When will Twitter collapse? (Elon Musk firings) | Hacker News Reader

When will Twitter collapse? (Elon Musk firings)

9 pointsoakenfloor17 comments

When you ask on HN whether software companies hire too many engineers most answers are negative. Twitter has lost 50% of its workers and Elon Musk just recently tweeted: "Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out. Twitter should feel faster.", and they've also released new features. HN commenters said that due to the firings, Twitter wouldn't be able to change things without breaking everything in the way anymore. When "Twitter will collapse"?

Relevant post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823

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It seemed that there was a lot of people here on HN that were rooting for Twitter's demise, but I personally don't understand the mentality where someone must lose for me to win. I read a lot of financial news and have noticed that Yahoo finance front page has been covered with articles predicting Twitter's failure, almost like they want it to fail.

Also, the number of articles about Elon's activity at Twitter will cause Tesla to collapse. I'm sure Elon has many teams of capable people at each company that does not require constant input from Elon. It's a bit unnerving to see the degree that media has taken this.

Most of us were rooting for the demise of Twitter before Musk took over. Having Musk fuck it up as hard as he does now is just the cherry on top.

Him losing billions makes it just so much better. As someone who really have never cared for his antics and the cult surrounding him.

I think most people who want Twitter to fail mainly want the cult of personality surrounding him to go away. He's gotten billions of government money for his projects and managed to get at least one public rail project cancelled. IMO I don't think it would be too bad if he was made to look like a fool, just so politicians aren't so willing to fund his businesses anymore.

> Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out. Twitter should feel faster.

Without more details, I'm going to hypothesize that these are just the sort of routine improvements and performance wins that such teams deploy on a semi-regular basis. Anything can be called a "significant architecture change" if you want it to be.

If it is in fact a very major change, though, it was probably in the pipeline long before Elon arrived, given the time it takes to develop and fully test such things. It's quite possible that the past couple months were spent entirely on testing and refining a large-scale change that had already been mostly complete pre-acquisition.

I think Elon is being more aggressive in pushing out changes. Many times companies get the "don't rock the boat" mentality for fear of breaking something, and feel that what they have is good enough.

> I think Elon is being more aggressive in pushing out changes.

What evidence do we have for this?

He's pushed aggressively for a few specific features, but we don't know how much of the work was done before the layoffs, whether that pace of development is sustainable, and whether it extends beyond his pet projects.

> What evidence do we have for this?

If you use the site you can literally see new changes daily, not all of them are great but at least it's not a stagnated mess like before.

As a commenter in that thread suggested (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33986124), slow degradation of the value of using Twitter is a more likely outcome than a sudden "collapse". This is not contradicted by the site having stayed up, or by there being more users now than before. The engagement metrics can go up in the short term, but lead to 4chan in the long term.

I'm starting to see some degradation already -- for example, a bunch of researchers I follow fled to Mastodon, so Twitter is less useful to me than before. I think this is a second-order effect of Musk's cruel/trollish behavior and of the content moderation, sales, legal, and policy teams being gutted, functions which someone who views Twitter as a "software and services company" (his phrasing) probably see as less important.

Devs here and elsewhere desperately wanted Twitter to fail because if Elon showed it was possible to just fire half your employees and actually end up with a better product then the jobs of most people here would be at risk. Now other leaders might think like Elon and end up firing devs en masse as cost cutting in hard times. The truth is there is a lot of bloat in FAANG scale companies. If tomorrow google fired 50% of it's army of tens of thousands of engineers, it wouldn't hurt at all. Might even end up helping given they created way better products when there were less engineers than at present.

Isn't too early to claim Twitter is a better product now?

BTW what exactly is better?

I hardly use Twitter but the few times I did, I didn't recognize any change.

There is a lot of abandonware out there that limps along. Most applicable is all the semi-failed social media: MySpace, Digg, LiveJournal, Foursquare, etc. are all still out there. Maybe they have problems with illegal unmoderated content and bad uptime, but nobody cares. Some still make money. I doubt any, maybe all of them put together, are worth 10% of what Elon paid for Twitter.

But many articles and news reports such as this one [0] also told us that it will collapse any minute now™ since the start of November. If not in a matter of weeks! [0]. /s

Perhaps it is time for the doomsters to admit that they purposefully were spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt and complete nonsense to predict an imminent collapse that didn't happen after the firings.

Twitter is still running just fine with less than 1,000 engineers and no total 'collapse' happened in weeks since those news reports.

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...

Keep in mind that what's written is mostly opinion. Very few people know the working of Twitter's IT infrastructure so it's mostly all guesses. Even if there are people that truly know what they are talking about their comments get drowned out by all the people that want to give their opinion.

We used to see the twitter whale a lot in the past but not lately. That hints to the idea that they have harden the infrastructure to tolerate common problems. Given the past problems with these social media companies that were related to a one point of failure that brought down the whole network. I suspect that it takes a lot to bring down the whole system at once.

There won't be any collapse. The remaining engineers are leveling up and understanding what they need to know. My experience has been that if I don't know a system, I can get familiar enough with it within weeks. If for some reason I can't figure out a part then I treat it as a black box and work towards replacing it. If the remaining engineers can't do the same then it's time to get a leader that can help them thru the situation. All these tech companies have spent top dollar to hire the best so they can get thru the knowledge loss relatively soon. There's plenty of brain power left at twitter to get them through the current problems.

> Twitter is still running just fine

The website/service is running but the company appears to have issues with rent payments[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34206993

I'm sure there are some heavy negotiations going on to get out of leases or renegotiate them.

"Scale free networks" dont collapse or something.

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