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.
Agree. Twitter was a going nowhere dumpster fire before the purchase. It's going to be a bumpy ride, but it could end up better or disappear. Either would be fine with me.
Everyone on this site (and even many non-tech people) had their own ideas on how to fix Twitter. It was a given that it was a mess. Musk had the money and hubris (I don't think he wanted to really buy it), to actually say hold my beer.
Regardless of what you think of Musk, he loves Twitter and now has a lot of financial incentive to make it function better as a business. So we'll see.
Boy that's an understatement. It was already kind of a neutral value shithole, but now he's got to figure out how to wring a profit out of this $45 billion dollar dried up cow. And he's got to do it without his usual trick of nursing from the US government teat. Good luck, Elon. You're gonna need it.
So far, Elon's been a dynamic and inconsistent figure. He's not representing a stable, known offering where things won't radically change with his whims.
IMO, he needs to stop tweeting and he needs to build a team who can represent the policies and offerings of the company. Obviously he has that in place at Tesla and SpaceX (in greater degrees than he has brought to Twitter so far).
Even if the $8/mo offering is a bargain, it also has to feel reasonable. So far, Elon's not making that case for himself, even while he's basically making the case that he is Twitter now.
The status quo was so bad - I'm really curious what's going to happen. I'm optimistic.
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.
I dont think twitter changes caused much of uproar in the past, like when they extended the character limit painlessly (unlike facebook). The audience is there mostly for the narrative, not the format.
Exactly, these people use it for their own exposure/benefit. If it harms them if they stop, they will not stop.
I served in the mosh pit. I knew the mosh pit. The mosh pit was a friend of mine. Twitter, you're no mosh pit.
It kind of was the end of that platform and the beginning of a new one. One likely much more profitable and also much more destructive to liberal democracy.
(Liberal as in the real, proper sense, not the newer slightly illiberal liberals)
> It is immoral, dangerous, and highly destructive to our democracy for any advertiser to fund a platform that fuels hate speech, election denialism and conspiracy theories. Until actions are taken to make this a safe space, we call on companies to pause all advertising on Twitter.
proving that the world truly is insane, I use old reddit on mobile as well as new reddit is more or less unusable on a mobile browser they hard force you in to their terrible app. If I need a mobile app I use a 3rd party app as the offical app is TERRIBLE
When/if they kill old.reddit is the say I stop using reddit, I would say my usage is already down 80% since the launch of reddit, as I pretty much only use the technical subreddits for news now, staying away for all other area;s of reddit.
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.
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.
We can be critical of his actions, but at this point, assuming incompetence is foolish.
Intelligence comes in a lot of ways - clearly Elon Musk is incredibly intelligent, but only in some ways and not in every way.
Trying to play devils advocate here, I don't fully believe that Musk will be incompetent in handling Twitter, but I definitely think given the current evidence it's possible his understanding of how to operate Twitter is less comprehensive than how to operate a hardware driven tech company.
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.
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.
That's assuming that those 25% were actually putting in work at Twitter.
It’s a toxic pit where people with boosted self-importance exchange silly reactions and replies, with no meaningful conversation whatsoever.
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.
> 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?
Giant tech companies do obsess about reducing the need for human intervention. Teams in my org at AWS kept track of failures/intervention rates per thousand instances. If it gets too high, it means you're spending too much engineering effort resolving on-call issues and need to fix it.
PagerDuty is a multi billion dollar company for a reason, and they're not even the only company doing what they do.
I don't think it's relevant if one has worked in a giant company to understand how bad on call can be, every engineer knows that. I personally assume on-call is much worse/harder/nerve wracking in bigger companies
They do. You automate recovery for all the failure modes your system has encountered. Then the system promptly fails in a new way you've never seen before.
Often because some totally different part of the system fails when scaling to new levels.
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.
For example, one day SRE got alerted that a bunch of expensive accelerators were unexpectedly shutting down and not restarting production. SRE has to reach out in this case to the SWEs who build/designed the system to ask some clarifying questions. Together, the SREs and SWEs form a series of hypotheses about the cause, ultimately discovering an entirely unanticipated failure mode.
I think I'm one of the few people in the world who has attached a $100K oscilloscope to the voltage regulator on a machine learning accelerator to debug why a specific training job that did a series of convolutions at a highly specific rate would cause a DC-DC regulator to act like an AC source. It took far, far longer to write and deploy the rule that detected this problem in prod than it took us to identify the problem and stop the killer job.
The general philosophy at these orgs is that the same failures should never happen _again_. So you build automation and safeguards protecting the system from the failure modes you know.
However, any complex system will have failure modes you don't know. There might be new software, new features, new APIs etc. going out that interact in complex ways. So complex systems will fail in very interesting ways. So the general philosophy in operating these systems is:
1. First get the system back into a state in which the problem is mitigated. 2. Apply some short term hacks, rollback any suspicious recent changes. 3. Have someone go a bit deeper and try to root cause what caused the failure, have a discussion about it with impacted teams (often called a postmortem) and come up with long term fixes that reduces or eliminates the root cause from happening again.
The companies where it was not true, was a pleasure to work in. The management, from C-suits downwards knew what they were doing. In the others, it was a total chaos.
Of course, if everything is fixed with duct tape, you need firemen ready to act. If everything is solid and robust, there can be small outages, but nothing too critical.
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.
If you don't like twitter stop using it and stop taking "news" about tweets seriously, because they are not serious.
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.
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.
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.
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-i...
One can only hope!
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.
You think that if he paid completely up front he wouldn't care about cutting costs? Why? The pressure would still be there -- it would just be in the form of pressure to recoup his investment
Ironically, Musk rewarded the owners of the company by paying an inflated price for it.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
I think the idea that Twitter can somehow boost ad revenues while removing moderation is just that.
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.
very productive start
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.
Just 3 days ago, Uber announced another quarterly loss of over $1 billion. They are failing, if you judge by profit and loss.
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
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.
- 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
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
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
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.
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.
You can spot stupid[*] replies miles away when there's no attempt to engage with the substance of the argument.
[*]: Yes, stupid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
That's bad for him and so far it seems bad for Twitter, but it was good for the shareholders, and it's good generally that contracts get enforced.
Could be part of a pump of the stock. Something he's done in the past, see FSD,coast to coast trip with no driver, battery swaps, the Cybertruck roadster and Semi, whatever that robot was,4680 batteries..........
Maybe that's a bit too much to ask of humanity at this stage of its development, but a person can always dream!
Does it matter that his method wasn't ideal, at least he wasn't pushing for nuclear war like many politicians.
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.
No. The results of failed management (said management has now departed)
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.
If this was a HN comment it would get flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Better to apply the guidelines to actual HN comments.
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?"
I know I was center-left for a long time, but the same values that I had 10 years ago as center-left are considered center-right at this time. I believe it's the same with Elon.
Nope, centre right at best. Or, if he is actually centre-left (neither of us will know), he has (for the last couple of years) been sucking up to the right. The effect is the same. I assumed he was playing each side off against each other so, again, the effect is the same as if he is right wing.
Calcanis maybe a lib, but his actions are hard core capitalist ... so for the sake of this situation, his actions will be right wing.
Sum total: rightwing.
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!
..but Twitter wasn't turning a profit to begin with.