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Comment by BMc2020 | Hacker News Reader

BMc2020

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It’s still operating but so many of those people were things like support for advertisers and safety that ad revenue is down so much that he’s trying lawsuits to force former advertisers back and by all accounts usage is down, too. Most boards and C suites don’t want that.

The site might be up, but my twitter app, even though updated, has been busted for months. Though that could be that I’m on the iOS beta.

I can’t even engage when I click on Twitter links cuz the whole link to app hijacking mechanism won’t even let me go to the website. Sure I can delete the app or copy/paste the url, but the fact that I have to do insane workarounds means, there’s whole sections of users that can’t use twitter even if they wanted to.

Abs I don’t care enough to actually fix this particular problem so, it stays broken.

There are constant political attacks on their advertisers. This is like calling the Cuba embargo proof that socialism doesn't work.

Advertisers left because they didn’t want their ads showing up next to extremist content. There have always been political criticisms about ads but they rarely get traction, but no ad exec wants to see their ad next to some guy talking about the need to provide a safe place for white children. Getting rid of the people who used to keep that from happening was a very shortsighted cost savings.

Then Musk decided to sue companies who stopped advertising. That might indulge his sense of entitlement but it also sent a message that the safest move is not to do business with X because you can no longer predict what they’ll do if he thinks you should be giving him more money.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/musk-sues-advertisers-ov...

I think the fact that Twitter is still running is nothing but a testament to the brilliant work done by the engineers who built and documented these systems.

I would guess that, going forward, companies should expect less of this kind of quality - especially when combined with the overall push towards LLMs.

>Yes, I could blame AI for 99 percent of the problems in the tech industry right now.

Tech is one of the less relevant industries being truly affected by AI in a negative light.

>And twitter is still operating.

A chicken with its head cut off can run around for a surprising amount of time before it falls limp.

Maybe you should check the working conditions of twitter rather than its heartbeat. If you remove 80% of staff and make the rest work 3 times harder you can do hide a lot of disfuntion. Until you can't.

Particularly if that chicken has billions of dollars backing it. That'll buy a lot of zombie-like robotic jerking around that occasionally moves in a direction.

Twitter share value has also dropped by 80% since the acquisition.

The russians and arabs don't care about shareholder value. They want a platform to end american democracy. Their soverign wealth funds won't be affected.

TL:DR; Mohammed bin Salman paid $300 million for one (1) house in France.

Cut 80% of jobs and 80% of revenue

That is not what shareholders want, hence why no one is copying it

The russians and the arabs (who financed it) have different goals. They wanted a platform to help end America democracy and Elon fired all the gatekeepers. The shareholders aren't invited to their party.

But corporate America did notice what he got away with and continues to get away with.

There are websites that have run for years without being touched by an engineer. Why should they go down?

Those people were working on new features for the most part. The investors wanted Twitter to grow, so they could get a return on their investment.

Twitter has been shrinking.

Elon Musk isn't playing "capitalism". I don't know the name of the game he's playing, but that isn't it.

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