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Comment by gettodachoppa | Hacker News Reader

Well, when Elon Musk took over and gutted half the staff, I distinctly remember HN full out of outrage and predicting (in hindsight, "impotently wishing" would be more accurate) doom and how Twitter will go down any day now.

Then nothing happened. At least, nothing that I personally observed as a casual Twitter reader. The goalposts were moved to "it will go down with the New Year's Eve spike", and once again nothing happened. Then the narrative became "the cracks will only be noticeable in a few months", and here we are and yet again, nothing.

So Musk and Geohot came out as the saner voices of that whole debacle. Of course Geohot said exaggerated things like "you only need 40 engineers to run Twitter", but if it turns out it takes 300 engineers, then I would consider this as Geohot being proven mostly right.

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Did you see the news about DeSantis yesterday? Musk convinced him to announce his presidential candidacy on Twitter, and the live stream just didn’t work.

I don’t think that qualifies as “nothing happened” when features used in high-profile events fail, with the CEO and a potential future president left on the line. Any other platform wouldn’t have struggled with a stream of this size.

I guess you might say that’s just one thing, and other than the CEO’s live streams not working, everything is fine. But there are numerous other examples of accumulating paper cuts and failures at Twitter. I think this is close to what most of those doomsayers expected would happen.

Google also recently had a total failure in a public event. It's not necessarily saying much about Twitter.

https://mashable.com/article/google-ai-maps-search-event-bin...

> the AI falsely said the James Webb Space Telescope took the first ever picture of an exoplanet

> During the announcement about a new Lens feature, the demo phone was misplaced and the presenter wasn't able to show the demo

> Google seemed to say, "let's pretend this never happened," and immediately made the livestream recording private after the event

> the live stream just didn’t work

Are you sure ? Others say 6.5 M listened to the livestream that was delayed 20 mins

They had to switch to David Sack's account to do the livestream and I think there were about 700k listeners that were on at the time of announcment. The issues weren't just infrastructure related, Musk had challenges with his mute button and it was creating feedback because he and Sacks were next to each other on their phones.

But yeah, it could have gone better for various reasons.

so was it no longer live, or did they encounter 20 minutes of technical issues that delayed the start? cuz either way it seems pretty obvious that at least for some amount of time it didn't work

There have been outages, just not as catastrophic as predicted.

I think that depends on who did the predicting :)

There was a lot of "ooh, it will catastrophically fail within weeks", which was fundamentally an assumption that the previous team was entirely incompetent. (Any halfway decent team tries their hardest to build resilient systems, not things that need hand-holding all the time.)

The current trajectory is exactly on the expected failure path predicted by anybody who does actually work on large systems - a steady increase of smaller failures, punctuated by the occasional large failure. (Cf. DeSantis announcement)

In essence, a reduction in staff will result in worse SLO results. It will result in less coverage of edge cases (technical and UX). Smaller teams are more constrained to travel on "the happy path". And the fact that marginal utility of additional engineers decreases means you can usually reduce teams a lot before impacting that path.

In complex systems, reductions also mean you're more vulnerable to a black swan event being irrecoverable, but that still requires a black swan first.

it really is a testament to how well engineered Twitter is/was. I well remember Musk gloating about how the architecture was stupid and he'd fix it. Twitter would be long gone if his remarks were anywhere near the reality

Guess you don't remember the fail whale? Twitter was held together with gum and bailing wire for a long time. Yes it got better, but I'm certainly not going to use it as the example for good engineering.

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