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Comment by fwungy | Hacker News Reader

Tech must adjust to no more ZIRP.

Fat will be cut. Notice that Twitter is just fine technically with an 80% staff cut.

You mean the place that lost half its revenue, is down 70% on valuation, and its team unable to release any meaningful updates or maintain platform stability?

This is fine /s

And was so severely rate-limited that it was unusable for even logged in members for a while?

TBH, that was a self-inflicted wound, not a result of short staffing.

Ooh. I touched a nerve here.

I don't have a study, but Twitter works for me. No tech issues. As for the valuation, it's ancillary.

Large tech companies are filled with various paper pushers. They add nothing to the products, and often interfere with them, just so they can justify themselves.

Guess how I know.

It’s not a nerve. Using a poorly run company as an example of success is very bizarre.

I mean, he's right. Twitter is just as good as it ever was. In fact outside of the USA probably cant even tell there was a transition. I live in Argentina and literally nobody cared. The alternatives (mastodon, bluesky, etc) are nonexistent here.

The point is that twitter's problems have nothing to do with the fact that it massively reduced it's workforce.

The product is as good as it ever has been.

It's problems stem from a single person and many companies being afraid to be associated with them because of their increasingly toxic behavior.

Heres my anecdote: Its broken beyond all measure, the same tweets keep loading on every refresh, you click back it loses your path and resets to another random selection of tweets you have seen mixed with randos. Video has gotten MUCH WORSE to the point where I can't even finagle the damn player to work, it just randomly crashes(before I was able to get it to play with a refresh or two and clicking on the seek bar quickly), sometimes i'm clicking around and it just flat out fails with that "cannot be displayed" error leaving me in the lurch. Ignoring the fact that a lot of good people have left, it just sucks to use even if you want to see the updates of people who are remaining.

It's always been nearly incomprehensible to me, even pre-EM.

The user notes feature was the best thing Twitter ever did so I disagree that they can't release meaningful updates.

It's hard to disentangle how many of their problems are due to staff cuts vs Musk being unpopular with advertisers and the coronavirus tech bubble bursting.

The Community Notes feature was called "Birdwatch" and was launched in 2021. Elon took over in late 2022, and renamed the feature in early 2023.

The valuation fell with the market, like any other valuation.

The loss of revenue is not related to the layoffs. It's related to advertisers' personal feud with Musk. Even if Twitter had retained all its employees, it would have lost the same revenue as long as Musk stuck to his principles.

> its team unable to release any meaningful updates

You say that like it's new.

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