, the buyout included $13 billion in debt to Twitter which they need to pay $1-2 billion a year for in terms of interest alone.
  - friedman23 4y ago
    He didn't want to buy it.
    - marcinzm 4y ago
      Then he shouldn't have signed a binding contract. Only an idiot investor wouldn't take twice the market value for an asset when given the chance.
      - friedman23 4y ago
        Ok, so he signed the contract. Decided not to buy it because it was a massively overvalued money pit but they forced him anyway. So now he is supposed to keep dumping money into the burning dumpster fire that is twitter?
        grumpitron 4y ago
        Correction - HE forced himself to buy it by signing a binding contract to buy it.
kranke155 4y ago
It’s way too early to make any judgement call, and this is just a blog length hot take.
- vagab0nd 4y ago
  The post is not saying much. It should have been a tweet. "No, it won't work, and thus it's bad."
  - 93po 4y ago
    "Richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses because I don't like him"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
theCrowing 4y ago
I believe Elon will learn the hard way that yes you can solve tech problems by throwing humans at them but you can't solve human problems by throwing tech at them.
- kenhwang 4y ago
  Advertising is a human problem. I think Elon is already feeling the blowback from immediately misunderstanding it based on this tweet[1]. It's going to be interesting to see how he intends on making up that $5b/year. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880
  - deckard1 4y ago
    > Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America. this reads like a Trump quote. People are free to use their speech to pressure advertisers into dropping Twitter. Or, rather, "voting" with their wallet.
    - r00fus 4y ago
      Definitely some "Trump at home" energy (to use a standard meme).
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    I'd be careful about that tweet. It is clear that Tesla competitors (GM, VW) stop funding Musk, but aside from that most big advertisers likely have longer running contracts, so immediate impact is unlikely. By such a statement Musk can however argue that the RIFs are "required"
    - kenhwang 4y ago
      I work in advertising. It is very typical for big advertisers to have a change of ownership exit clause. It is also very typical for these contracts to only establish the unit rate, but without a required minimum spend amount. The bigger nail in the coffin is IPG recommending their clients pull out; they probably represent a third of F500 ad spend. I would not be surprised if the other three firms in the big four are recommending the same. It's not just car brands. edit: it'll also be interesting to see if other social media sites (primarily Facebook, Reddit, Snap, or TikTok) or advertising platforms (Google) retaliate against Tesla now that Elon owns a direct competitor. Tesla enjoys quite a lot of "free" word of mouth advertising on their platforms, and those platforms all have the means to bury positive sentiment and/or amplify negative sentiment towards Tesla.
reactspa 4y ago
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  Are we not allowed to voice our opinion on your words in the form of an upvote or downvote? I am assuming those are buttons you never use on hackernews yourself. Sympathy can still be something you can have for people you disagree with.
tomlue 4y ago
I don't work at a giant company, but I'm curious: > Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop. Is this true? Shouldn't giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?
- mikkergp 4y ago
  Yes, but complex systems are always changing and in some ways in a constant process of degrading. A lot of the biggest companies are growing exponentially faster than their processes and it ends up being nearly impossible for the tooling and supporting software to keep up. At that scale all the automation software you buy off the shelf won't scale with you. With over a billion dollars a year in surplus infrastructure costs, I would have to imagine Twitter is at that scale.
  - nelsondev 4y ago
    At Amazon, near Black Friday and Prime Day, there are company wide deployment freezes, where no one is allowed to push to prod. When I was oncall for my team, I found there were less pages, less issues, and the system was generally more stable. Entropy, leading to availability problems, grows with rate of production changes. If no one touches the code, my guess is the system is more stable rather than less.
    - mattm 4y ago
      I think Uber published a study about this. Deployments and changes cause most issues.
    - paxys 4y ago
      Of course this is true, and isn't really a surprise. Very few outages are caused by existing code in a system that was otherwise working perfectly. It's almost always due to some change – whether a bug in newly deployed code, bad config update or whatever else. An untouched system is absolutely more stable than one in flux. Of course the solution can't really be "let's not deploy anything, just to be safe", because then your competitors are going to launch new features and leave your product behind.
intrasight 4y ago
>the result of the addled whims of a walking meme No. The results of failed management (said management has now departed)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
christkv 4y ago
Here is my prediction. After raging for awhile and trying other apps that will all disappoint people will log back onto twitter again to get their dopamine hit and that will be that. For verification it will no longer be a status symbol for anyone and will let Twitter get higher ad rates as they will be pushing to self verified real people. Say pay a higher ad rate for advertising only to verified users.
- notfromhere 4y ago
  Twitter’s ad product has never been very good and at least in b2b very few people use it. I think the idea that Twitter can somehow boost ad revenues while removing moderation is just that.
mjr00 4y ago
> But, what is gone? Twitter was a unique spot where journalists, celebrities, titans of industries, your family, friends and co-workers, would join a daily mosh pit filled with a mix of truly important cultural moments and the most inane things you’ve ever seen. [...] Twitter will likely go from Elon’s new toy that is too difficult for him to play with, to being passed on to his legal and finance advisers to sort out. Regardless of your opinion on Elon, it's simply too early to conclude that this is "likely" to happen, or that all those people will stop using it. For those old enough to remember, major social media platform changes have happened and users have sworn that it was (effectively) the end. Sometimes they are right: see new Digg causing a mass Reddit migration, or banning adult content on Tumblr, turning a dying platform into a dead one. Sometimes they are incredibly wrong: see new Reddit[0], or, amusingly, people who claimed that Facebook switching to an algorithmic news feed instead of chronological was the end of the platform. I can't remember how long ago that was, but I imagine Facebook has increased in userbase and value 3 or 4 orders of magnitudes since that change. [0] Yes, I'm aware old reddit is still accessible, but the vast majority of the userbase is on the mobile website or app.
- plazmatic 4y ago
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  It’s too early to claim it’s dead but he’s right that it’s a coin toss to see if the service can stay running (without downtime). With 50% layoffs (and the rumors of how lax their security was) it’s only a matter of time before the on-call needed to save some issue won’t exist. A breach or bug or something is inevitable. Remember when meta -a far bigger and richer company- messed up basic networking and took the company down for a day? Regardless of how you feel about free speech, not everyone likes it. Even the perception that twitter is getting toxic will drive people away… except the toxic people. The only thing holding twitter up is that there’s no alternative for the people that matter - the “blue checks” who drive most of their traffic and engagement. Yet Elon managed to piss them off anyways.
  - arein3 4y ago
plazmatic 4y ago
howmayiannoyyou 4y ago
If he's right (too soon to know), then nothing of value was lost. Twitter wasn't profitable and probably was never going to be. Those tweeting will probably lead healthier and more productive lives doing other things. Those consuming content may have to actually read substacks, blog posts, reddit posts and other means of delivering content that are less a knife fight, and more a reasoned argument. Twitter was rarely the Budapest cafe. It was more the favala rival gang war. If it dies at Elon's hands then its another boon to society, along with electric vehicles and comparatively cheap and reuseable space flight.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway82388 4y ago
As a relatively disinterested observer (don’t tweet, don’t own a Tesla, don’t feel particularly strongly about Mr Musk), I’ve found the media/commentariat reversals of position on this funny. Musk’s initial Twitter takeover talk was met with general opprobrium, to put it mildly. I must have read more than one take that it was a threat to democracy itself. Then, after a stock market downturn, and when the Twitter acquisition looked more like an impulsive decision that Musk might regret, the prevailing mood was gleeful. He was stuck with a white elephant. Schadenfreude. And since he clearly no longer wanted it, the consensus now he was legally and morally obligated to buy. Twitter itself demanded it. They weren’t going to let him weasel out of that one. Now that he seems to have accepted his obligation and the sale has gone through, we’re back to opprobrium. It’s callous to laugh when so many people have lost their livelihoods (although I’m confident any former Twitter employee has plenty of employment options). But the commentariat consistently outdoes what a satirist could invent.
- wnevets 4y ago
  That is because most Twitter users knew Musk would ruin what made Twitter Twitter. Twitter users just assumed the process of "muskifying" Twitter would be subtle and over the course of years. Watching him speed run the destruction of a $44 Billion company in a matter weeks has been absolutely shocking.
  - pb7 4y ago
    Twitter is a cesspool so ruining what it is is a positive thing. It cannot get worse from here. At worst, it dies; at best, it returns to its former glory circa 2012. Both sound like wins to me.
    - wnevets 4y ago
      If what you say is true then paying $44 Billion sounds like a huge mistake.
      - pb7 4y ago
usaphp 4y ago
> They were dumped unceremoniously, the result of the addled whims of a walking meme How is that different from Stripe layoffs from yesterday? I believe Stripe employees also didn't know that they will be laid off, and they got similar compensation to what Twitter employees got.
- gwbas1c 4y ago
  ~15% versus ~50%. Stripe's layoffs were part of the business climate; Twitter's layoffs are the result of the new owner deciding to fire half the company.
- BryantD 4y ago
  Stripe gave: - Pay until at least February 21, 2023 - 2022 annual bonuses even if you're not around at bonus time - Pay for unused time off - Six months of healthcare - Accelerated stock-option vesting - Career support - Immigration services support for visa holders That's public, since Stripe published the relevant email. Twitter didn't make their terms public (there's a difference), but reports are: - Pay for 60 days (January 3rd, 2023) - One additional month of severance if you sign a release Those two packages are not similar. Note that Musk's merger agreement included some other things: - Performance bonus paid out at target - Cash contribution for healthcare - Equity vesting accelerated by three months But so far I haven't heard anyone saying they got those. We'll see.
stainablesteel 4y ago
i don't understand how people keep getting played by the same media tactics elon is playing you, everything is fine, he just wants free attention to spread platform news to people without spending $ all the complainers are his new marketing network and it's glorious
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Normally I’d agree with you, it’s exactly his MO and it works - BUT- the 50% job cuts and massive revenue issues they’re rumored to already face is actually news on it’s own. His fluff about changes are just outrage marketing.
seydor 4y ago
The deconstruction has begun. Twitter management is too rightwing to last. Soon the MSM will pick up the story and will suggest the right alternative to twitter that you can use.
- baryphonic 4y ago
  Not sure where you got "rightwing" from. David Sacks is to the right, Elon is center-left, and Jason Calcanis is a bigtime lib. For the past three days, rightwing Twitter has been screaming that Elon has "caved" and so on because Trump, Alex Jones and a few others haven't been unbanned. (Personally, I'd like to see the Babylon Bee brought back as a gesture of good faith, pun intended.) How is the combination of those three "rightwing?"
  - watwut 4y ago
    Musk is not center left. The most radical and literally proviolence people pressuring you don't make you center left
    - xiphias2 4y ago
      I'm not sure where you are getting this from. He was literally pushing for peace talks in the Ukrain-Russia war, where lots of people are dying right now. Also he has manufacturing plants all over the world (China), so he would lose the most from violence (while many other billionaires are profiting from war).
      - watwut 4y ago
        The "radical and literally proviolence people pressuring you" refered to Alex Jones and Trump pressuring. Them pressuring Musk does not make Musk center left. > He was literally pushing for peace talks in the Ukrain-Russia war, where lots of people are dying right now. That does not make Musk left nor anti violence. It rewards violence. It makes him either naive or pro Russia. It allows Russia to torture and continue genocide in territories it has. It rewards it for invasion and creates situation in which Russia will logically invade again.
o_1 4y ago
Ahh yes doomed to fail. When your speach isn't as protected because others are allowed to talk. Jack Dorsey literally bet the farm on the Elon could fix twitter. Twitter jobs seemed like the comfy lets push 1 feature a quarter. The amount of ex gov employees is also an astonishing statistic. Makes you wonder what this article is even talking about. The only thing I think elon really gets wrong is the "Work from Home" deal.
- slantedview 4y ago
  Yes, I'm sure the advertisers are fleeing because "others are allowed to talk". You've nailed it.
nemo44x 4y ago
I don't think this is a great opinion piece. IT jumps to conclusions about what Musk's team has done without being able to see any evidence of its effectiveness. All we have is groans from people that pretty much spend their days complaining about everything anyways. And then there's this idea that Twitter was some great, happy place until the last week. That's simply not true and Twitter hasn't changed in any way whatsoever yet. What we know so far: - Twitter will rollout a paid account system where if you pay $8/month your tweets will actually be visible to people and you'll see less ad's. This will ensure bots/scammers have difficulty posting to Twitter because their non-paid posts won't be seen by many people. People are more likely to casually browse Twitter now and people who profit from writing on Twitter will have better engagements. - Twitter is working on ideas to let users seta threshold for what they want to read/see. If you want a G-rated stream, then you'll be able to do that. For people that get triggered or don't want their ideas challenged then they can mute that much like you can avoid music and movies/media you don't want to be exposed to. - Twitter fired a lot of staff. Unsure how this pans out. Some people think it was ridiculous to have that many people. Others think it will cause the entire thing to break. No one really knows anything here. I have to assume Elon's team has spent months analyzing what they believe is lean muscle and what is the fat they can cut. How can people draw these impossibly detailed predictions on its future from these actions? Musk has a history of being bet against and proving the doubters wrong. Anyone there in 2013 when TSLA shipped the first Model S batch knows how much he was hated and bet against then. He has also failed to deliver on some promises. We'll see.
Imnimo 4y ago
I'm very unconvinced by Elon's $8 plan, but even to me "smothering it within weeks" seems wildly pessimistic. Even if his strategy doesn't work out, would things really come crashing down so quickly?
- thebradbain 4y ago
  I've been a daily user of Twitter since 2011. I mostly use it to keep up with the entertainment industry/Hollywood as I live in Los Angeles and that's where the sausage in this town is made (which when HN talks about Twitter, I think on the whole completely forgets about that huge contingent of Twitter), so not really into the whole politics/tech sphere there (that's what HN is for). Most people in that sphere don't really _want_ to care one way or the other who runs Twitter. And yet from a technical perspective, I've already noticed broken links. Duplicate tweets being posted. False notifications... the cracks are already showing and its one day in. Others have too. This has a cascading effect that people who previously do not necessarily care on the whole about who runs Twitter are now seeing the app simply not work how did yesterday, and attributing it to the new management.
- sylens 4y ago
  There are people in my extended network already noticing certain abuse of verified profiles, which will only get worse when anybody can pay for one
Waterluvian 4y ago
"...to balance their own version of “free speech”" Nail on the head for what really bothers me. None of this (or the Trump/Freedom/Truth Social) opinions comprehend the fundamental concepts behind free speech. At best, they're ignorant, at worst, they've co-opted the concept to wield it against those whose speech they don't like.
- baryphonic 4y ago
  What are the fundamental concepts of free speech that many of us don't understand?
DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
The claims in this article assume a lot. To pick just one, regarding stability/uptime: without knowing the distribution of layoffs by department, this may not just be incorrect, but the opposite might be true: if most SREs were retained, and engineers who know the systems well are still around, stability will likely improve as there will be fewer changes to the systems (usually the number one source of outages). If PMs were heavily cut then it’s possible they have infra that was slated for future projects that will no longer happen which gets them extra capacity. Not saying any of what I spelled out above is what happened. But it is entirely plausible that thousands of jobs across the organization could be cut, and stability and uptime could improve.
- smarcellus 4y ago
  Doesn't seem likely considering Musk's intent to push a ton of new experimental features within a week. https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1588304086792667136 https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1588304086792667136
- BryantD 4y ago
  True, but given that he's looking for $3 million a day in savings from servers and cloud services[1], I'm not wildly optimistic about how busy the remaining SREs are going to be. No matter how many of them there are. There's always money in the AWS bill but that's a lot of money to expect to be able to find. And, um, this kind of thinking is one of the things Mudge was talking about. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-infrastructure-costs-by-1-bln-sources-2022-11-03/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-i...
- summerlight 4y ago
  https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/03/musk-orders-twitter-to-cut-infrastructure-costs-by-1-billion-sources-say.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/03/musk-orders-twitter-to-cut-i... Musk wants to save $1B from infrastructure costs, so the service quality will very likely degrade. The current business focus is money saving at all cost so I don't think SRE or whatever engineers are not very safe from layoffs.
sebastos 4y ago
If there was some way to wager my own money that this blog post will age poorly, I would. One of my hobby horses is pointing out people that bend themselves in knots predicting that Uber will fail tomorrow (still waiting!) because they, personally, _don't_ _like_ Uber. There's a similar phenomenon with Elon Musk. Behold, Elon Musk, the guy who runs a car company and a space rocket company, will be completely stymied by keeping high availability on a website? THAT's the bridge too far that he just won't be able to build a team to solve? This is either extreme self-delusion based on an emotional need OR just an example of a classic web engineer who is too wrapped up in their own world to understand that other hard problems exist.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > One of my hobby horses is pointing out people that bend themselves in knots predicting that Uber will fail tomorrow (still waiting!) because they, personally, _don't_ _like_ Uber. Just 3 days ago, Uber announced another quarterly loss of over $1 billion. They are failing, if you judge by profit and loss.
  - f1shy 4y ago
    After billions of quarterly losses, and still kicking around... I would love to fail so...
    - Kye 4y ago
      We're in the year the free money dried up. How long can this last?
    - lapcat 4y ago
      Nice job if you can get it!
jabthedang 4y ago
b800h 4y ago
"They thought they were rolling out some grand experiment in social discourse, forgetting that brands, users, and speech are all tightly intertwined in somewhat important things like revenue and profit." ..but Twitter wasn't turning a profit to begin with.
ricardo81 4y ago
What I get from this whole experience is big tech employees, likely on a wage x^2 their national average, are able to communicate more widely to the world about their disenfranchisement about being unemployed than others made unemployed who are not. Slightly ironic that they're employed by social networks. Said tongue in cheek because these are people with livelihoods and looking after families. There are others that are concerned with big tech in general and its role that have been marginalised in mainstream news. Is there actually any pioneer in these companies that thinks social media on a global scale can work for good, apart from Elon Musk, apparently? The whole centralisation of the net was a problem in the first place.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  Are you aware of how exponents work?
  - ricardo81 4y ago
    I believe so friend. An exponent is short form for exponential or an order of magnitude. Do you work in SV? You're free to ask what X is.
    - macmcirish 4y ago
      Orders of magnitude are typically in log 10, 2^2 being 4 is in the same order of magnitude. The national average wage for the USA is roughly 70k according to a quick Google search, unless you’re suggesting the devs are making $4.9 billion per year I think you’re not using exponents correctly.
      - ricardo81 4y ago
        macmcirish 4y ago
        Please don’t troll here. If there is something that x is referring to that is not wage, then please enlighten us because I honestly cannot read it as any other way. There are no realistic values of x for x^2 that work with this argument.
manmal 4y ago
OP makes it sound as if Twitter were a good platform for public discourse - it’s not. It’s a cesspool of indignation, racism, faux wokeness (white-knighting to feel superior over others) etc. If you don’t have a thick skin like Musk, you must self-censor yourself pretty heavily to avoid backlash and sometimes humiliation. Just liking a controversial tweet or following a problematic account can get you on the bad side of people. I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving.
- slantedview 4y ago
  > It’s a cesspool of indignation, racism, faux wokeness > I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving. Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using. Either way, the point isn't how bad Twitter is in your personal opinion, the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse.
  - manmal 4y ago
    I was referring to the favorable state of Twitter OP was describing, which doesn’t hold up IMO. > Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using I‘m an ex heavy Twitter user. I primarily use it for keeping up to date with tech, but the signal/noise ratio is not great nowadays. I can see myself switching to Reddit and HN completely. > the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse That remains to be seen, no? What’s the use of writing that a week after an acquisition?
    - slantedview 4y ago
      The author is definitely projecting, but he's basing his projection on real signals: increases in hate speech, advertisers leaving, mastodon currently trending, etc.
h43z 4y ago
It's sad how everyone thinks his job is crucial to keep a company running.
- f1shy 4y ago
  Yes. Everyone thinks (s)he is indispensable... yet the cemeteries are full of such indispensable people...
paxys 4y ago
It has been a mere days since the acquisition closed. The results of what Musk is doing today will play out over months, maybe years. Yes it may all crash and burn at some point, but if you are already declaring it a failure with zero backing data then it is simply your bias talking.
- slt2021 4y ago
  mere days after takeover and already laying off engineers, getting class action employment lawsuit in CA, and advertisers are leaving in droves. very productive start
fdsafdewe 4y ago
>Twitter was a unique spot where journalists.... It's telling that "journalists" was put first. I've heard many times that Twitter is "useful" to journalists, who I assume feel like they have their finger on the world's pulse. It might explain why so many news stories include random opinions from unknown Twitter users, and why they are so out of touch with (at least my) reality.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
olivermarks 4y ago
I doubt this post by Nolan is going to age well. I'm not a fan of Elon Musk and his vaporware vehicles. I'm not a fan of Twitter, but have been using it more than usual recently. I am a fan of free speech and associated universal laws whether online or off based on a level discourse playing field. I feel terrible for all the people suddenly left at the beginning of winter in one of the most expensive places on the planet without a job, and hope they all go on to better and brighter things!
exogeny 4y ago
When has anyone ever thought of Jason Calacanis as a savvy operator?
stephc_int13 4y ago
As always, predicting the future is difficult. Elon is taking a big risk here, and I doubt that he truly knows what he is doing. None of what he is doing with Twitter seems to be rational. The rational thing for him would have been to stay away from Twitter as this is clearly a harmful distraction for his mental health and his other endeavors. But that does not mean the outcome will be as catastrophic as some are predicting.
longrod 4y ago
I think this is nothing except shitposting. The whole blog reads like an angry rant of someone who didn't get what he wanted. This is not new. Layoffs are not a new thing. New management, new rules, it's always been like this. Do I feel sorry for the people who got layed off? Of course I do! I wouldn't want to be them right now. I feel for them. But the consequences mentioned in this post is completely unreasonable. These are the kinds of points you hear from a depressed person who thinks the world is going to end because all the toilet rolls are suddenly out of stock. The amount of doomsaying I see everywhere regarding the Musk takeover is baffling. I am no Musk fanboy but this is completely irrational. The fact of the matter is, people don't like change. That's all there is to it. Change automatically makes people cry out. Here's a scenario for you: What if the new Twitter is better? What if it isn't the toxic place you expect it to become? What if you are completely wrong? Have you considered that? Here's how I see this situation: Musk is not an idiot. He must know exactly what he needs to do. This isn't his first rodeo and comments like "running a service of this scale and size is incredibly complex with downtime and uptime and blah blah" is incredibly naive. Musk runs at least 2 companies that require a huge network & availability guarantees. He knows what's needed there. Twitter is going no where and if you think it'll go down in the coming years, you have a surprise coming your way. I am optimistic because of Musk isn't known to give up. This can fail for sure but I don't think that'll be the end of it. The next step in my opinion is cutting down on the Twitter codebase. Trimming features. Shutting down unnecessary stuff. They laid off 25% of the workforce so at least 25% of Twitter will be affected. Let's see which parts though. There's a lot of unnecessary junk in there (communities, spaces etc.) that I'll be happy to say goodbye to.
- Zanneth 4y ago
  > They laid off 25% of the workforce so at least 25% of Twitter will be affected. That's assuming that those 25% were actually putting in work at Twitter.
- meheleventyone 4y ago
  > Musk is not an idiot. He must know exactly what he needs to do. How does this square with the attempts to get out of the deal? I think your points would make a lot more sense if he hadn’t signalled extremely clearly that he thought the deal was terrible.
liveoneggs 4y ago
Twitter is given an outsized and undeserved amount of attention. It has over-powered a tiny minority of users to get vastly over-represented and repeated to the rest of the people who don't give a damn about it. If you don't like twitter stop using it and stop taking "news" about tweets seriously, because they are not serious.

127 points by mncaudill 4y ago

>They were dumped unceremoniously, the result of the addled whims of a walking meme. If this was a HN comment it would get flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nickthegreek 4y ago
as would many of musks tweets. not sure your point.
pvg 4y ago
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Better to apply the guidelines to actual HN comments.

stagger87 4y ago

> This endeavor will be one of their lasting legacies: taking a much-loved, revenue-generating cornerstone of the web and smothering it within weeks One can only hope!

93po 4y ago

> The illusion of Elon Musk, David Sacks and Jason Calcanis as savvy operators is completely gone. Elon has owned Twiter for less than a week. How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure? How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?

WorldMaker 4y ago
> How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure? The article does touch on this a bit. Elon went in "with a red pen": his entire first week from an outside perspective was spent looking for costs to cut, departments to toss, and things to shutdown. It culminated in a 50% (!) layoff in the first week. That's not usually the sign of a healthy start, especially if you assume that the previous owners weren't that crazy and had somewhere upwards of 100% redundancy where you can just fire 50% of the company without consequences. > How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses? 1) The Peter Principle: incompetency has a way of failing upward in businesses. 2) The "Gravity" Constant of Money: once you've made enough net worth it attracts more automatically. Billionaires are basically "black holes" of passive income no matter what they think their day job is.
- beeboop 4y ago
  Cutting costs in a company that's almost never been profitable is failure? A huge layout isn't a suggestion of an unhealthy start, it's a suggestion of an unhealthy status quo. What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions?
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    > Cutting costs in a company that's almost never been profitable is failure? A huge layout isn't a suggestion of an unhealthy start, it's a suggestion of an unhealthy status quo. Maybe? It's not just that's an early layoff. It's that it is an early layoff of a huge magnitude. Again, a 50% layoff means that the previous status quo had upwards of 100% redundancy. That is unbelievable for any company, no matter how unprofitable. (I could believe it of a very profitable company with money to "waste", but a publicly traded company getting asked every quarter why they aren't profitable yet? I can't believe it. If it were that simple to cut overhead, shareholders would have demanded it years ago.) Feel free to give Musk the benefit of the doubt and assume Twitter really was that unhealthy. I feel there's a lot more reason to be skeptical here. > What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions? I may be a bit hyperbolic claiming that the Peter Principle must especially apply to billionaires. But, it is entirely possible to believe that Musk succeeded entirely on luck and his decisions didn't matter (for good or bad) in the long run. EVs were a huge gamble 15 years ago, but it also didn't take that much of a crystal ball to know that they were "the future". Space is always a giant gamble and the most successful always seem to just be the luckiest. (That was one of Heinlein's hypotheses early in the space race. I think a lot of sci-fi writers still believe it to be true today. Admittedly sci-fi writers don't have the most hard data to prove/disprove such a hypothesis, but it is still a useful hypothesis.) None of that requires "proving" that the companies were successful "despite" Musk. I think there is evidence of some questionable business model practices, too (and there's plenty on Musk's business decisions out there to find; it's not "new" criticism), and I have provided some of it in at least one other thread, but at the end of the day: when you are judging someone based on the number of poker chips they have on the table, it's fair to question if it was all just random luck, especially when that someone is also acting a bit as the Dealer and getting a chunk of House money too.

bluetomcat 4y ago

> Twitter was a unique spot where journalists, celebrities, titans of industries, your family, friends and co-workers, would join a daily mosh pit filled with a mix of truly important cultural moments and the most inane things you’ve ever seen. It’s a toxic pit where people with boosted self-importance exchange silly reactions and replies, with no meaningful conversation whatsoever.

CharlesW 4y ago
That depends on who you follow and how you follow them. If you follow non-toxic people using Lists instead of the algorithmic timeline, it's not bad.
warkdarrior 4y ago
I can tell you that there are lots of great conversations among people from same domains of expertise or interest. The general exchanges with random folks are indeed meaningless and quickly devolve into rants. But once you find experts in niche areas, it is great stuff to follow, read, and interact with.
Levitz 4y ago
Which wouldn't be half as bad if it wasn't for the potential for echo chambers and tribalism fostering political radicalization. This seems to be a person that thinks that they had something beautiful and nice that contributed to the public sphere and doesn't realize that for many this event in which twitter may change drastically or die is a good thing either way. Then again if I was in a server room where 4chan, kiwifarms and twitter were hosted and I had a revolver with two bullets I'd shoot the twitter server twice. I'd be baffled if I ever learned in some quantitative way that the site was a net good.
- philosopher1234 4y ago
  What political radicalization specifically are you concerned about?
  - 4y ago

dnissley 4y ago

The anger at Elon et al is understandable -- but I hope they can spare some anger for the years of stagnation (if not outright neglect) wrought by the former operators that led up to this moment.

marcinzm 4y ago
They led to a stagnant company with -$200m in profits. Elon instantly led to a company that is now $1-2 billion in the red a year, and needs to aggressively cut costs and increase revenue to make it up. I'd say the current situation is 99% on Elon. edit: For those not aware, the buyout included $13 billion in debt to Twitter which they need to pay $1-2 billion a year for in terms of interest alone.
- friedman23 4y ago
  He didn't want to buy it.
  - marcinzm 4y ago
    Then he shouldn't have signed a binding contract. Only an idiot investor wouldn't take twice the market value for an asset when given the chance.
    - friedman23 4y ago
      Ok, so he signed the contract. Decided not to buy it because it was a massively overvalued money pit but they forced him anyway. So now he is supposed to keep dumping money into the burning dumpster fire that is twitter?
      - grumpitron 4y ago
        Correction - HE forced himself to buy it by signing a binding contract to buy it.

kranke155 4y ago

It’s way too early to make any judgement call, and this is just a blog length hot take.

vagab0nd 4y ago
The post is not saying much. It should have been a tweet. "No, it won't work, and thus it's bad."
- 93po 4y ago
  "Richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses because I don't like him"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

theCrowing 4y ago

I believe Elon will learn the hard way that yes you can solve tech problems by throwing humans at them but you can't solve human problems by throwing tech at them.

kenhwang 4y ago
Advertising is a human problem. I think Elon is already feeling the blowback from immediately misunderstanding it based on this tweet[1]. It's going to be interesting to see how he intends on making up that $5b/year. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880
- deckard1 4y ago
  > Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America. this reads like a Trump quote. People are free to use their speech to pressure advertisers into dropping Twitter. Or, rather, "voting" with their wallet.
  - r00fus 4y ago
    Definitely some "Trump at home" energy (to use a standard meme).
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  I'd be careful about that tweet. It is clear that Tesla competitors (GM, VW) stop funding Musk, but aside from that most big advertisers likely have longer running contracts, so immediate impact is unlikely. By such a statement Musk can however argue that the RIFs are "required"
  - kenhwang 4y ago
    I work in advertising. It is very typical for big advertisers to have a change of ownership exit clause. It is also very typical for these contracts to only establish the unit rate, but without a required minimum spend amount. The bigger nail in the coffin is IPG recommending their clients pull out; they probably represent a third of F500 ad spend. I would not be surprised if the other three firms in the big four are recommending the same. It's not just car brands. edit: it'll also be interesting to see if other social media sites (primarily Facebook, Reddit, Snap, or TikTok) or advertising platforms (Google) retaliate against Tesla now that Elon owns a direct competitor. Tesla enjoys quite a lot of "free" word of mouth advertising on their platforms, and those platforms all have the means to bury positive sentiment and/or amplify negative sentiment towards Tesla.

reactspa 4y ago

nickthegreek 4y ago
Are we not allowed to voice our opinion on your words in the form of an upvote or downvote? I am assuming those are buttons you never use on hackernews yourself. Sympathy can still be something you can have for people you disagree with.

tomlue 4y ago

I don't work at a giant company, but I'm curious: > Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop. Is this true? Shouldn't giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?

mikkergp 4y ago
Yes, but complex systems are always changing and in some ways in a constant process of degrading. A lot of the biggest companies are growing exponentially faster than their processes and it ends up being nearly impossible for the tooling and supporting software to keep up. At that scale all the automation software you buy off the shelf won't scale with you. With over a billion dollars a year in surplus infrastructure costs, I would have to imagine Twitter is at that scale.
- nelsondev 4y ago
  At Amazon, near Black Friday and Prime Day, there are company wide deployment freezes, where no one is allowed to push to prod. When I was oncall for my team, I found there were less pages, less issues, and the system was generally more stable. Entropy, leading to availability problems, grows with rate of production changes. If no one touches the code, my guess is the system is more stable rather than less.
  - mattm 4y ago
    I think Uber published a study about this. Deployments and changes cause most issues.
  - paxys 4y ago
    Of course this is true, and isn't really a surprise. Very few outages are caused by existing code in a system that was otherwise working perfectly. It's almost always due to some change – whether a bug in newly deployed code, bad config update or whatever else. An untouched system is absolutely more stable than one in flux. Of course the solution can't really be "let's not deploy anything, just to be safe", because then your competitors are going to launch new features and leave your product behind.

intrasight 4y ago

>the result of the addled whims of a walking meme No. The results of failed management (said management has now departed)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

christkv 4y ago

Here is my prediction. After raging for awhile and trying other apps that will all disappoint people will log back onto twitter again to get their dopamine hit and that will be that. For verification it will no longer be a status symbol for anyone and will let Twitter get higher ad rates as they will be pushing to self verified real people. Say pay a higher ad rate for advertising only to verified users.

notfromhere 4y ago
Twitter’s ad product has never been very good and at least in b2b very few people use it. I think the idea that Twitter can somehow boost ad revenues while removing moderation is just that.

mjr00 4y ago

> But, what is gone? Twitter was a unique spot where journalists, celebrities, titans of industries, your family, friends and co-workers, would join a daily mosh pit filled with a mix of truly important cultural moments and the most inane things you’ve ever seen. [...] Twitter will likely go from Elon’s new toy that is too difficult for him to play with, to being passed on to his legal and finance advisers to sort out. Regardless of your opinion on Elon, it's simply too early to conclude that this is "likely" to happen, or that all those people will stop using it. For those old enough to remember, major social media platform changes have happened and users have sworn that it was (effectively) the end. Sometimes they are right: see new Digg causing a mass Reddit migration, or banning adult content on Tumblr, turning a dying platform into a dead one. Sometimes they are incredibly wrong: see new Reddit[0], or, amusingly, people who claimed that Facebook switching to an algorithmic news feed instead of chronological was the end of the platform. I can't remember how long ago that was, but I imagine Facebook has increased in userbase and value 3 or 4 orders of magnitudes since that change. [0] Yes, I'm aware old reddit is still accessible, but the vast majority of the userbase is on the mobile website or app.

plazmatic 4y ago
vineyardmike 4y ago
It’s too early to claim it’s dead but he’s right that it’s a coin toss to see if the service can stay running (without downtime). With 50% layoffs (and the rumors of how lax their security was) it’s only a matter of time before the on-call needed to save some issue won’t exist. A breach or bug or something is inevitable. Remember when meta -a far bigger and richer company- messed up basic networking and took the company down for a day? Regardless of how you feel about free speech, not everyone likes it. Even the perception that twitter is getting toxic will drive people away… except the toxic people. The only thing holding twitter up is that there’s no alternative for the people that matter - the “blue checks” who drive most of their traffic and engagement. Yet Elon managed to piss them off anyways.
- arein3 4y ago

plazmatic 4y ago

howmayiannoyyou 4y ago

If he's right (too soon to know), then nothing of value was lost. Twitter wasn't profitable and probably was never going to be. Those tweeting will probably lead healthier and more productive lives doing other things. Those consuming content may have to actually read substacks, blog posts, reddit posts and other means of delivering content that are less a knife fight, and more a reasoned argument. Twitter was rarely the Budapest cafe. It was more the favala rival gang war. If it dies at Elon's hands then its another boon to society, along with electric vehicles and comparatively cheap and reuseable space flight.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

throwaway82388 4y ago

As a relatively disinterested observer (don’t tweet, don’t own a Tesla, don’t feel particularly strongly about Mr Musk), I’ve found the media/commentariat reversals of position on this funny. Musk’s initial Twitter takeover talk was met with general opprobrium, to put it mildly. I must have read more than one take that it was a threat to democracy itself. Then, after a stock market downturn, and when the Twitter acquisition looked more like an impulsive decision that Musk might regret, the prevailing mood was gleeful. He was stuck with a white elephant. Schadenfreude. And since he clearly no longer wanted it, the consensus now he was legally and morally obligated to buy. Twitter itself demanded it. They weren’t going to let him weasel out of that one. Now that he seems to have accepted his obligation and the sale has gone through, we’re back to opprobrium. It’s callous to laugh when so many people have lost their livelihoods (although I’m confident any former Twitter employee has plenty of employment options). But the commentariat consistently outdoes what a satirist could invent.

wnevets 4y ago
That is because most Twitter users knew Musk would ruin what made Twitter Twitter. Twitter users just assumed the process of "muskifying" Twitter would be subtle and over the course of years. Watching him speed run the destruction of a $44 Billion company in a matter weeks has been absolutely shocking.
- pb7 4y ago
  Twitter is a cesspool so ruining what it is is a positive thing. It cannot get worse from here. At worst, it dies; at best, it returns to its former glory circa 2012. Both sound like wins to me.
  - wnevets 4y ago
    If what you say is true then paying $44 Billion sounds like a huge mistake.
    - pb7 4y ago

usaphp 4y ago

> They were dumped unceremoniously, the result of the addled whims of a walking meme How is that different from Stripe layoffs from yesterday? I believe Stripe employees also didn't know that they will be laid off, and they got similar compensation to what Twitter employees got.

gwbas1c 4y ago
~15% versus ~50%. Stripe's layoffs were part of the business climate; Twitter's layoffs are the result of the new owner deciding to fire half the company.
BryantD 4y ago
Stripe gave: - Pay until at least February 21, 2023 - 2022 annual bonuses even if you're not around at bonus time - Pay for unused time off - Six months of healthcare - Accelerated stock-option vesting - Career support - Immigration services support for visa holders That's public, since Stripe published the relevant email. Twitter didn't make their terms public (there's a difference), but reports are: - Pay for 60 days (January 3rd, 2023) - One additional month of severance if you sign a release Those two packages are not similar. Note that Musk's merger agreement included some other things: - Performance bonus paid out at target - Cash contribution for healthcare - Equity vesting accelerated by three months But so far I haven't heard anyone saying they got those. We'll see.

stainablesteel 4y ago

i don't understand how people keep getting played by the same media tactics elon is playing you, everything is fine, he just wants free attention to spread platform news to people without spending $ all the complainers are his new marketing network and it's glorious

vineyardmike 4y ago
Normally I’d agree with you, it’s exactly his MO and it works - BUT- the 50% job cuts and massive revenue issues they’re rumored to already face is actually news on it’s own. His fluff about changes are just outrage marketing.

seydor 4y ago

The deconstruction has begun. Twitter management is too rightwing to last. Soon the MSM will pick up the story and will suggest the right alternative to twitter that you can use.

baryphonic 4y ago
Not sure where you got "rightwing" from. David Sacks is to the right, Elon is center-left, and Jason Calcanis is a bigtime lib. For the past three days, rightwing Twitter has been screaming that Elon has "caved" and so on because Trump, Alex Jones and a few others haven't been unbanned. (Personally, I'd like to see the Babylon Bee brought back as a gesture of good faith, pun intended.) How is the combination of those three "rightwing?"
- watwut 4y ago
  Musk is not center left. The most radical and literally proviolence people pressuring you don't make you center left
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    I'm not sure where you are getting this from. He was literally pushing for peace talks in the Ukrain-Russia war, where lots of people are dying right now. Also he has manufacturing plants all over the world (China), so he would lose the most from violence (while many other billionaires are profiting from war).
    - watwut 4y ago
      The "radical and literally proviolence people pressuring you" refered to Alex Jones and Trump pressuring. Them pressuring Musk does not make Musk center left. > He was literally pushing for peace talks in the Ukrain-Russia war, where lots of people are dying right now. That does not make Musk left nor anti violence. It rewards violence. It makes him either naive or pro Russia. It allows Russia to torture and continue genocide in territories it has. It rewards it for invasion and creates situation in which Russia will logically invade again.

o_1 4y ago

Ahh yes doomed to fail. When your speach isn't as protected because others are allowed to talk. Jack Dorsey literally bet the farm on the Elon could fix twitter. Twitter jobs seemed like the comfy lets push 1 feature a quarter. The amount of ex gov employees is also an astonishing statistic. Makes you wonder what this article is even talking about. The only thing I think elon really gets wrong is the "Work from Home" deal.

slantedview 4y ago
Yes, I'm sure the advertisers are fleeing because "others are allowed to talk". You've nailed it.

nemo44x 4y ago

I don't think this is a great opinion piece. IT jumps to conclusions about what Musk's team has done without being able to see any evidence of its effectiveness. All we have is groans from people that pretty much spend their days complaining about everything anyways. And then there's this idea that Twitter was some great, happy place until the last week. That's simply not true and Twitter hasn't changed in any way whatsoever yet. What we know so far: - Twitter will rollout a paid account system where if you pay $8/month your tweets will actually be visible to people and you'll see less ad's. This will ensure bots/scammers have difficulty posting to Twitter because their non-paid posts won't be seen by many people. People are more likely to casually browse Twitter now and people who profit from writing on Twitter will have better engagements. - Twitter is working on ideas to let users seta threshold for what they want to read/see. If you want a G-rated stream, then you'll be able to do that. For people that get triggered or don't want their ideas challenged then they can mute that much like you can avoid music and movies/media you don't want to be exposed to. - Twitter fired a lot of staff. Unsure how this pans out. Some people think it was ridiculous to have that many people. Others think it will cause the entire thing to break. No one really knows anything here. I have to assume Elon's team has spent months analyzing what they believe is lean muscle and what is the fat they can cut. How can people draw these impossibly detailed predictions on its future from these actions? Musk has a history of being bet against and proving the doubters wrong. Anyone there in 2013 when TSLA shipped the first Model S batch knows how much he was hated and bet against then. He has also failed to deliver on some promises. We'll see.

Imnimo 4y ago

I'm very unconvinced by Elon's $8 plan, but even to me "smothering it within weeks" seems wildly pessimistic. Even if his strategy doesn't work out, would things really come crashing down so quickly?

thebradbain 4y ago
I've been a daily user of Twitter since 2011. I mostly use it to keep up with the entertainment industry/Hollywood as I live in Los Angeles and that's where the sausage in this town is made (which when HN talks about Twitter, I think on the whole completely forgets about that huge contingent of Twitter), so not really into the whole politics/tech sphere there (that's what HN is for). Most people in that sphere don't really _want_ to care one way or the other who runs Twitter. And yet from a technical perspective, I've already noticed broken links. Duplicate tweets being posted. False notifications... the cracks are already showing and its one day in. Others have too. This has a cascading effect that people who previously do not necessarily care on the whole about who runs Twitter are now seeing the app simply not work how did yesterday, and attributing it to the new management.
sylens 4y ago
There are people in my extended network already noticing certain abuse of verified profiles, which will only get worse when anybody can pay for one

Waterluvian 4y ago

"...to balance their own version of “free speech”" Nail on the head for what really bothers me. None of this (or the Trump/Freedom/Truth Social) opinions comprehend the fundamental concepts behind free speech. At best, they're ignorant, at worst, they've co-opted the concept to wield it against those whose speech they don't like.

baryphonic 4y ago
What are the fundamental concepts of free speech that many of us don't understand?

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago

The claims in this article assume a lot. To pick just one, regarding stability/uptime: without knowing the distribution of layoffs by department, this may not just be incorrect, but the opposite might be true: if most SREs were retained, and engineers who know the systems well are still around, stability will likely improve as there will be fewer changes to the systems (usually the number one source of outages). If PMs were heavily cut then it’s possible they have infra that was slated for future projects that will no longer happen which gets them extra capacity. Not saying any of what I spelled out above is what happened. But it is entirely plausible that thousands of jobs across the organization could be cut, and stability and uptime could improve.

smarcellus 4y ago
Doesn't seem likely considering Musk's intent to push a ton of new experimental features within a week. https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1588304086792667136 https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1588304086792667136
BryantD 4y ago
True, but given that he's looking for $3 million a day in savings from servers and cloud services[1], I'm not wildly optimistic about how busy the remaining SREs are going to be. No matter how many of them there are. There's always money in the AWS bill but that's a lot of money to expect to be able to find. And, um, this kind of thinking is one of the things Mudge was talking about. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-infrastructure-costs-by-1-bln-sources-2022-11-03/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-i...
summerlight 4y ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/03/musk-orders-twitter-to-cut-infrastructure-costs-by-1-billion-sources-say.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/03/musk-orders-twitter-to-cut-i... Musk wants to save $1B from infrastructure costs, so the service quality will very likely degrade. The current business focus is money saving at all cost so I don't think SRE or whatever engineers are not very safe from layoffs.

sebastos 4y ago

If there was some way to wager my own money that this blog post will age poorly, I would. One of my hobby horses is pointing out people that bend themselves in knots predicting that Uber will fail tomorrow (still waiting!) because they, personally, _don't_ _like_ Uber. There's a similar phenomenon with Elon Musk. Behold, Elon Musk, the guy who runs a car company and a space rocket company, will be completely stymied by keeping high availability on a website? THAT's the bridge too far that he just won't be able to build a team to solve? This is either extreme self-delusion based on an emotional need OR just an example of a classic web engineer who is too wrapped up in their own world to understand that other hard problems exist.

lapcat 4y ago
> One of my hobby horses is pointing out people that bend themselves in knots predicting that Uber will fail tomorrow (still waiting!) because they, personally, _don't_ _like_ Uber. Just 3 days ago, Uber announced another quarterly loss of over $1 billion. They are failing, if you judge by profit and loss.
- f1shy 4y ago
  After billions of quarterly losses, and still kicking around... I would love to fail so...
  - Kye 4y ago
    We're in the year the free money dried up. How long can this last?
  - lapcat 4y ago
    Nice job if you can get it!

jabthedang 4y ago

b800h 4y ago

"They thought they were rolling out some grand experiment in social discourse, forgetting that brands, users, and speech are all tightly intertwined in somewhat important things like revenue and profit." ..but Twitter wasn't turning a profit to begin with.

ricardo81 4y ago

What I get from this whole experience is big tech employees, likely on a wage x^2 their national average, are able to communicate more widely to the world about their disenfranchisement about being unemployed than others made unemployed who are not. Slightly ironic that they're employed by social networks. Said tongue in cheek because these are people with livelihoods and looking after families. There are others that are concerned with big tech in general and its role that have been marginalised in mainstream news. Is there actually any pioneer in these companies that thinks social media on a global scale can work for good, apart from Elon Musk, apparently? The whole centralisation of the net was a problem in the first place.

Invictus0 4y ago
Are you aware of how exponents work?
- ricardo81 4y ago
  I believe so friend. An exponent is short form for exponential or an order of magnitude. Do you work in SV? You're free to ask what X is.
  - macmcirish 4y ago
    Orders of magnitude are typically in log 10, 2^2 being 4 is in the same order of magnitude. The national average wage for the USA is roughly 70k according to a quick Google search, unless you’re suggesting the devs are making $4.9 billion per year I think you’re not using exponents correctly.
    - ricardo81 4y ago
      - macmcirish 4y ago
        Please don’t troll here. If there is something that x is referring to that is not wage, then please enlighten us because I honestly cannot read it as any other way. There are no realistic values of x for x^2 that work with this argument.

manmal 4y ago

OP makes it sound as if Twitter were a good platform for public discourse - it’s not. It’s a cesspool of indignation, racism, faux wokeness (white-knighting to feel superior over others) etc. If you don’t have a thick skin like Musk, you must self-censor yourself pretty heavily to avoid backlash and sometimes humiliation. Just liking a controversial tweet or following a problematic account can get you on the bad side of people. I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving.

slantedview 4y ago
> It’s a cesspool of indignation, racism, faux wokeness > I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving. Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using. Either way, the point isn't how bad Twitter is in your personal opinion, the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse.
- manmal 4y ago
  I was referring to the favorable state of Twitter OP was describing, which doesn’t hold up IMO. > Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using I‘m an ex heavy Twitter user. I primarily use it for keeping up to date with tech, but the signal/noise ratio is not great nowadays. I can see myself switching to Reddit and HN completely. > the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse That remains to be seen, no? What’s the use of writing that a week after an acquisition?
  - slantedview 4y ago
    The author is definitely projecting, but he's basing his projection on real signals: increases in hate speech, advertisers leaving, mastodon currently trending, etc.

h43z 4y ago

It's sad how everyone thinks his job is crucial to keep a company running.

f1shy 4y ago
Yes. Everyone thinks (s)he is indispensable... yet the cemeteries are full of such indispensable people...

paxys 4y ago

It has been a mere days since the acquisition closed. The results of what Musk is doing today will play out over months, maybe years. Yes it may all crash and burn at some point, but if you are already declaring it a failure with zero backing data then it is simply your bias talking.

slt2021 4y ago
mere days after takeover and already laying off engineers, getting class action employment lawsuit in CA, and advertisers are leaving in droves. very productive start

fdsafdewe 4y ago

>Twitter was a unique spot where journalists.... It's telling that "journalists" was put first. I've heard many times that Twitter is "useful" to journalists, who I assume feel like they have their finger on the world's pulse. It might explain why so many news stories include random opinions from unknown Twitter users, and why they are so out of touch with (at least my) reality.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

olivermarks 4y ago

I doubt this post by Nolan is going to age well. I'm not a fan of Elon Musk and his vaporware vehicles. I'm not a fan of Twitter, but have been using it more than usual recently. I am a fan of free speech and associated universal laws whether online or off based on a level discourse playing field. I feel terrible for all the people suddenly left at the beginning of winter in one of the most expensive places on the planet without a job, and hope they all go on to better and brighter things!

exogeny 4y ago

When has anyone ever thought of Jason Calacanis as a savvy operator?

stephc_int13 4y ago

As always, predicting the future is difficult. Elon is taking a big risk here, and I doubt that he truly knows what he is doing. None of what he is doing with Twitter seems to be rational. The rational thing for him would have been to stay away from Twitter as this is clearly a harmful distraction for his mental health and his other endeavors. But that does not mean the outcome will be as catastrophic as some are predicting.

longrod 4y ago

I think this is nothing except shitposting. The whole blog reads like an angry rant of someone who didn't get what he wanted. This is not new. Layoffs are not a new thing. New management, new rules, it's always been like this. Do I feel sorry for the people who got layed off? Of course I do! I wouldn't want to be them right now. I feel for them. But the consequences mentioned in this post is completely unreasonable. These are the kinds of points you hear from a depressed person who thinks the world is going to end because all the toilet rolls are suddenly out of stock. The amount of doomsaying I see everywhere regarding the Musk takeover is baffling. I am no Musk fanboy but this is completely irrational. The fact of the matter is, people don't like change. That's all there is to it. Change automatically makes people cry out. Here's a scenario for you: What if the new Twitter is better? What if it isn't the toxic place you expect it to become? What if you are completely wrong? Have you considered that? Here's how I see this situation: Musk is not an idiot. He must know exactly what he needs to do. This isn't his first rodeo and comments like "running a service of this scale and size is incredibly complex with downtime and uptime and blah blah" is incredibly naive. Musk runs at least 2 companies that require a huge network & availability guarantees. He knows what's needed there. Twitter is going no where and if you think it'll go down in the coming years, you have a surprise coming your way. I am optimistic because of Musk isn't known to give up. This can fail for sure but I don't think that'll be the end of it. The next step in my opinion is cutting down on the Twitter codebase. Trimming features. Shutting down unnecessary stuff. They laid off 25% of the workforce so at least 25% of Twitter will be affected. Let's see which parts though. There's a lot of unnecessary junk in there (communities, spaces etc.) that I'll be happy to say goodbye to.

Zanneth 4y ago
> They laid off 25% of the workforce so at least 25% of Twitter will be affected. That's assuming that those 25% were actually putting in work at Twitter.
meheleventyone 4y ago
> Musk is not an idiot. He must know exactly what he needs to do. How does this square with the attempts to get out of the deal? I think your points would make a lot more sense if he hadn’t signalled extremely clearly that he thought the deal was terrible.

liveoneggs 4y ago

Twitter is given an outsized and undeserved amount of attention. It has over-powered a tiny minority of users to get vastly over-represented and repeated to the rest of the people who don't give a damn about it. If you don't like twitter stop using it and stop taking "news" about tweets seriously, because they are not serious.