Twitter is now just nice yacht for a billionaire. The acquisition was no different than Ron Watkins buying 8chan.
Of course, that's a pre-Elon analysis. Elon's loans alone add 1 bil/year in interest costs, and reports say there's been a large drop in revenue since his purchase.
"He owns twitter, of course he knows what he's doing!"
"He owns a Lambo, of course he knows what he's doing!"
But it was profitable at certain times. Despite all the reported "bloat". Ironically now, it has little hopes of being profitable thanks to advertisers pulling out due to lax moderation (some of the automated stuff no longer working because the maintainers are gone!). So even if they managed to run the site with a skeleton crew, assuming they keep breaking non-essential features, it's unclear they could ever become profitable again.
There seems to be this echo chamber around the Twitter acquisition that thinks most software companies are bloated and that software engineers basically do nothing. They seem to believe Twitter will make that demonstration. It's particularly pervasive in semi or non-technical circles. I guess it's the same crowd that bought into no-code and low-code tools to "get rid of expensive developers" for the last decade.
While Twitter hasn't suffered any complete outage as of yet, several products and features seem to be broken, as well as a good chunk of their API (I don't buy the claim it's intentional because the latencies and error rates have been jumping up). To be completely honest, this level of service degradation would have killed more serious products. It's fine for Twitter because there's no SLA, no enterprise customers and no critical infra running on it.
But now with Twitter reportedly losing 40% of its advertisers and taking on $1 billion of annual debt servicing costs, it seems unlikely they'll be able to get back to profitable if things keep going this way.
Would you think the whole ordeal was done better if they just refused to admit that any of the firings were in error? Nobody makes no mistakes when firing. There are many issues with the Twitter firings, but asking some of them to come back isn't a negative sign at all.
I'm perplexed by the mental gymnastics you had to resort to to try to deflect any responsibility from Musk, let alone the despair to omit any reference to the extremely poor judgement and outright incompetence it takes to pull this sort of stunt, and instead fabricate this theory where this impulsive shot in the foot was actually a brilliant plan to thwart entrenched interests.
Occam's razor and Musk's track record reject this hypothesis. Musk f-ed up, just like he keeps on f-ing up, like the recent shit fest of Musk posting a stream of brain dead and profoundly I'll advised tweets trying to publicly smear a employee with disabilities.
That we know of (meaning they posted publicly about it). The real number could be way higher.
> but asking some of them to come back isn't a negative sign at all.
It's a very negative sign, especially at the scale it happened (as I said, we know about the cases where the person accepted to go back or publicly stated they were offered to come back).
Mistakes certainly can happen, but they're much more likely to happy when things are done chaotically without proper planning.
It is the whole "Learn WHY things are how they are, before you suggest changing them" which all new engineers need to learn, also seemingly applies to restructuring. If they had waited a couple of months, they could have made strategically smart changes, and over the long term it likely won't cost them more.
In the last months before he took over it had become literally unusable. After some seconds of scrolling a sign-up window would show up which was impossible to dismiss and neither ublock nor umatrix helped.
Meanwhile:
- failures are happening more often. Just in the past week they broke "following" page for half a day, and then image uploads for a few hours (with hilarious "your account has hit the API limit for their own site)
- they just randomly killed third-party apps that made Twitter what it was with zero warning or explanation
- destroyed all possible credibility of blue checkmarks. Which are not just celebrities, but also government agencies
- people report an increase in harassment and trolls
I think the acquisition is partly idelogically motivated. So destroying the blue checkmark credibility is probably "mischief managed".
For government accounts, they now have gray checkmarks.
What increased velocity?
> So destroying the blue checkmark credibility is probably "mischief managed".
This statement makes no sense
> For government accounts, they now have gray checkmarks.
Wat?
Is this the velocity you're talking about? When they introduced paid blue checkmarks, then realized it's a bad idea, and introduced "official" label to only backpedal less than a day later, only to introduce gray checkmarks? First time I hear of gray checkmarks btw.
Just checked: of course there are now gray checkmarks. And of course they are randomly assigned. And of course there are also golden checkmarks because reasons. Also randomly assigned.