Hacker News Reader

Comment by topspin | Hacker News Reader

Been watching the OpenAI drama play out on X for three days now: media sites everywhere embedding X tweets.

Embedded tweets don't have ads or replies. News sites continue to use this mechanism for a curated window into the site. If anything, the continued use of embedded tweets would appear to fly in the face of claims of an anti-twitter cabal of MSM.

Embedded tweets don't have ads... yet.

This was explored at least once by Twitter under Dick Costolo. Pretty quickly abandoned. Turns out media sites don’t want to embed other ads from other platforms on their site.

Embedded youtube videos have, so I can see the xeets having ads.

I don't see embedded Tweets as my browser asks to accept their Cookie to view it.

It might now show ads (yet) but the act of embedding allows tracking of the user which is of value to advertisers.

I’m still waiting for the site to go down. After Musk laid off 80% of the staff, HN and Reddit were adamant that the infra was far too complex for the remaining employees and a few Tesla/SpaceX engineers to figure out and keep running for more than a few months.

Any day now…

I mean, its outage rate for me has been significantly higher than before, more along the lines of the early days of Twitter when Fail Whales were a running gag. Features randomly breaking for a couple days; timeline not loading; etc.

Twitter's remaining staff is pretty clearly struggling to hold the shebang together.

It did go down, many times. [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/technology/twitter-outage...

That’s not really what I, or anyone making the predictions was referring to.

The prevailing sentiment was that the site would basically fail to remain functional and go offline because only incompetent yes-men would work for Elon while anyone with aptitude or experience was gone.

> The prevailing sentiment was that the site

I don't remember that ever being the prevailing sentiment. That was a sentiment by a particular subgroup, but I remember the prevailing sentiment being that Twitter will get even worse than before. Which most people I know think has happened.

Nah, the prevailing sentiment was that there would be more outages and instability, which was true.

I menan, it has had a lot of outages and failures. Most of those fired were not core engineers but people who to the most part were hired to make sure twitter keeps the right external interests such as governments and advertisers happy, let users have a good enough experience to where advertisers will continue to pay twitter and most importantly to scale twitter so that it has the potential to make profit (not just break even), and they succeeded by getting Elon to buy the company. Twitter's shareholders profited. It maybe takes like a dozen people to just keep the site online but to keep users, increase revenue and profit that's why everyone else was there. You pay at most 200k times 7000 people which is around 1.4B in salaries at most (likely much less lol) for a company valued at 48B so it can be a 100B company some day. The whole point of investing is you make more money.

Of course a jerkoff like Elon who inherited his way into profiting from paypal and buying the established near market ready Tesla would not understand that, he us used to letting others run things and taking credit for it, I mean people literally credit him for rocket science (spacex!), he drank his own kool-aid.

If you seriously think that those people he fired served no purpose, I'd like to challenge you: would you buy a private twitter share now? I mean you'd have to be pretty bad at investing to do so right?

Elon's whole schtick is that he can't get people to like him even with all his money and he thinks that makes him a victim. He hasn't figured out what most normal adults figure out in roughly their 20's: no one owes you affection, nothing you own or do entitles you to someone else's affection. He sought to remedy this by expelling all who disagree with him and rallying his fans around him.

Truly sad, he could have literally built a city or an island full of his admirers if he wanted. He lost all that money over twitter loudmouths. I think he has the official record of the person who lost the most amount of money in the shortest time in the history of humanity!

How could you possibly know the KPIs and profitability of twitter at this moment? Especially since I assume you only consume anti-twitter content? None of us would buy a twitter share right now because we don’t have enough data to do so…

We are literally in a thread taking about their only meaningful revenue source collapsing to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

I’m saying we don’t have first-hand sources for revenue, nor do we have first-hand sources for expenses, which we know to some degree have both declined.

Even Elon said just 3 weeks ago that it had lost more than half its value. Why are you so insistent on clinging to such a poor argument here?

You don’t need some independent GAAP compliant audit to see that things were going exceptionally poorly before they lost the majority of their only meaningful revenue stream and that no sane person would start investing in it at this point.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938969/x-twitter-valua...

Elon himself has stated a 50% loss of value since he purchased it, of course he did blame others for the loss.

At this point they’ve rewritten nearly everything in rust so that’s unlikely to happen

I highly doubt they've rewritten even half the code. Of all the places that should know how long and hard "rewrites" are, it should be here, given all the developers.

Depends how the organization is structured.

Rewrites can be cathartic if you are not tasked with reserving every detail or forced to catalog every possible change of every possible alteration

Carcinisation

That has nothing to do with advertisers not wanting their ads next to hate speech and nazi commentary.

Completely manufactured by the media.

What is manufactured? That advertised don't want their ads next to hate speech, the hate speech itself, or the fact that ads are appearing next to the hate speech?

He describes, in detail, the method where it was "manufactured" by the activist group MediaMatters here:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725771191644758037/phot...

I absolutely love that he screnshotted a word processor which highlights vague claims he's making with dashed-underlines. But what's with the double-underline of "speech"?

I don't get the dude, at all. He's weird, and impulsive. And makes mistakes that I would never make, and yet he leads teams that build things that other teams led by other brilliant people failed to build before.

I will never understand it.

I just know that in my past-life working with Air Force space command they all laughed at him when he first said he was going to have vertically landing rockets with SpaceX. The execs at GM who cancelled the EV1 all laughed at him with Tesla. Everyone on here was positive that Twitter would crash under its own weight when he nuked 80% of the staff.

I've been a daily user of Twitter since 2008.

It's glitchy from time to time, and I notice lags on my notifications. And yet it also hosts video, has a bunch of new features that I mostly like, and the "Spaces" functionality is actually pretty damned good after being total garbage when it first launched. From a feature standpoint, it's vastly better than it was before he massively overpaid for it. And yeah, there are nazis on there that weren't there before. I almost never see them, but when I do, I mute them.

So basically, it's like how the internet had always been. The nazis suck, but they're a cost I pay to not have posts like "The bat-borne coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan might have something to do with the bat-borne coronavirus lab in Wuhan" get censored.

>>or the fact that ads are appearing next to the hate speech?

This part is manufactured. Have you never been on facebook tiktok instagram or any other ad saturated SV invention?

think a bit beyond the media and the associated lies man. nick you must be at least somewhat intelligent if you're hanging out here, think.

I'm sorry... I am not intelligent because I believe in the factual truth? There are screenshots of the ads next to content, and X confirms they are real in their lawsuit filing.

>>I am not intelligent because I believe in the factual truth?

Reread what I said or prove me wrong, or do both at once.

>>There are screenshots of the ads next to content,

manufactured evidence, why dont you read tfa? Slam dunk, MM is going down.

The screenshots are real. The content was served by X to MM as stated. Every test known to man would be "manufactured" by X's definition.

Elon Musk is the media. You've just chosen a specific side and planted your banner.

It’s wild watching people like the one you were responding to talk down to others as though they were correcting a child with so much confidence while simultaneously having zero self reflection and just hiding behind this vague smoke and mirrors conspiracy nonsense. It’s completely indistinguishable from random qanon ramblings.

What part of it is manufactured? That his mask came off, and revealed a full-on reptile underneath, that's retweeting replacement theory?

You don't think that there's a problem with the richest industrialist and media mogul in the world actively broadcasting that there's a vast, global Jewish conspiracy to replace whitey?

This isn't, like, criticism of a political viewpoint! If he's going to believe in crazy things, the guy should stick to grassy knolls and flat earth and faked moon landings, or literally anything that's not 'The jews are out to get us'.

I suppose Musk is the "the media" these days, so yes, his racist outbursts are manufactured by the media.

That's been a real problem for me, since I can't see embedded tweets and won't follow links going to twitter. I wish reporters would just quote the tweet they think is so important that it should be widely read.

Yeah X proves that it's still the single best source for breaking news and still the public town square.

Honestly I hope Elon holds a grudge and remembers that companies performatively pulling ads from the platform right now and charges them a premium when they eventually come back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com