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Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

A lot of non-knowledgable folks expected twitter to immediately collapse after firing half their engineers. Instead, this is what that kind of failure looks like. Functionality starts to become flaky, some non operational entirely. You can't rely on the status page anymore. Innovation rapidly plateaus. Quality of service suffers on the whole.

Rome didn't fall in a day.

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The claim that Twitter would collapse immediately never made any sense. Most engineers tend to design software so that they can take holidays. There might be a handful of Ops people who may be need to be available 24/7 but even in a website the size of Twitter those probably number fewer than a few dozen.

Were there prominent engineers making this claim or just the mainstream media that doesn't understand systems engineering?

mainstream media generally understand nothing outside of media, and is especially ignorant about science and technology.

People who claimed to be senior SREs wrote long Twitter threads about how it was going to look like a post-nuclear wasteland within a week of the purchase.

> Rome didn't fall in a day.

Freenode didn't either, but this Twitter thing seriously gives me the same sort of vibes.

At first, it might even increase stability because deploys are a big source of outages, and now there are a lot fewer deploys happening.

But the risk of a major outage -- one that the remaining engineers are ill-equipped to handle -- grows. There are way fewer people paying down tech debt, and the ones still trying to deliver features are now doing so in a minefield.

> Rome didn't fall in a day.

the expression is "Rome was not built in a day."

When dealing with issues like "the Sack of Rome", they pretty much did take place on particular days

http://web.archive.org/web/20180318005947/https://www.histor...

It was presumably a play on the expression, not something they thought was the common expression.

not everybody reading the word play would know the reference, it's useful to tell them.

and while plays on words are great, when they're counterfactual it gets confusing what is mean, and becomes unclear if the author knows what's being said, and Rome did fall in a day, 6 times

That is not what is meant by the phrase “the fall of Rome”, which refers to the end of the western Roman Empire.

It's like quitting smoking. If you're very good at quitting smoking, because you already quit 6 times, it means the first 5 times you haven't really quite. If Rome fell 6 times it also means at least 5 times it didn't fall for good and thus it took more than a day to fall for good.

but the phrase is "Rome was not built in a day", nobody says Rome did not fall in a day

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=rome+did+not+fall+in+a+day&...

If you want to make the case that Rome did not fall in a day, that's fine, you may have even made the case in your comment. I was just commenting on using the stock phrase wrong and expecting it to resonate.

For example, I can say "An apple a day sends you straight to the doctor." If I said that, most people would recognize that I had twisted the original phrase, and could decide if they wanted to engage with what I wrote. But if I wrote, "just like an apple a day, gluten every day will send you to the doctor", I'd expect more pushback from people, "hey, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense"

> When dealing with issues like "the Sack of Rome", they pretty much did take place on particular days

I’d took much more than one of those for Rome to fall. Which was the point.

That wasn’t the fall of Rome, though, not really. There’s a reasonable argument that the fall of Rome started in the first century BC, when the Republic destabilised, culminating in Marius, Sulla, Caesar and friends, and ended in the 15th century AD or so.

In fairness, I have yet to see a first party status page that reliably detects all outages.

Many intentionally don't show outages. Amazon is generally quite picky about what is considered an AWS service outage

Of course they are picky, because they have SLAs that say outages cost them money. This speaks to the need for independent monitoring/auditing to ensure that companies are being honest about the metrics that they provide. Right now, no one can hold them accountable for lying on their status pages, because every customer must make their own case that there even was an outage. Worse, there’s no truly independent party to make them accept such evidence, so you are ultimately dependent on them deciding to come clean.

I'll give credit where it's due, Shopify's status page is pretty reliable at showing downtime as it happens.

This website is the real status page for me

Too many bonuses and SLA contracts depend on the “status” for it to be a reliably self reported metric.

When I was in one of these positions, I negotiated bonuses to allow for some failures specifically to avoid this type of conflict of interest. I think it’s also mentioned in the seminal SRE book published by Google.

Github is good, though I suspect that will change given the amount of issues they run into daily: https://www.githubstatus.com/history

One of the worst things about the "new Twitter" is that the "old Twitter" provided so much surplus to the world in terms of the open source work their engineers did, all the design frameworks, the neat technical blogs, the sponsored events and whimsical nature of the company. It felt very much in the original spirit of Silicon Valley. It was a fine, if slightly underperforming company who had ~infinite runway to fix things as they had billions of dollars in the bank and were roughly break-even profitable.

"New Twitter" feels like the worst version of private equity LBO capitalism. Suddenly the rationale for every decision is entirely extractive finance; load the company with debt to juice your shareholder returns, fire everyone who can't be proven to be profitable, break your leases, close your offices, kill all perks, cease all meetings of your employee affinity groups, make sure nobody is working on projects that don't have a straight-line to revenue growth, squeeze every dollar out of your users, monetize any surplus that you were previously providing while relying on inertia to keep your users through the much worse user experience.

Elon-era Twitter is basically 2000s-era Sears -- and man is it depressing that people are cheering it on.

Hard not to think Musk's entourage and zealotry for layoffs didn't provide cover for the more recent tech layoff sprees.

“2 day a week office requirement = 20% voluntary departures,” Calacanis wrote. “Day zero…sharpen your blades boys."

[1]: https://www.yahoo.com/video/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-messag...

Adverse selection. The people who voluntarily go have the most options en are generally the most skilled.

> Rome didn't fall in a day.

But a few hours were enough for Pompeii.

There's always hope :)

Why root for it to collapse? Seems like a bizarre thing to hope for (but I’ve never been on Twitter so I’m coming at this from a distance).

Personally I'm rooting for all centralized, corporate, ad-financed tech to collapse and be replaced by open, federated standards.

I am afraid one does not imply the other and that this will also leave room for new centralised company-controlled services.

kalleboo summarized it handsomely.

I really dislike seeing (mega-) corps usurping the public domain, and find it highly offensive and dangerous to democracy.

Twitter isn’t the public square, it’s a private revenue stream for Twitter. It shouldn’t be allowed to sway people into believing it’s a free speech platform, nor should it be used as the public space for official announcements by governments and other authorities.

> A lot of non-knowledgable folks expected twitter to immediately collapse after firing half their engineers.

AFAICT at the time, that was more a strawman crea5ed by Musk defenders than the normal criticism/expectation of people who viewed the actions as unwise.

I think a lot of people maybe conflated “immediately become broken” (which it did, pretty much) with “immediately literally vanish” (which was never likely).

> Innovation rapidly plateaus

Twitter shipped more features in the last 6 months than in the last 10 years. And that’s with a quarter of the staff too.

I know. What innovation has twitter done in the 5 years prior? Not too much

Someone above was genuinely impressed by allowing alt text on images.

Wasn't Spaces under the previous management?

That said, I don't know what bar for "feature over the last 6 months" is actually meaningful. The problem with Twitter was never the user-facing product, it was the thing that actually made them money - the ads. Twitter usage exploded under the Trump years while revenue lagged. The product that Twitter should be innovating isn't user facing.

They just added ads in the tweet replies (as opposed to just the main feed) and will be giving a percentage of the revenue to the person starting the thread.

I can only think of Spaces, doubling the character limit and something about NFTs on profiles.

Do we count turning on something half-baked, finding bugs, turning it off, it wasn't really off, turning it back on later with 3/4th the promised feature 5-6 feature releases?

Or maybe we're counting a feature that was developed but not released for N (reasonable) reasons, now discounting those N reasons and releasing it anyway as a signal that there's some sort of innovation occurring?

Indeed. Shipping new changes is actually the reason these glitches are occurring.

I'm pretty sure you're wrong even just going by (edit: pre-2022Q4) features listed on the wikipedia page[1], and that appears to leave out a number of cool and useful things such as polls and the extensive support for image alt-text.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Twitter

Like the emergency kill switch that shut down all of Twitter Spaces for the entire platform when Elon was asked a single pointed question he didn't want to answer.

https://fortune.com/2022/12/16/elon-musk-shuts-down-twitter-...

there isn't a much better analogy to the interchangeability of bug and feature than this comment.

So innovation is just shipping new features? Don't really believe that's a great metric to track something so subjective, I believed innovation had a bit more weight than "let's do something and ship it! Whatever!".

Please explain how the old twitter innovated by your definition

I didn't state anywhere that old Twitter was innovating, that's your strawman to beat :)

and you believe that right? jesus

If Twitter has issues it’s because Musk is a foolish billionaire who fired too many people. If it doesn’t have issues then it’s just a testament to the brilliant engineers before his tenure. In other words he can’t win. I expect Twitter will have it’s wins and losses (both technical and fiscal) over the next months but I expect that “knowledgeable” folk will continue to have the same conversation each time there is a loss.

Or you could take a step back and rationally access the situation as Musk's ego causing him to be locked into a doomed to fail deal, and his desperate attempts to turn Twitter around failing spectacularly as he almost immediately alienated advertisers.

Instead we have a false dichotomy and more Musk cult of personality.

I don't see what is false about what I said, the conversation has played out literally over and over. One call fails and Musk is an ego-maniac that ruined Twitter, nothing happens for a week and it is "all praise the great engineers he fired". There is such intellectual dishonesty. I have zero loyalty to Musk, I will criticize his mistakes and laud his successes, can you say the same? Calling any pro-Musk sentiment a cult of personality is just another trick to stick to your dogma.

There is no intellectual dishonesty.

Moments after Musk took charge, he enabled the Edit feature. Entire feature length movies where then uploaded to twitter via this feature.

He pushed forward buying twitter blue, essentially making twitter verification useless as a feature.

As I already said, advertisers pulled out almost instantly, causing his financial situation to be practically unsolvable.

The website is still up and running, yes, because servers don't magically explode the next day, but to treat this as intellectual dishonesty is cult of personality. Musk has only hurt Twitter since acquiring it. If all you are capable of is straw manning about the one person you read who meme'd the site would fall down the next day because they've never written a server before, then fuck off.

The status page being wrong is somebody making the decision to leave it green in spite of compromised functionality.

Or no-one left knows how to update it. Has it updated for any of the post-Sink outages?

im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman although im sure some of the HN history buffs could correct me.

the whole saga still gobsmacks me to this day. one of the wealthiest men in america tantrum-spends 44 billion dollars on a website, then goes through an agonizing six months pretending he didnt have to buy it and is eventually forced by a judge to complete the acquisition. next, said oligarch fumbles the execution so badly the company basically winds up firing everyone it can and accidentally lock themselves out of the headquarters for the weekend in the process. Eventually the man himself, Musk, desperately pleads for "anyone who writes code" to meet him in the dead of night on the tenth floor of his now empty office only to wind up with midlevel managers pledging their fidelity as the vichy scramble to find their place in the new order and various services begin to fail. Finally, mercifully, Musk is hauled back to Tesla where share prices are tumbling almost as quickly as twitter users are jumping ship, but not before unshackling a prison full of reprobates and racists to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts.

the best part was all the so-sure-they're-right HN takes that ended up being absolutely incorrect every step of the way

And they still believe it! He's an unparalleled genius and every single breath he takes directly contributes to saving the world. Unfortunately there's a queer globalist Hollywood blue tick pizza trafficking Democrat conspiracy making it look like Twitter is a massive dumpfire, trying to make him look bad despite every single one of his decisions being unquestionably perfect and logical.

I can't figure out which takes you're talking about. I have to assume they're the takes that twitter is closing up shop and that everyone is moving to Mastodon, and that Mastodon is scalable enough to accept those people.

Journalists Remain on Twitter, but Tweet Slightly Less

https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter...

> only a small handful have deactivated their accounts

This is a bad metric. Twitter takes the dubious position that it's a good idea to allow usernames to be re-registered when people delete their accounts (this one can't be blamed on naughty ol' Mr Car; it's a _vintage_ design flaw). So deleting your account, particularly if you're prominent, is a bad idea as it allows for impersonation.

A better metric would have been how many accounts went silent, but they don't seem to have done that one.

Elon Musk is never going to be able to buy twitter

oh wait maybe he got the deal, but he'll never pay for it, the whole thing is just a stunt

oh wait maybe he got the deal, but he's so stupid, he'll never be able to pay for it, but he'll be forced to buy it anyway, bankrupting him in the process!

oh wait I guess he just bought twitter. well it's going to fall apart immediately next week now that he fired everyone who kept the lights on!

etc. etc.

Nice fanfic, but no one ever said he wasn't able, just that he was not willing. I think this is pretty clear by the fact that he tried to wiggle out of it and had to be forced by the court. No one was ever doubting that he didn't have the money to buy twitter, just that he wasn't stupid enough to go through with something so dumb just because he got triggered.

nah, people did say that. there was a lot of hyperbole. what's important is whether there were folks who who said all those things, and as to whether they were worth paying attention to their opinion in the first place.

we learn from the best https://elonmusk.today/

>im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman

Probably not, but Crassus did live in the time of Rome's centuries-long inflection point.

It's hard to use a phrase like "richest person in the world" in an age where living standards and currencies varied so much, but he was extremely, notoriously, extravagantly wealthy.

He cornered the housing market by showing up to burning buildings with a fire brigade, and offering to put out the fire only if the owners sold the property to him at a steep discount. If they didn't, he let the property burn.

He was eventually killed in a war with the Parthians, and legend has it that they found him so repulsive, they poured molten gold down his corpse's throat as a message.

I'm not focusing on a single "hitman" taking down Rome. Who really knows but it was a multitude of factors. My point here is that large systems don't typically acutely fail. It's more of a gradual process of rust and decay that accelerates them into irrelevance.

Your point about what a total mess this was is absolutely spot on though. It didn't have to end like this. This was a tragedy of blunders.

Yep totally. Kind of like the "broken window" phenomena with a building/neighborhood where if one broken thing doesn't get fixed everything else goes pretty quickly

It’s a hypothesis, not a phenomenon. Several studies and statistical analyses shown that regression to the mean and external factors were better explanations for the decrease in crime than the zero-tolerance policy. The theory itself is based on a presumed correlation with no real proof of causality.

I guess a counterpoint would be freenode, but maybe that isn't large enough to count.

Structurally, from a people perspective, complicated but it’s not really systems complicated. IRC is simple, as is the software Freenode was built on.

The featureset of Freenode, compared to the featureset of Twitter, the company is a couple of orders of magnitude off.

>I'm not focusing on a single "hitman" taking down Rome. Who really knows but it was a multitude of factors. My point here is that large systems don't typically acutely fail. It's more of a gradual process of rust and decay that accelerates them into irrelevance.

I think a lot of people with experience understood this fundamental concept but the issue is that it seems difficult to convey this into a headline grabbing series of news articles.

Therefore, it seems as if the whole hubub at the beginning of this saga was this concept but massively overinflated(OMG twitter is going to collapse overnight). In fact I guess you can argue that it was so overinflated that it was lying but thats the standard we have to live with for now.

> It's more of a gradual process of rust and decay that accelerates them into irrelevance.

precisely. entropy tends to increase in this universe. humans are special because our phenotypical effect of creating order is unparalleled in scale, precision, and sophistication.

The funniest thing to me is how the Billionaire railed about a lack of free speech, but then tried to turn free speech into a commodity that could be purchased for his own opportunistic profit.

Every day is a day closer to when Twitter will vanish, curing public addiction to and dependency upon it. Something else will come later, and slowly be corrupted again as well.

It would have been easier and much less costly to just have made an app from scratch and to have left Twitter to it's prior dysfunctional obscurity.

We shouldn't lose sight of the role that David Sacks and Jason Calcanis has played.

Many of the worst decisions have their fingerprints all over it.

Purposefully didn't focus on "whose fault it is". A long chain of bad decisions led to this situation. Twitter's board shares a fair amount of the blame too, for example. So does Jack Dorsey for not giving twitter much attention during his reign as CEO.

Wait, why does Jack Dorsey deserve blame? He took a failing company and conned an idiot into paying 2.5x market value for it. Measured by shareholder value, he's one of the most brilliant CEOs in history.

He deserves a lot of blame for not standing up for his former team when they were treated so poorly during the transition.

Firing people is normal. Doing it in an arbitrarily cruel way is not.

What could he have done?

The company was taken private and the new owner started burning the place down to rebuild it in the image of a golden cow or something.

I guess he could have tweeted for mercy.

the team was paid salary for the term of their contributions PLUS severance. let’s also add proceeds from the stock sale.

are you really saying they’re owed something more by the owners of the company?

Looks like they only ended up with one month pay as severance. Not great… Source: https://fortune.com/2023/01/07/twitter-employees-laid-off-el...

15 years ago it wasn't clear whether Facebook or Twitter was going to be the winner (or if they'd both just be another MySpace).

Jack is responsible for Twitter losing.

It always felt like Twitter co didn't actually understand what Twitter was and almost all of the product innovation came from the community rather than twitter itself.

Twitter's only failure is that it never returned a profit. When you look at the social landscape, it's hard to argue anyone has succeeded other than Facebook.

Twitter's product is great and it didn't need to be as large as Facebook. It shouldn't need to twist itself for the greatest common denominator users who required immediate gratification via algorithmic feeds and short memes.

> When you look at the social landscape, it's hard to argue anyone has succeeded other than Facebook.

YouTube and TikTok seem to be doing alright.

Twitch and Snap too.

TikTok is private, but is said to be losing money. Snap is in the same boat as Twitter as being largely unprofitable. It is unclear if Twitch is profitable either.

Twitter definitely punched above its weight as the go-to forum for companies, politicians, celebrities, media, etc.

Or conversely, as the go-to forum for companies, politicians, etc., Twitter punched well below its weight for generating revenue.

Dorsey retained his stake in the company -- he apparently believed in musk at least far enough to stay invested.

The board succeeded in selling the company and returning value to investors. I think they did their job.

I made bank off the deal, very pleased that Elon is such an idiot

The board did their job perfectly!

> is eventually forced by a judge

I might be misremembering but it didn't actually end up as a judge's decision, did it? I remember that they were starting discovery, lots of amusingly embarrassing things old Elno did/said were coming out and he said "OK NEVER MIND I'll buy it then" which suspended the court case pending him actually doing that (which, as we all sadly know now, he did.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/technology/musk-twitter-d...

> The Delaware Chancery Court judge has given Mr. Musk until Friday to close his long-promised, $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter. If he doesn’t, Chancellor McCormick will preside over a trial in November that could end with Mr. Musk being forced to make good on the deal he made with Twitter in April.

Close enough.

This might be semantic quibbling, but although it never came to decision, everybody with any legal knowledge whatsoever knew that the decision would be in Twitter's favor, and I assume eventually Elon's lawyers got it across to him that he had no chance of winning the case. IMO it's likely that, rather than discovery, prompted the surrender - if I could avoid paying $44 billion for Twitter with a couple embarrassing text leaks, I'd take that deal. So in that sense I don't think it's inaccurate to say he was forced by the judge, albeit indirectly.

Yea, he weaseled out of the trial like he does everything. I wish the judge would have instead forced the trial to move forward no matter what, making him pay both financially and politically/socially.

Something I find interesting are the parallels from current day billionaires to dictators and depots throughout history. I was recently listening to Behind the Bastard, where they spoke of Nicolae Ceaușescu [1]. Among the terrible things he did, he also constructed the largest civilian government building in the world, the Parliamentary Palace. It's sits at 30% capacity today; because it was built not to be used, but to fan his ego.

I remembered always being told growing up that capitalism was superior to communism because it intelligently allocated resources based on the market. But by giving a few people billions of dollars, we're seeing them do the same things communist dictatorships did; throwing money blindly into vanity projects. Like The Line [2], or Telosa [3]. I have to wonder if the modern billionaires are creating a similar instability in society, even if it is lessened by their not being the head of government.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telosa

Nobody said it was perfect. Humans make mistakes and are corrupt. But the results are much better than the alternatives.

What’s the opposite of “fan fiction”?

True stories about reality.

Hate fiction or revenge fiction, according to tvtropes...

I'm kinda holding out for the slash version.

> but not before unshackling a prison full of reprobates and racists to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts.

Let me fix that for you:

> but not before unshackling a prison full of [people we disagree with] to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts.

Someone send this script to David Fincher!

you have a way with words

>im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman although im sure some of the HN history buffs could correct me.

The imperial administration never really recovered from Commodus (who had a bunch of high-ranking officials murdered), although there were plenty of good emperors after him (e.g. Diocletian, Constantine, Justinian), but their achievements tended to be lost by their successors.

I mean, from my point of view as a passive Twitter user whose live has been unaffected by Elon taking over, I read this just as another repeat of the same ‘Anti-Musk narrative’ that keeps getting tossed around like a football. I don’t care either way, I’m not a Musk apologist, but I would just ask why this whole ordeal upsets you (and others) so much?

Okay he immediately fired a ton of people from a company that was notorious for setting money on fire. Is that really surprising, that he guts his newly acquired company, so he can rebuild it the way he sees fit? Especially considering every single other huge tech company has laid off enormous amounts of employees in the last year? Are you just as mad at them as you are Elon?

Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad? Elon is going to do Elon things, and if it bothers you so much maybe try blocking him on Twitter, and ignoring any news you see about him. It’s not worth the stress. Especially if it causes you to take time out of your day to write such a rage filled post. Just go about your day, and don’t worry about how Elon chooses to run his companies. I doubt everyone cared this much about how Twitter was run before this, just go back to that.

Why do you think that folks discussing this situation find it upsetting, stressful and/or maddening?

The idea that blocking the billionaire owner would prevent me from noticing Twitter is struggling is a little silly.

I mean, from my point of view as a passive Twitter user whose life has been unaffected by Elon taking over, I read this just as another repeat of the same ‘Anti-Musk narrative’ that keeps getting tossed around like a football. I don’t care either way, I’m not a Musk apologist, but I would just ask why this whole ordeal upsets you (and others) so much?

>Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad?

The people who are mad are the type of people who were used to having the illusion of influence, or thought they had the social currency to do/get what they wanted with Twitter.

They've lost that perceived control, and are suddenly anxious that they're addicted to a service they cannot influence or use for social power. They get happy for being able to drill in Musk's failure. To them, Musk is a convenient "rich" that they can finally apply "eat the rich" to.

I don’t think that’s a fair characterisation.

I am for instance not and have never been a twat and have disliked most of the discourse there and certainly resented the disproportionate amount of attention the twats got.

However, I had and have little reason to trust that Musk won’t make twitter into simply a different kind of hell. He certainly said as much with all his (ultimately) fake “free speech” stance.

Basically just because a thing is bad doesn’t mean it can’t get worse.

If Musk manages to make twitter irrelevant though I’ll thank him for it.

> I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad?

It's because a lot of people have invested time into curating their little social sphere on Twitter and Mad Car Guy has set the company on a path to utter destruction. People don't like to have their things taken away.

You may think Twitter "set money on fire" before Musk but objectively they were approximately breaking even and now they clearly are not.

Elon was just unnecessarily cruel with the layoffs imo, if he had been more professional and less political I think people would have had a different reaction.

The anti Elon group grew pretty massively when he laid off people in the way that he did. Anecdotally, I was neutral of Elon before the layoffs but that changed when I saw the way he conducted himself.

>"I'm not X, but ..."

Hmm, I've heard that phrase before.

“Elon is going to do Elon things, why get mad?”

Quite the patronizing tone to say basically nothing.

But I’ll add: tech forums (like this) are built for discussions about tech stuff (like twitter), so of course you’ll hear people floating their opinions about these topics. That doesn’t mean they care more/less than you.

We get it, you’re above such petty discourse, but many tech employees see a difference between market layoffs and the richest man in the world buying a company on a whim and firing people over printed code reviews. Does holding that opinion mean that they’re stressing? Probably not. I’d bet most are just replying on the toilet.

For someone that says they're not a Musk apologist or to ignore Musk, you seem to have a rather long history of coming out specifically to defend Musk. You realize your immediate comment history is apparent, right?

For reference [1] [2] [3] and so forth.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33999369

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33986234

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33986409

I guess you got me? You pointed out comments that came from one particular issue/ thread. That’s not a ‘rather long’ history. And as I said in those comments it had nothing to do with Elon. That was doxxing, plain and simple. And my mind hasn’t changed on that. Doesn’t matter If it’s Elon, Taylor Swift, or my next door neighbor. It’s wrong. Mind you, a high profile celebrity’s convoy got attacked right after all that happened, supposedly because they thought they were getting Elon. My point is just move on with your lives. It’s just recreational outrage at this point.

> I would just ask why this whole ordeal upsets you (and others) so much? ... Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad? ...

> I doubt everyone cared this much about how Twitter was run before this

There are two very separate issues. Some people are upset and mad (so good question, and I bet you get some good answers). Other people, including me, are not at all upset or mad BUT we think it's extremely interesting. And important.

> Innovation rapidly plateaus.

Yeah when I think of innovation I think of Twitter, and when I think of stagnation, I think of Elon Musk - the guy with the rocket company /s.

It's a bit naive to think SpaceX's ability to innovate is Musk's own doing. Gwynne Shotwell has been the one calling the shots for a long, long time.

Gwynne calls the shots because Elon put her there.

"Surely this next success is ALSO due to luck" - the loser comforts themself on the sidelines. "Surely, this is simply the 14th time they have gotten incredibly, improbably lucky."

Twitter is (was?) a large contributor to OSS projects, no?

I’d wager a great deal of SpaceX’s success is down to competent management and a lot of people who believe in the mission and are willing to work very hard to make it happen.

I’d also wager that a not insignificant amount of time and effort is spent insulating Musk from anything important, rather like how an oyster coats an irritant in layers of nacre.

Twitter’s problem is that they no longer have competent management. Plus they’ve never needed the kind of organisational immune system that can deal with something like Musk before and are therefore wide open.

What's with people constantly inventing myths about SpaceX?

It's all out in the open, Musk played an important role in getting it going and still plays an important role in running the R&D side of the company, leaving the 'operational' stuff to Shotwell. There are plenty of testimonies from current and previous employees showing this.

It's pathetic to be inventing stories just because you can't accept that someone you dislike has been successful in some things.

No - no he is not. Since he bought Twitter it seems as though he hasn't stepped foot in it judging by his private flight records[1].

It has been no secret at all that at Musk's company's significant management resources are dedicated to managing Elon Musk, and when he gets his hands into the rest of the company things tend to go wrong[2,3].

Musk is the money and was the hype man. By all accounts he was an absolute disaster of a manager, and the goal of dealing with him was to keep him as away from regular employees as possible. It's just in the case of SpaceX everyone is committed to the big lie because they all want to build spaceships - if you're smart enough to do rocket science, you're smart enough to do almost anything else and make bank. At Tesla it's the same - people wanted to build environmentally friendly, self-driving cars (Autopilot might be increasingly a catastrophe, but it's not hard to see why people would want to work on it).

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-jet-not-recently-f...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/19/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-extreme-...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/19/elon-musk...

Not sure why you’re quite so personally upset by this idea.

Think about it - if you’re someone who wants to continue making cool rockets you’re going to tell the person with all the money anything they want to hear, including “Oh yes, you’re so smart and your R&D contribution is so important, thank you for thinking of these things, how would we have managed without you.”

The last thing you want is the person with all the money to stop giving you money because their notoriously fragile ego has been bruised.

A lot of folks aren’t open to change and see change and experiments as frightening yielding biased conclusions.

It’s fine to have opinions but drawing bold conclusions is best done with factual data over a longer time horizons.

> A lot of folks aren’t open to change and see change and experiments as frightening yielding biased conclusions. > It’s fine to have opinions but drawing bold conclusions is best done with factual data over a longer time horizons.

Not sure if you've heard of the McNamara fallacy, but it's something I see a lot on HN.

Point is, the twitter saga is happening now. I'm sure a retroactive analysis of twitter's financials, user growth, activity, etc. would be fascinating ten years from now... but at that point it would have become an academic curiosity. Perhaps a curiosity we can learn from, but in that timespan the tech industry might be totally different.

It's thus silly to brush away obvious qualitative observations and dismiss conclusions from them as irrelevant. Worth noting their limitations, sure.

A bit silly to call this whole saga an "experiment" either. Musk didn't even want Twitter. He decided to axe a good chunk of the folks arbitrarily. By many accounts, a good chunk of the folks left don't want to be there either. Is it an experiment? If so, it's one of the least controlled and poorly set up experiments I've ever seen.

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