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Comment by davoneus | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who presides what Musk had done at Twitter is obviously either a Musk-can-do-no-wrong acolyte, or an ignoramus who's out of touch. I'd bet the former, if for no other reason than pity.

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Why can’t you be a bit of both? Twitter was awfully run by all means. They were unable to turn large profits even during the pandemic.

Musk’s handling of Twitter has also been pretty poor by all means.

People have been treating this like some political issue with sharp partisan divide. Which I don’t get at all - it’s a badly run business taken over by a new boss who is out of his depth. Nothing more, nothing less.

I detest Musk as much as the next guy (or more, if my history on HN is any proof). I think he's a despicable human being; I would not be caught dead in the general vicinity of a Tesla, etc.

That said, for the casual user, Twitter works pretty much the same as it did before he took over. It hasn't crashed durably. Makes one wonder what all those people were doing.

Obviously 100% of the engineers weren't just keeping the lights on. The long-term future of Twitter is way more bleak right now than it was a year ago, and that has, in part, to do with the fact that all of the insane engineering talent at Twitter is gone.

Twitter has some insane infrastructure, which was way ahead of it's time, and which is arguably why the company is still doing fine.

> Makes one wonder what all those people were doing.

A "good" social media giant needs huge headcounts in departments like Troll Control. Last I heard, the EU was threatening to sanction or ban Twitter - because the gutted Twitter staff wasn't keeping up with such things.

Yes, maybe, but I haven't seen all those supposedly new trolls (and to be fair, I never saw the bots Musk was constantly complaining about before purchase).

I think it's possible trolls, spam and "bots" exist in a kind of invisible state: they can be found if one looks for them (what regulators are probably doing) but they never appear on most users' timelines.

Hmmm private equity licking their lips. Tech is still over valued in P/E terms so they haven’t been biting but expect a lot of companies purchased and taken private. If you are in the right position you can make a lot of money on the upside as an IC if they cut you into the turnaround. Otherwise go find a new job.

I dislike Elon Musk, but apart from a few stability glitches the product seems fine and product delivery seems to be moving faster than it has in years.

I know everyone is waiting for it to crash, and you may be right, but so far, stripping (hundreds of?) millions of cost out of the business seems to be have been a good strategy from a technical perspective at least.

Only need about 20% of the engineers are dedicated to keeping services running in any tech company.

The other 80% are focused on new product features, growing revenue, growing engagement, growing new user signups, l blocking bad actors and legal compliance.

Having worked in a "growing engagement" role at a big company, I'd say it's more accurate to describe it as "running no-op experiments over and over until the A/B testing tool tells you one had a 'statistically significant' result". It seemed to me like the exact kind of make-work Musk fans criticize.

Axing all of those roles could make it easier to ship valuable user-visible features, since the remaining engineers wouldn't have to work around feature flags for fifty ongoing experiments.

Let's not project your role at Company X onto Twitter. Especially, given that neither of us have worked at Twitter X.0

Definitely doesn’t seem like that other 80% did a lot of that at Twitter.

Definitely doesn't seem like you have any data points at all to make a judgement, apart from the revenue collapse of 40%.

Honest question, as a non twitter user, what does "product delivery seems to be moving faster than it has in years." mean? Has there been new features?

> product delivery seems to be moving faster than it has in years.

They launched Twitter Blue which was a disaster, then redid the timeline, which at best is a mild improvement, and they rushed out things that were already in development.

I'm not in the Twitter Death Cult camp, but I don't think we can judge new development based on the last four months.

Twitter services that are publicly exposed have seen a global latency average has racked on 150ms with regular spikes of several seconds or more. [1]

Core services for Twitter have been throwing 500s a dozen times every few hours. [2]

Twitter performance for users in Australia has fallen apart twice due to what was found out to be someone losing access to a root certificate and mitigation delayed because the team that could fix it is no longer employed. [3]

This is far more than a few stability glitches.

[1] https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refr...

[2] https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refr...

[3] https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refr...

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