Elon's first non-reply tweet since the news broke: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593415171149791232
> How do you make a small fortune in social media?
> Start out with a large one.
> How do you make a small fortune in social media?
> Start out with a large one.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593455727611215872
> And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol
> Let that sink in …
He literally cannot distinguish between good and bad attention. He still thinks he's winning this.
You cant take credit for positive outcomes if you done nothing yet.
If the chaos drives away advertisers, as it seems to be, that isn’t great either.
Losing advertisers is a problem in the short term, but less overhead helps and they're pivoting the model. I thought we all hated ads? Now people suddenly support that model? Please. It's all so fake.
[1]he already posted a conspiracy theory, deleted it when called out, and then said he never posted it. That’s his recent behavior, if you trust his statements I have a bridge to sell you
That he deleted that stupid tweet was admission it was stupid. Where did he say he never posted it though? It's highly unlikely he said that and wasn't joking. He knows everything he posts is captured immediately.
No, admitting that it was stupid would be an admission that it was stupid. Removing its existence is just hiding the mistake.
>Where did he say he never posted it though? It's highly unlikely he said that and wasn't joking.
Here[1], and inb4 you say that's obviously a joke. No it is not to a casual observer. He claims he never tweeted what was reported, and the only indication at all that the tweet should be read in a not monotone voice is the emphasis asterisks around not. All that indicates to a casual observer is that he is emphatically denying he ever made the first indirect tweet.
It's true that good publicity comes from amazing turnarounds. Final Fantasy XIV is a good example, since FFXIV 1.0 was widely regarded as terrible and 2.0 was lauded for somehow miraculously turning the company's fortunes around.
But the big difference there is that it was a new management that did it. You don't get points for completely ruining your company's best-known product (to the point where some believe it to be the company's only product).
The reason people are "using" Twitter now is to watch a trainwreck. Most people by now probably have a backup plan.
> [me running naked through the library with a balloon animal on my head]
> The fact that you're talking about me means that I hit a nerve
However the question is for how long he can keep the drama and attention till the thing collapses.
> Elon, there's a bunch of us in SV who will come up tonight to help on the infra side to keep the site up.
> If you need help just ask.
As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight
That's either a level of delusion that I can't imagine and/or someone who has no idea what they are talking about. I also can't imagine carrying water for or "simp-ing" for a billionaire, especially one who treats people so terribly (this "work yourself to the bone or resign" ultimatum was one of the more disgusting things I've seen in tech, I'm appalled at the people defending it as some genius move).
Really I feel bad for the people who have no choice but to stay at Twitter, the H-1B's and the like. The brain drain is going to be (/already has been) massive and all that will be left are the people who have no choice, can't find a better/different job, or are true sycophants. None of that makes for a healthy work environment and isn't conducive to making good products.
[0] https://twitter.com/MichaelGuimarin/status/15934156421110456...
The infra is just too clever for anybody to grok in a million years. These clowns probably don't even have fedoras, no way they'll ever figure it out.
Way better than keeping a person around who hoards institutional knowledge and admin access for job security. In fact that would be the first person I'd zero in on and get rid of, and have in the past. Not only are people like that not indispensable, they should never have been hired, anywhere.
A well engineered twitter has everything necessary to run it in properly documented internal wikis and can be handed off to a small new group of competent ops people at the drop of a hat. Ideally new hires should be able to fix and change things within a day of starting their jobs with little to no hand holding. I'm sure it is very far from that at the moment due to the unprofessionalism of everybody involved, but this is actually the best and fastest way to get it there purely from an ops perspective - usually takes years to convince management to yank off the bandaid because everybody is too scared to take responsibility.
Twitter used to have fail whales all the goddamn time, sky doesn't fall, it isn't amazon they aren't losing money every second it is down.
Whoever stayed on will be able to figure out eventually which things to restart in what order so long as they aren't locked out of the servers.
Unless Twitter is still using Zookeeper. :P
In the process of figuring it out they'll be putting in-writing what should have been documented all along and getting a feel for the brittle bits. Long term twitter is better off.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I'm sure the databases have recent known good backups at worst you'll get a bunch out of prolonged outages and some dataloss - since we are talking about tweets, nothing of value was lost.
I hadn’t thought about what will happen next, but this is probably it. It’s fascinating watching the D-K effect play out at every level here.
It might actually benefit engineers in the long term too, since they can ultimately blame Elon ( after he fires them ) and hopefully learn from it.
Operating a Kafka cluster doesn't make one an expert at anything. Zilch.
The site is still up and in a month or two Elon should cut another 90% of them and it will still be up.
Some people will have to live down the discovery that they were never essential workers but rather seat fillers.
Many companies say that they are like a startup, but I can see Twitter going back to that style. Far fewer people, far faster shipping, less thinking things through, etc. The bluechecks for anyone in a week and undoing it seems very startup like to me. Is that good? Probably not - but it is interesting, and, like I said, high risk high reward.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Has there been literally *any* indication that this "hardcore" attitude will result in more reward?
People here on HN drastically underestimate the value of Twitter’s network and name. Musk could start 1,000 social media companies for 1,000 lifetimes and still not hit on Twitter’s timing and execution early on.
The age of social media is dead. No one is creating a Twitter competitor in 2022+. Either the site completely dies and people flee to existing platforms, or it lives on.
The idea that one can just build a Twitter clone shows little understanding of human nature.
What happened in 2022 that all the doors are suddenly closed? Wouldn't you have said the same in 2016, before TikTok came out of nowhere and became the most popular website (per Cloudflare). I'm pretty sure people spoke similarly in 2006 about how Facebook has no chance against Myspace. The only constant is change.
You might be able to acquire the company from Elon for cheap in a bit Tumblr-style though.
What, is Twitter going to re-IPO?
Is that before or after paying off the billions in debt?
As an ordinary employee what is the potential reward?
A turn around is clearly possible. Social media companies have been tremendously valuable in recent history and might become so again. Musk has had amazing financial success with other companies.
As an employee your potential rewards are what I've already explicitly called out. You can advance further and faster up the corporate hierarchy in the tumult. You can also earn and hold stock rewards that may be extremely valuable. And, of course, you may consider it intrinsically valuable to help shape a tool used by hundreds of millions worldwide, and, as the number of employees shrinks, the per-employee impact increases.
For a mere hobby it is too expensive even for him. 44bn (+continuing operating costs, credit costs, ...) also is a lot to regain via profits. So the logical thing is to either sell it to some other corporation (who!?) or going public. But for that he has to somehow make it an attractive investment, while currently he is doing the opposite.
The reward is deathmarch with Elon holding the whip.
Guy can't even use website generator
People want it all to fail out of spite, and attempt to bring their dreams to life by merely doomsdaying repeatedly and with fervor. We had 4y of Trump and no amount of wishful doomsdaying actually changed anything. The media was full of drama and we told ourselves stories of incredible disfunctions, but at the end of the day the government kept on doing its thing, the country mostly didn't change too much on the fundamentals. Reality is most often more boring than that (save FTX-like events).
I think that's most of the code, at this point
Well that goes the first assumption.
> or scaling events that reach a tipping point
Such as having applications running without restarts for a long time due to deploy freezes?
> Odds are those aren't the bread and butter of problems faced by Twitter _right now_.
Right now, exactly this moment, probably not. But if those were the only worrying events that could happen in the short term, I doubt anyone would need to offer any help to Twitter.
> due to code changes
Well, Musk has said that he wants to do "hardcore engineering" implying there will be a lot of changes coming up. That surely can't go wrong.
But if infrastructure wasn't managed like shit it will probably just keep on chugging
The problems themselves most often have simple short term remedies.
I really think people blow out of proportion the actual requirements to keep things running, probably because they wish to see him fail. But everywhere I've worked, systems were most stable when engineers weren't there to muck with them. There's a reason many people refuse to ship on Friday.
Are you sure you can be effective coming completely cold into a company with massive attrition?
There is not one Twitter experience, but a multitude, and expecting to fully grasp the platform just by being on it for a few years is unrealistic.
And what glorious fun we're all having looking at this train wreck.
Bet it stays up and a certain crowd moves on to boycotts before eventually returning as users next year.
If this actually woke you up, why didn't you wake up when he called a diver a pedo for no reason, and instead of apologizing he fought it in court saying that "nononono it's perfectly normal we said it all the time as kids" as if that should make it okay.
The primary reason to not talk much is that it's useless. You can't reason with an angry mob. Sure there are plenty of things to criticize, but the mob is not focused on valid criticism targets. Anything and everything is hailed as a sign of evil and/or incompetence. It is incredibly exhausting to try to provide nuanced reasoning against kneejerk hate.
Overall I thought the whole Twitter purchase was a distraction when it was first announced and I still think that. I'm much more interested in SpaceX.
Hence I favor musk in relative terms. Whether musk destroys twitter or rebuilds it's a postive thing in my book.
We were expecting a collapse in several months, not a few weeks.