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Comment by renegade-otter | Hacker News Reader

On a technical level, I tend to agree. Never underestimate the skill of the employees to save their boss from horrible decisions.

That said, Twitter is no longer "open" like it used to be - I bet it just won't handle the public traffic anymore. That is directly tied to cratering revenue but it's hard to untangle from the owner's self-destructive drug-induced behavior.

It's a testament to the quality of the codebase in general. Good code is hard to kill, but it WILL be eroded to the point where it can no longer grow and be better.

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That might be true about the traffic, but twitter wasn’t open before the musk purchase either, it would stop you from seeing posts if you weren’t logged in if you tried to scroll more than a few times. Its current behavior of showing just a few posts sorta, uh, randomly selected might be easier on the server, idk.

For most of its life, Twitter was completely open. You could see any tweet or user page with the URL, whether or not you were logged in. The only exception was if someone had “protected” their account.

Twitter as it runs now is far more locked down. And that happened after it experienced significant, noticeable outages.

Performance is not binary… Twitter is still “up” as a service but with a much smaller public footprint and handling much smaller amounts of traffic.

Do you know when they stopped being frictionlessly open? I’m curious when they started doing the to continue you have to log in pop overs. It preceded musk, as I said. I think every link still worked, but scrolling and navigating twitter like a typical website instead of typing in a link had log in gates.

That is NOT true. As a Twitter addict, I know that was not the case.

Also, Twitter had two notable Spaces problems, when launching the DeSantis campaign (into the ground) and the second fiasco, which I actually forget what it was, just recently. The system just cannot handle truly planet-scale traffic like before.

As someone who wasn’t a twitter addict, I know it was true because people would link me to twitter, I would see the tweet but attempting to scroll too much would result in a log in popover years before the musk buyout.

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