If Twitter survives this without any major harm it will have profound consequences for the whole software industry.
"Major harm," to me, would be either bankruptcy or a competitor overtaking significant chunks of Twitter's users. Even if Elon literally has to re-hire half the roles he fired for, or Twitter is down for a few days or a week, or they struggle to get advertisers for a little while, that's nothing for the long-term. In six months, the chances that it'll look like these firings were a bad idea are minimal.
And likewise with the "the only realistic way to moderate an online platform is the way Twitter was doing it" narrative. In six months, all it takes is the ship to still be floating without the old moderation to prove it out, and that's by far the most likely outcome.
With the takeover, Twitter has been saddled with massive new debt and would have to become significantly more profitable to service it. Instead, they are losing ad revenue, and any savings from reduced head count will not manifest four at least 4 months because of the severance payments for the laid off workers.
Musk could of course keep the company going as a hobby for a few more years, but he strikes me as more likely to cut his losses early — preferably by finding somebody to take the problem off his hand, but, if necessary, by bankruptcy.
> Even if Elon literally has to re-hire half the roles he fired for
I have this nagging suspicion that the kind of people who line up for an opportunity to work without equity, lousy job security, and send weekly code printouts to the CEO are not necessarily the highest quality hires in the field.
> or Twitter is down for a few days or a week
The Twitter user base has quite a bit of inertia keeping them from moving to competing platforms — lots of people I follow have made backup plans on Mastodon, but not many have moved their focus there. But Twitter becoming literally impossible to use would probably be the one thing precipitating such a process.
> they struggle to get advertisers for a little while
And after that? Are the major brands going to decide that they like advertising on a Gab-lite Twitter after all? Or is Twitter going to strike it rich with ads for dietary supplements, gold coins, non-perishable meals, and tactical pants?
> In six months, the chances that it'll look like these firings were a bad idea are minimal.
The targeted firings were bad enough (To paraphrase someone else "Imagine ranking engineers by # of lines of code added, and then keeping the ones with the HIGHEST number"), but the voluntary departures are likely to be even more consequential. After the way the workforce was treated, what are the odds that the people left are the "best", rather than the ones with a lack of alternatives (e.g. for visa reasons), or Musk fans who may or may not be qualified?
That said, Instagram was run by just a dozen people back then, while it had hundreds of millions of users, right? So it's not a new data point.
Storing, retrieving, indexing, managing 280 char blobs (with links, threads, embeds) is not exactly the most hardcore of a problem domains.
Microblogs are the typical tutorial topic, and twitter's only "innovation" was to increase the text limit.
Every twitterer is a newsletter. Most hardly ever tweet and sporadically at that. The followers are subscribers. They hardly even see most tweets they subscribe to as the whole thing is quite ephemeral. Same as never reading all your emails (very few people are inbox zero freaks).
The timelines are just that, an email inbox. It is very soft "real-time" at best.
Tweets older than 48 hours can just be archived to a blob store and served as a static website. Most people consume it as such, logged out and from the browser.
You think brainyquote.com is hard to scale? Think of twitter.com as unbrainyquote.com.
All the other froufrou built on top of it is more complicated but 2007 style twitter is dead simple. That is its (completely accidental) genius.
There is no shortage of systems that are x10-100 times more "web scale".
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/20/twitter-f...
