Hacker News Reader

Comment by salad-tycoon | Hacker News Reader

Twitter shed 80% and still works, is still the go to outside of fringe empty echo chambers of the left and right divide. Not only that but they added a significant amount of features like Grok, which I know nothing about really, and Substack like payments.

80% is a lot and it works just fine. 7,500 to 1,300 in Jan 2023. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...

View on HN

Twitter's still working, but it's in a state that I think is worse than before. The spam bots alone seem to be orders of magnitude more prominent. I don't think I'd ever seen a spammer pre-headcount-change, and now "MY PUSSY IN BIO" is a running gag on the website because spambots are so prominent.

They also changed their content rules to allow drastically more content, which reduces the total amount of work to be done. You could argue that this is a good thing because the moderation was useless and censoring before, but the moderation also made it a friendlier place for major advertisers who have since pulled out—so changing the moderation resulted in a business model change. That's naturally going to reduce headcount.

They effectively disabled the developer API via absurd pricing. That alone would cancel a ton of projects/teams due to the load that likely placed on their servers. The user experience is also not even close to the same, while they've not really added any new features that likely weren't already in the pipeline. Not even to mention their tanking revenue and valuation. It's not even close to a "working the same as before" company.

Your definition of "working" needs work. Nothing you said contradicts the parent.

I think OP just meant it was working to strip Twitter of the majority of its operating costs so it can be transformed into a sweatshop profit machine (but, in that case, I disagree, since its not making a profit).

So what you're saying is everything anyone using Twitter cares about is working just fine.

I guess, unless you're also making the assumption that the number of daily users has remained the same from pre-elon acquisition. I promise you that is not the case. There's also that pesky profitability problem.

From my point of view, just not. I went from using Twitter a lot to gaining a lot of free time ... be because overall experience now sux in many small ways.

Whereas there used to be interesting exchanges and threads before, algorithm now promotes similar nonsensical short responses again and again. The stuff on top is just not interesting anymore.

Twitter doesn't work if we go by the same definition as before.

They have a ton of outages, the app is constantly buggy, the ad network is ridiculous, the moderation is nonexistent. I faced a bug that new tweets wouldn't load _for weeks_. If it was any other company, we would be saying they are done, but since it is Elon at the helm, some people pretend that Twitter still works.

Twitter is in the "Wile-E-Coyote just ran off the cliff" phase where his legs are still running on air. Companies like that have tremendous momentum, but an airplane can only glide so far after you turn off the engine.

It still is cherry picking one out of many examples where the headcount reductions were by far not that drastic as in Twitter.

The parent reply has an important point: a good % of headcount reductions tend to affect r&d and the type of projects where cutting investment doesn’t have a negative short or even medium term effect on the company. Sometimes it can even be positive for operations (e.g. infra teams have to support less product teams). This is mostly why it’s very uncommon to see headcount reductions lead to instability, etc.

Long term effects (e.g. stagnation, no innovation..) may manifest, but are harder to see clearly in advance, and when they do happen the connection to those layoffs from N years ago is not obvious/even remembered

I'm getting a lot of "tweets aren't loading right now" type errors. The app keeps jumping to the top when I'm scrolling into someones timeline. Sometimes i see my replies twice. Sometimes things just don't load. It's seems like death by a thousand paper cuts. That said, I'm sure the technical issues can be fixed eventually.

I'm also getting a lot of garden variety "West/Christianity vs East/Islam" type race baiters and stupid 9gag type memes despite actively trying to indicate to the algorithm that I'm not interested. I think they've skewed it towards controversy to increase engagement but it's just boring.

It's so buggy right now. It feels like it's gone back to the old fail whale days. "It works" is a pretty low bar to clear. On the upside, it gave me back a lot of free time, because the Twitter experience is just too frustrating to deal with anymore.

It "works".

The main app is generally functional, but it's easy to see the deterioration of the smaller subsystems that large platforms like that need for a good user experience. For instance, I have an account that I am unable to log into because their password recovery/change feature doesn't seem send me anything when I click it. I'm sure frequent users have a litany of little things they've noticed that are flaky or outright broken, even if they can still send and read tweets.

>Not only that but they added a significant amount of features like Grok, which I know nothing about really, and Substack like payments.

A premium (as in requires money), also-ran AI with a juvenile "sense of humor" and payments? These are significant?

An implicit assumption I see often is that all 8000 Twitter employees were software engineers too, but at it's peak engineering only made up 40-ish%.

Without question though, despite the appearance of velocity in shipping features post-layoffs, the features were either small changes or if they were big, already partially deployed as experiments to small groups of users.

Aside from Grok, Musk's Twitter hasn't shipped anything new except and expanded monetization system (again, partially implemented when he took over anyway).

They got rid of stuff working with paying customers - ad companies. And that part is now failing so much, that Elon Musk went on multiple public tirades.

Twitter is not able to attract ads, because they don't communicate with companies properly and are chaotic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com