Hacker News Reader

Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

I think some of Musk's actions do make sense. Their staff and infrastructure costs were way out of control. They could have been reliably profitable every year just by cutting those costs. That's kind of insane.

The rest of his changes - stopping moderation and the API price changes are stupid.

Has Reddit cut staff? Seems like they're just copying Musk's mistakes.

View on HN

They have indeed cut staff.

https://fortune.com/2023/06/06/reddit-layoffs-job-cuts-stall...

The staff they just hired with the massive fundraise they just had?

You think firing 70% of a company is sane? How about alienating your advertisers? On an advertising funded platform.

Railing against work from home and then stopping paying you office lease? The first eviction was ordered today. How long till the flagship office doors are chained shut?

No part of the twitter debacle is sane. Modeling any part of one’s strategy on it would be laughable.

Not OP, but he did caveat it with saying some decisions, which I assume he meant that cutting costs on an overstaffed org is a good idea, but maybe cutting 70% before you have a good idea what they do might have been a bad way to do it.

You can make the sane/rational decisions, yet implement those decisions in the most insane way possible.

Twitter cost cuts seem amazing...?

You didn't see that video of the girl who worked at Twitter but didn't seem to do anything other then drink coffee and go to yoga class? I think if the company is not making a reliable profit then maybe there's some costs that could be cut.

They were making a profit... It's also not possible to deduce anything from a video of someone supposedly only drinking coffee and doing yoga. She's still be an order of magnitude more productive than the CEO splitting his time between five full time CEO positions.

Obviously there was an insane amount of bloat. Many popular apps with similar scale run with 20-100 engineers ....... they had like 4500 or something?

Insane waste. Remember that lady going on about "how dare you critique infra! we use graphql!" Nonsense, they were obviously not that valuable: twitter is running great with them all gone..

I just posted a comment elsewhere to this effect, but as a extremely light Twitter user (have an account, don’t post, click on a handful of links to Twitter posts a week), really basic functionality has become mostly unusable for me since the buyout. Like, a good portion of the time, the site doesn’t even load for me. Video rarely works. The one time since then I tried to log into my account, it took probably 20 minutes between demented captchas and getting kicked back to the start of the process. And I’m not even talking about any higher level functionality or whatever the subjective experience as a poster is like, just simple passive viewing.

Obviously a lot of people were unduly pessimistic about Twitter’s technical resilience, but from what I can see, it does not seem to be a well oiled machine.

I have had the exact opposite experience. Do you remember how used to take a second for replies to load under a tweet? Now it’s instantaneous. My suggested feed is a lot better too.

To add another data point from someone who used to use the site regularly but still occasionally checks in once and a while, I have noticed a significant degradation in quality for the main feed and random outages/errors seem to crop up a lot more frequently. But aside from our respective pieces of anecdotal evidence, we’ve seen how pathetically they’ve been recently handling scaling and technical issues with high traffic events like the Desantis campaign announcement.

My suggested feed is absolutely useless, I'm not interested in what Musk has to say and I'm especially not interested in the unfiltered mouth diarrhea from MAGA morons like MTG. I don't even live in the US, why would I be interested in seeing it?

It's working perfectly afaict. "What is a woman?" for example was streamed a gajillion times just fine. The 700k stream of DeSantis or whatever took twitter down though, I doubt it will next time..

Honestly, no, I don’t remember, but my mental model of replying/threading on that site has been broken for a very long time. I’ve never been very sure how it works, or if it’s working properly, so I’m probably not the right person to ask about that aspect!

Glad you’re liking the feed.

There's a much more diverse range of opinions now which is nice. Before it was just a bland vanilla follow the narrative or get suspended vibe

I find that now it's all just MAGA types, whereas anything left of center has been purged.

For me the suggestion algorithm used to insistently make me learn about music/celebs and random topics I don't care about, but now it just shows you friends of friends and random Blue users, who are largely crypto rightist propaganda like "black people getting in fights" accounts.

There does some to be an effort to make it look like the reddit default page since there's some viral meme pages mixed in.

Though for the last week it really desperately wanted to show me posts about some Spider-Man movie, so the old stuff still activates sometimes.

Interesting you say that since it seemed to be the exact opposite before Musk.

I feel like it was already leaning pretty far right before, it's just straight up Nazis now.

Are we even talking about the same website?

Huh? No one else has experienced this as far as I can tell. any sources? I can ping it right now from AWS or something, it's working great ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com