I'm not so sure its a good idea to trade in journalistic neutrality for "full disclosure" and personal point of view.
Saying something negative about somebody is not the same as "gleefully taunting" them.
I read the techcrunch article and in my opinion it wasn't that bad
It nice to be able to say as it is and not decorated, the guy failed and he left or was made to leave.
lesson learned: scaling is hard!
One might also question the code in the application. Scaling is rarely a simple issue that merely adding a new piece of gear or building a better network can solve. If an application is slow in all of its parts, it's pretty much a hopeless endeavor to just make hardware faster. I don't know anything about Twitters architecture (other than that it is built with RoR, which no one is going to accuse of being fast or proven with regard to scalability). I think it's probably premature to say "the guy failed"...maybe the application or the framework failed. We'll see in 3 months if things have gotten significantly better, or the problems persist.
Personally, I blame Valleywag.
Shall we ban Techcrunch now?
Scaling is not only hard it's a nightmare. Especially given RoR is infamous for it's scaling issues.