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Comment by CodeWriter23 | Hacker News Reader

This story lacks the back story. Musk was prompted to investigate engagement issues about 3 weeks ago by a bunch of people doing the “take your account private” test and nearly all of them reporting increased engagement when private. Musk did it for a day, I personally did not see his result. About 5 days ago he posted about the team fixing two major engagement bugs. Point is he has had them focused on engagement for at least a couple of weeks.

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I see people holding these sorts of theories about Facebook algorithms, too. They tend to be entirely bullshit.

The folks taking their accounts private aren't doing any sort of scientific test, and there are folks who try it who don't see engagement go up. Unless you're somehow doing statistically significant tests with large groups of users, the same content, at the same time, there are an immense number of confounding variables here.

Here's what he found subsequent to taking his account private. You can judge for yourself it these were major bugs or not. But the absolute vs. proportional block count is clearly an error that would effect engagement.

To me it seems logical, if you find a certain type of error like that, you go searching elsewhere to see where previous coders made the same kind of mistake. (Even when previous coder = myself)

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1624660886572126209?s=46...

The problem is you can’t believe him. Were those real issues? Maybe, but what we know now that anyone who told him his lack of engagement was organic got fired. So all that’s left is to come up with some reason to justify why Elon is less popular than he thinks he should be. Whether it’s true or false doesn’t matter, because he’ll keep firing people until someone tells him what he wants to hear.

Setting aside "he found" for a moment - given reports of people being fired for giving accurate information, "someone told me" seems more likely - I evaluate Musk's claims like "Fanout service for Following feed was getting overloaded" in the context of previous claims like https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832 (lie) and https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776 (lie).

>Musk did it for a day

It's deeply sad and funny that he's gutted Twitter so badly that, instead of having a team that could investigate these user complaints and determine whether they have merit and what the cause is, the CEO of a major tech platform resorted to "Huh, weird, let me try. LOL that's crazy."

And before the gutting of Twitter and management change, this problem wasn't even on the radar to be investigated.

Looks to me like the ability to investigate and respond to problems has improved if you ask me.

They investigated nothing. They just 1000x-ed his tweets. All problems go away if the one twit that matters is happy. Not to mention that the guy who suggested that Elon's popularity went down (with charts) because his content is at the level of a 12-year-old, that guy got fired on the spot.

According to the article, he assigned no less than 80 staff to "investigate".

> CEO of a major tech platform resorted to "Huh, weird, let me try. LOL that's crazy."

Brings into question what the CEOs of Tesla and SpaceX are doing with their time. Also investigating bugs at Twitter, you say? Amazing that the CEOs of three companies are all working to solve Twitter’s problems. Must be the off season in space.

And what does that have to do with the new changes he pushed to have his tweets be in every single users' timelines?

Nothing, it's Musk drones rushing to defend their god. The parent leaves out that Musk fired an engineer in a meeting where he demanded to know why his tweets weren't getting enough engagement.

Why do you guys get so vitriolic? The parent is attempting to logically explain. What is the need for making intense moral characterizations? Don't you see the dichotomy here?

Give it a few months, and it'll just be a vast, empty, echoing Twitter office containing him and Jason Calacanis.

A fitting punishment.

Well, the author of the article presumes to know his intent in asking for that change. Could be narcissism, or it could be an engineer running a test. The truth is the author doesn't know what his intent was.

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