Thoughts about Twitter

&gt; 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.<p>Regardless of your opinion on Elon, it&#x27;s simply too early to conclude that this is &quot;likely&quot; to happen, or that all those people will stop using it.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>[0] Yes, I&#x27;m aware old reddit is still accessible, but the vast majority of the userbase is on the mobile website or app.

I believe Elon will learn the hard way that yes you can solve tech problems by throwing humans at them but you can&#x27;t solve human problems by throwing tech at them.

I think this is nothing except shitposting. The whole blog reads like an angry rant of someone who didn&#x27;t get what he wanted. This is not new. Layoffs are not a new thing. New management, new rules, it&#x27;s always been like this.<p>Do I feel sorry for the people who got layed off? Of course I do! I wouldn&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t like change. That&#x27;s all there is to it. Change automatically makes people cry out.<p>Here&#x27;s a scenario for you:<p>What if the new Twitter is better? What if it isn&#x27;t the toxic place you expect it to become? What if you are completely wrong? Have you considered that? Here&#x27;s how I see this situation:<p>Musk is not an idiot. He must know exactly what he needs to do. This isn&#x27;t his first rodeo and comments like &quot;running a service of this scale and size is incredibly complex with downtime and uptime and blah blah&quot; is incredibly naive. Musk runs at least 2 companies that require a huge network &amp; availability guarantees. He knows what&#x27;s needed there.<p>Twitter is going no where and if you think it&#x27;ll go down in the coming years, you have a surprise coming your way. I am optimistic because of Musk isn&#x27;t known to give up. This can fail for sure but I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;ll be the end of it.<p>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&#x27;s see which parts though. There&#x27;s a lot of unnecessary junk in there (communities, spaces etc.) that I&#x27;ll be happy to say goodbye to.

&gt; 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.<p>It’s a toxic pit where people with boosted self-importance exchange silly reactions and replies, with no meaningful conversation whatsoever.

I don&#x27;t work at a giant company, but I&#x27;m curious:<p>&gt; 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.<p>Is this true?<p>Shouldn&#x27;t giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?

I don&#x27;t think this is a great opinion piece. IT jumps to conclusions about what Musk&#x27;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.<p>And then there&#x27;s this idea that Twitter was some great, happy place until the last week. That&#x27;s simply not true and Twitter hasn&#x27;t changed in any way whatsoever yet.<p>What we know so far:<p>- Twitter will rollout a paid account system where if you pay $8&#x2F;month your tweets will actually be visible to people and you&#x27;ll see less ad&#x27;s. This will ensure bots&#x2F;scammers have difficulty posting to Twitter because their non-paid posts won&#x27;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.<p>- Twitter is working on ideas to let users seta threshold for what they want to read&#x2F;see. If you want a G-rated stream, then you&#x27;ll be able to do that. For people that get triggered or don&#x27;t want their ideas challenged then they can mute that much like you can avoid music and movies&#x2F;media you don&#x27;t want to be exposed to.<p>- 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&#x27;s team has spent months analyzing what they believe is lean muscle and what is the fat they can cut.<p>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&#x27;ll see.

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&#x27;t give a damn about it.<p>If you don&#x27;t like twitter stop using it and stop taking &quot;news&quot; about tweets seriously, because they are not serious.

I&#x27;m very unconvinced by Elon&#x27;s $8 plan, but even to me &quot;smothering it within weeks&quot; seems wildly pessimistic. Even if his strategy doesn&#x27;t work out, would things really come crashing down so quickly?

The claims in this article assume a lot. To pick just one, regarding stability&#x2F;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.<p>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.

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

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.

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.<p>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.<p>I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving.

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.<p>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.

As always, predicting the future is difficult.<p>Elon is taking a big risk here, and I doubt that he truly knows what he is doing.<p>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.<p>But that does not mean the outcome will be as catastrophic as some are predicting.

It has been a mere <i>days</i> 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.

It&#x27;s sad how everyone thinks his job is crucial to keep a company running.

If there was some way to wager my own money that this blog post will age poorly, I would.<p>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&#x27;t_ _like_ Uber. There&#x27;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&#x27;s the bridge too far that he just won&#x27;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.

i don&#x27;t understand how people keep getting played by the same media tactics<p>elon is playing you, everything is fine, he just wants free attention to spread platform news to people without spending $<p>all the complainers are his new marketing network and it&#x27;s glorious

&gt; They were dumped unceremoniously, the result of the addled whims of a walking meme<p>How is that different from Stripe layoffs from yesterday? I believe Stripe employees also didn&#x27;t know that they will be laid off, and they got similar compensation to what Twitter employees got.

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

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.<p>Slightly ironic that they&#x27;re employed by social networks. Said tongue in cheek because these are people with livelihoods and looking after families.<p>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?<p>The whole centralisation of the net was a problem in the first place.

&gt; The illusion of Elon Musk, David Sacks and Jason Calcanis as savvy operators is completely gone.<p>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?

&quot;...to balance their own version of “free speech”&quot;<p>Nail on the head for what really bothers me. None of this (or the Trump&#x2F;Freedom&#x2F;Truth Social) opinions comprehend the fundamental concepts behind free speech. At best, they&#x27;re ignorant, at worst, they&#x27;ve co-opted the concept to wield it against those whose speech they don&#x27;t like.

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&#x2F;commentariat reversals of position on this funny.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Now that he seems to have accepted his obligation and the sale has gone through, we’re back to opprobrium.<p>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.

If he&#x27;s right (too soon to know), then nothing of value was lost.<p>Twitter wasn&#x27;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.<p>Twitter was rarely the Budapest cafe. It was more the favala rival gang war. If it dies at Elon&#x27;s hands then its another boon to society, along with electric vehicles and comparatively cheap and reuseable space flight.

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

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

&gt;Twitter was a unique spot where journalists....<p>It&#x27;s telling that &quot;journalists&quot; was put first. I&#x27;ve heard many times that Twitter is &quot;useful&quot; to journalists, who I assume feel like they have their finger on the world&#x27;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.

&gt;<i>They were dumped unceremoniously, the result of the addled whims of a walking meme.</i><p>If this was a HN comment it would get flagged: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

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.

I doubt this post by Nolan is going to age well.<p>I&#x27;m not a fan of Elon Musk and his vaporware vehicles.<p>I&#x27;m not a fan of Twitter, but have been using it more than usual recently.<p>I am a fan of free speech and associated universal laws whether online or off based on a level discourse playing field.<p>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!

&quot;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.&quot;<p>..but Twitter wasn&#x27;t turning a profit to begin with.

Ahh yes doomed to fail. When your speach isn&#x27;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 &quot;Work from Home&quot; deal.