It's almost a month and Twitter is still online despite predictions of mayhem | Hacker News Reader

It's almost a month and Twitter is still online despite predictions of mayhem

searchenginejournal.com

24 pointschasd0030 comments

I think it's too early to say, but it is interesting on what timeline we should expect a failure or update our beliefs on how much bloat there was. I'm not sure personally, if we go a year with no major issues I'm willing to concede Elon was right about the bloat

Even if they manage to keep the service online, the fact that employees are sleeping in the office is a sign that they are now grossly understaffed.

We also don’t have much visibility into revenue now that it’s a private company. I’ve seen a lot of speculation that their ads product is falling apart and revenue is down. And obviously Twitter Blue seems to have been a chaotic failure.

twitter was profitable before the takeover; and they had invested in good auto scaling/recovery of systems to handle day-to-day through year-to-year problems; i for one am not surprised all seems okay on the consumer side after a month.

the real problems are when security patches need to be deployed to all levels of infrastructure and upgrades to all versions are required before patches go out.. that is the waiting game i'd be willing to bet will be most frustrating to them. but then again with so many people out of jobs there, there is that much more money to give to the remaining employees for incentives to live at the office

Maybe Musk was right about the bloat

It is fascinating that half (or more?) of Twitter's workforce can be released and there's no discernible degradation of the service. I wonder how many other tech CEO are looking at their organizations and wondering if they could slash similarly without losing platform performance.

> there's no discernible degradation of the service

Twitter advertisers would beg to differ.

The service has degraded for advertisers?

In terms of brand safety it has. But we haven’t seen the same backlash as when FB or YT had brand safety issues a few years ago. My guess is because the Elon stories are chumming the water for Twitter stories. Curious if it ever shakes out

We aren’t talking about brand safety, just whether the site is working as expected after firing all the engineers.

Yes. I've heard directly of the chaos. If I hadn't heard directly I wouldn't have commented but sadly have, from multiple people.

I'm interested to know more about what's failing.

The Latest Tweets feed on the Android app was completely broken for about a week for me and several other people.

Seems short-sighted. That Twitter hasn’t fallen over appears more like a credit to the SRE work that went into getting everything running on, effectively, autopilot. Today’s Twitter infra is clearly a far cry from the stuff a decade ago.

Yes. It just shows that it doesn't take 7,000+ employees to run the blue bird site.

Only around 500 to 1000 despite all the emotional reactions, outrage, FUD and unfounded apocalyptic prophesies made by the media and the doomsters predicting the imminent collapse of Twitter.

The twitter app itself could probably run fine with much less than that, I've seen skeleton engineering crews support hundreds of millions of MAUs pushing terabytes of data. What musk has sacrificed is everything besides the twitter app, which is probably not enough to maintain twitter the corporation in the long term.

> everything besides the twitter app

Like what? What has twitter acheived beside twitter app with more employees for a decade?

Having used twitter, I don't know what I don't know, but it's hard to imagine how the company could possibly have 7K employees. Maybe 500 to 1K seems more reasonable given what's there.

Did the UK/German employees ever get paid for November?

There are those wishing it to fail, those wishing it to succeed. Wishing won't help. It will find its own level. We can only stand and watch.

Small things are breaking, but the Cassandra-like predictions of major outages appear to have been wrong so far.

Think it's a bit early to tell for sure, many predictions overplay the short term and underplay the long term or sometimes vice versa. Some of that bloat that's no longer there may have been what made Twitter stable without those employees now. What I think Twitter has lost is slack, for better or worse. Twitter may just be stuck in its current form for the most part for the remainder of its live (not that pre-Elon Musk Twitter was gearing up for a pivot or anything). If they do find a new lucrative pet project to put resources into or significant regulations to deal with on a technical level, maybe it will just be less over-engineered, or maybe it will be covered in band-aids.

Color me surprised it was all bluster.

Clear as day that Trump pretty much stopped being able to sustain liberal outrage and now the Borg has decided Musk is a Republican (he's certainly not) in order to continue the perpetual heroin drip of anger and hatred they live off of.

He explicitly endorsed republicans ahead of the recent election. How can you be _certain_ he isn't a republican? As a follow up, how do elon's boots taste?

> As a follow up, how do elon's boots taste?

aren't you just proving my point that you're blinded by hatred?

can you just admit you were wrong? "now the Borg has decided Musk is a Republican (he's certainly not)" is just not true. The Borg didn't decide anything, he endorsed republicans

Getting the ex-president to call for the termination of the constitution was a kind of mayhem.

But that was on Truth social and not twitter?

It was a response to "the twitter files" being released on Twitter, by the new owner of Twitter.

And it was made by someone who had been invited back onto Twitter by Musk.

Eh we all know Trump uses toilet paper with the US Constitution printed on it. I doubt that is what prompted him to being of the mind that his whims are more important than democracy or the US Constitution. Release of those "files" only led him to repeat what he has said/implied on multiple occasions in the past, including encouraging the Jan 6 coup attempt.

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