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Comment by transcriptase | Hacker News Reader

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…

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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

Carcinisation

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

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