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Comment by SkyPuncher | Hacker News Reader

What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade?

While I don't agree with the way Elon has been making this move, it's sure looking like he's trying to clear the place out so he can establish a new culture. These policy changes are likely to scare mobile, top-performers off to other companies. This likely clears out a lot of internal dissent and heal digging to make room for new "top performers".

I wouldn't be shocked if we see new "top talent" hires in 3 to 6 months then _actual_ new innovation in 6 to 12 months.

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Why would any competent engineer sign up to work in the environment Musk has created? I’ve seen no upside to employees offered, only brutal management and benefit reduction with a promise of hard work for less.

Why would it be any different from his other companies? I wouldn't apply, but if some people are willing to work at Tesla, surely some are also willing to work at Musk-Twitter?

Because Twitter isn’t building space ships or changing transportation, and the expected culture and benefits of a software media company vs manufacturing company are very different.

Musk attracts engineers by selling a vision. Reusable rockets to make humanity an interstellar species. Electric vehicles to free humanity from fossil fuels. Humanoid robots. Neuralink. And on it goes.

For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence". [1]

That might not be your cup of tea, or you might believe Musk is too petulant a leader to bring that vision to fruition. But it is an aspiration that will make some people excited and willing to put in the hard work Musk is demanding.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728

>For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence".

Unless you make fun of the owner, that gets you banned ASAP.

Also, I don't think most people associate a massive increase in hate speech and harassment with a healthy town square. Threatening paying customers who show any reticence is an "interesting" way to grow a business. It's early still, but this has basically been the vision pitch so far.

Not only that but the owner is tweeting hateful images and articles with misinformation.

Yes, and the vision pitch for spacex early one was exploding rockets if you’re that myopic.

> For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence". [1]

Musk seems like one of the people least capable on earth of having a debate in a healthy manner.

> a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner

Musk says a lot of things, some serious and others 100% trolling, and we have a hard time knowing how serious he is for any of them. Even as he’s addressing the main customers of his company, given his past and present behavior, we can’t take your quote at face value and assume any of it is meaningful (he’s saying that while reducing the moderation staff…)

My definition of “competent engineer” includes reading between the lines and making an effort to understand what is actually required for a job to be done. I don’t see any competent engineer joining on publicly shared empty promises.

But that's not remotely as inspiring a vision as the others. Nor is it new, or is he presenting Twitter or himself as the best parties to accomplish this. People who care about this vision are running their own forums and fediverse servers.

>Why would any competent engineer sign up to work in the environment Musk has created?

same reason people worked for id software or other companies with grueling cultures. Because working with people who are excited about what they do and who are fiercely loyal is great. It's not even really about Musk, it's what has always drawn people to hard work.

For Tesla or SpaceX, it's obvious what the payoff for the burnout is. You get to pull off things that have never been done before, which missions that matter to humanity.

With Twitter...? So, maybe they copy TikTok and Youtube and some crypto payments system. Who cares?

> What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade?

They basically stole clubhouses’ thunder with spaces and tbh clubhouse has lost a lot of it’s shine.

Now did Twitter actually innovate? I would say not really but they did reimplement the wheel and so far seems to be working for them. I’d say the execution still counts as being innovative.

Clubhouse lost its shine on its own. It simply didn’t scale on a social level and became a cesspool of crypto scams and conspiracy theorists looking for marks.

Both things can be true at the same time. I dropped of CH because the synchronicity was too much for me. But apparently other people still use Twitter spaces.

I agree, high performers can actually damage innovation by stopping it. Since they own major systems, they control how and what gets done.

They launched the predecessor to the current hottest social media app but killed it before it could gain any popularity. So that’s a new way to shoot yourself in the foot.

> They launched

They bought Vine. Story still holds though.

Twitter acquired Vine before Vine launched.

Okay, a citation: I didn’t realize this either, but there are many articles about it from 2012, such as: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-twitter-bought-vine-befor...

“Why Twitter Bought Vine Before Launch”

Or https://thenextweb.com/news/twitter-acqui-hires-pre-launch-v...

“Twitter acquires pre-launch video sharing startup Vine”

They increased the message size from 140 to 280 characters, allowing people to generate double the outrage with almost the same network load.

What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade?

Bootstrap

Past decade. Bootstrap is 11 years old.

It still gets updates.

That is kind of the opposite of innovating, no? The idea that the company is depending on prior innovation? Unless you are saying the updates contain innovation.

I don't think Twitter has had anything to do with Bootstrap for a significantly long time. fat and mdo left twitter 10 years ago.

Setting aside the timeframe.

Bootstrap is not a revenue generating function for them.

I admit I had the timeframe wrong, but whether it generates revenue was not part of the question.

Fair enough. I should have stipulated my point as "customer innovation".

It seems like Twitter is facing the same issue FB is. Behind the scenes innovation, but not customer facing.

Can't tell if this is snark, but gotta hand it to the Twitter Bootstrap project for making off-the-shelf CSS libraries acceptable.

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