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Comment by wnevets | Hacker News Reader

Are people who still want to argue that Elon isn't destroying Twitter?

You really can’t argue when twitter works fine right now and everything is just talk till it happens.

It works fine until a cert expires somewhere or a hard drive fills up and there’s no crew to catch it before it kicks off a cascading failure.

What's going to happen is that we'll find out either of these are true:

1) Elon will run this thing to ground and site will disappear one day, and entirely stop working for days. Elon will call up ex-employees with 2x overtime pay to help fix it. They might not. It will be a major news event since most politicians these days are on Twitter and Elon's reputation will be forever tarnished. Other CEOs and leaders will join the mocking gang.

2) Elon will show to the world that Twitter can just run fine with 75% less work force and all you need is highly motivated, talented (and compensated) employees. It will be a direct testament to the fact that these woke corporations in SF/SV are totally dysfunctional and they've had a good ride so far from the adtech boom.

We'll have to return back to your comment and see how it ages. Stakes are high.

If 2 is proven true, investors will demand tech companies make massive cuts to employment.

most big tech companies have more than one product that has not meaningfully changed or added competitive features in 10 years. twitter is being run like it's world of warcraft when it is actually ffxi.

They will, until the first company actually has serious issues after cutting staffing and then they will get very skiddish and hyper conservative about everything again and it will just be another decade of stock buybacks.

Life isn't usually that spectacle. More likely scenario is that we'll see more frequent small-medium outages from Twitter, Elon frantically tries to bring/borrow engineers from everywhere (likely many from Tesla and SpaceX) to make it barely survive from all the fiasco. Then Elon will finally learn that there probably was a good reason for all the 7500 people in the hard way then finally re-invent the wheel from the scratch.

1) Twitter stays up without a hitch: A testament to how relisilient Twitter architecture is even with someone actively trying to fuck it up. Elon clearly does not want Twitter to survive, but thanks to ex-Twitter employees who built such a great resilient system.

2) Twitter goes down in flames: This is what happens when a megalomanian billionaire takes over a complicated distributed scalable system. These billionaires have no idea how complex systems work.

So, no cookie for Elon.

On a side note, I think it's kind of sad that we still haven't figure out (or standardized) a way to prevent these two very common problems.

"Sir we told you to stop smoking 12 packs a day and drink a bottle of vodka every 6 hours, you now have terminal stage cancer"

"Uh duh ok but I still breath, I don't have cancer until I see them"

If the ads systems still actually work, Twitter could theoretically be pretty profitable without much headcount.

IMO there's no way those profits last more than a quarter until everything breaks. But yeah, maybe it is technically profitable tomorrow.

Trying to be objective, isn't downsizing what all tech companies are doing? There's a lot of PR mismanagement here, but it seems to be in line with the rest for the moment (leaving aside EM bs). And Twitter is no Meta. There are no alternative products to bring in cash revenue, so hardcore downsizing it is.

He is pushing the limits (and maybe finding them) of how quickly you can correct head count in a larger company. We won’t know if his actual vision for the product is bad until he gets done with this transitional period and can start releasing updates. Basically I’d argue not much happened yet but HR meetings.

How are they going to release updates when they just nuked the entire design and engineering staff?

To be fair, that design and engineering staff took over a year and couldn't deliver an "edit" feature. Project Veritas caught some Twitter engineer on camera claiming to work 4 hours per week.

This is not an endorsement of Elon or anything he's doing with Twitter, but Twitter's core product is not complicated. For some comparisons:

Rumble has 35 employees

When WhatsApp was sold to FB in 2014 they had 55 employees.

WeChat has about 1400 employees.

My guess is you could successfully run Twitter with a few hundred employees.

Your username justifies this take lol

WeChat does push to talk voice chat, image sharing like snapchat, broadcast messaging, video conferencing, video sharing, and digital payments. What is Twitter doing behind the scenes that justifies multiple times the amount of employees at WeChat?

WhatsApp is your strongest argument.

WeChat has always been part of Tencent. It was piggybacking on the infra of what was already one of the biggest tech companies in the world. That's like comparing the number of Gmail employees to Twitter, sure it serves lots of users, but it doesn't have to worry about so much of what a standalone company has to deal with

Twitter may be its own best argument. Twitter had 1,000 employees in 2012 and 200M MAUs. They only have about 50% more MAUs now, 10 years later.

They weren't making money with those 1000 employees, either. Revenue 10X'd since then (along with cost).

WhatsApp/YouTube were in the same boat when purchased. Good at getting active users but monetizing takes a lot of employees and they hadn't tackled that yet when acquired

Internal reps for large advertisers and agencies alone would exceed that number. Long tail advertisers can self-serve, but ad platforms need their whales and whales expect inside reps.

Depends what kind of ads. Targeted advertising sure. But simple brand ads campaigns don’t need that large of staffing.

I posit brand ads require more staffing, because they require more sales efforts to get advertisers to buy. Direct response is easier to measure the ROAS, but for brand ads, it's a really good idea to have someone selling ads constantly to your existing clients. Otherwise, many clients in the mid-size space ($100k-$5M/year, approximately) probably can't measure their return, which means those budgets are always at risk of being cut.

With direct response, even data-naive decision makers can figure the value of.

According to Wikipedia WeChat's parent company Tencent had 112,000 employees in 2021. That company has many different products, but where does the 1,400 number come from?

What has that website updated in like 12 years? Nearly nothing.

Have you ever worked on a large org with a main product that kept getting updated under the hoods to support more and more "invisible" features that ultimately drive how the product works?

Because if you did you should know that updates are constantly happening...

Twitter's longest standing and most valuable users access it solely via 3rd party smartphone apps, which use an API that's not been updated for many years and have zero new features from twitter in that time.

The service is identical to 2009 or something as far as I'm concerned, and still appears broken as far as video embeds go to this day. It's one of the heaviest and slowest loading sites I can think of.

Yeah.

It all looks pretty crazy. It seems like he's going to fail.

But he might succeed. You never know.

I just think he is trying to get rid of employees with low morale or those that don't want him as a boss. Twitter will be fine and there's a good chance it will do better under Elon's management.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

I wish him luck in successfully destroying that cesspool for a platform!

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