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Comment by eastendguy | Hacker News Reader

Wow, Twitter is collapsing much faster than I expected. With PG and some other high-profile accounts gone, many will loose interest in their Twitter feed fast. Rinse and repeat.

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I thought it'd collapse on the tech side before the policy side. Rather shocked the mask has come off this quickly on what "free speech" actually meant.

Large distributed systems that have already been built can often limp along for a very long time before falling over. I would give Twitter at least another 3-6 months for stuff to start breaking.

Yep. Distributed systems, like any complex systems, follow "slowly at first, then all at once."

Agreed entirely, but I thought the "free speech" stuff would last longer than that 3-6 months, if for no other reason than to avoid the embarassment of it.

On what level do you mean? 2fa already broke at one point (no clue if they fixed it I don't use two-factor as my twitter account is not terribly important)

You'll know the level when it happens - I am referring to multi-day outages. 2fa being broken doesn't surprise me at all. I bet the didn't want to pay the bill.

To be clear, it could take years.

Oh yeah the full "can't access the site" could be a long way off. Could also be tomorrow if the wrong thing starts breaking and no one left understands how to maintain it.

While I sort of expected the same... I think our HN crowd (myself included) is biased to assume the importance of technology more than the importance of the social dimension. But also, I think Musk put a heavy hand on the tiller far faster than I expected he would (the wise thing to do would have been to assume there was much to learn; he seems to have stomped into his new company with a belief he knows what's best, and that's not meshing well with what was already there).

But we should remember our own tech-first biases. Twitter ran in frequent-fail-whale mode for months with users accepting that because it fed their social needs. The moment it stopped serving those needs, people started leaving no matter how good the tech is.

It's a testament to the work created by their amazing infra team (now mostly gone) to have the platform on autopilot for so long.

No offense, but pg doesn't really post all that much stuff that would make me reconsider Twitter as a platform if he left. And, to be fair, neither does anyone else. Twitter is a marketing platform not a social network.

I use it primarily as a RSS feed and the occasional "get up to speed with the latest news fast" alternative.

Except for the fact it isn't really collapsing. A couple people throwing a fit and saying they are leaving doesn't change the majority.

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