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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Dude, the thing with these things is that the breathlessness has already exhausted belief. Supposedly Tesla Y was a terrible thing, supposedly everyone was going to die in the heat under the Tesla tent, supposedly Twitter would die in 3 days without their staff.

Nothing happened. Everyone I know who owns a Tesla loves it. So I’m going to file this under “internet hates guy; tries to make it sound like he makes bad things” which people do a lot with Musk stuff.

None of the Tesla cars are one I’ll buy (need 3 rows comfortably - might even buy the new VW electric van) but I’m getting the feeling from the online techies like I did at the AirPod release and the iPad release: my instinct is that this is great stuff; then my friends who buy it love it; then everyone online hates it; then it sells billions of dollars worth.

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> supposedly Twitter would die in 3 days without their staff.

I agree people tend to overreact and overblow expected consequences, but I mean, twitter's valuation is down 80%[0] and they haven't released anything new in two years, after exhausting the backlog of already developed things.

It's not going great.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/09/30/elon-musk...

Valuation has no relevance to the layoffs. The valuation is down because brands left due to Elon's politics.

Por que no los dos?

There referring to the people who claimed that Twitter would break down following the large scale firings. Every time Twitter went done for a little bit after that, lots of comments here would pop up claiming that the Twitter site would get worse and worse and eventually break apart because of the firings (see the whole discussion here[1], for example). People said Musk didn't know what he was doing, and wouldn't be able to keep the site up long term after the layoffs.

Despite the fact that these predictions ended up being completely wrong, there seems to have been very little reflection from the people who were making them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35043433

The way I see it all these supposed "inefficiencies" got twitter a valuation of 44B and a hub for people across the spectrum to congregate. Firing all these people and goining hardcore mode has only slashed the value of the company by 80% and even more of a cesspool of bots and misinformation, not to mention the exodus of advertisers and a large portion of users.

So yeah. Good job.

This is a good example of moving the goals posts. There were lot of claims that [A] would happen. In the end, [A] didn't happen. People say, "maybe it's time to admit that the claims that [A] would happen were wrong," and the reply is "no, [B] happened, so it doesn't matter."

It's certainly possible to argue that Musk hasn't done a good job of running Twitter. But the claim - made by many people here - that the site wouldn't remain function after 80% of the staff was laid off certainly proved to be incorrect.

> they haven't released anything new in two years, after exhausting the backlog of already developed things.

I'm not a Twitter user, so I might miss the lack of some essential features, but it seems to me that the platform is mostly feature-complete. Just further bloating the software for the sake of it is not necessary a good strategy, yet it is one that a lot of startups follow, just because that VC R&D money has to go somewhere.

I wouldn't say that everyone who owns a Tesla loves it. As a matter of fact everyone I know who has bought a Tesla and loves it came from a car that was a lower quality and lower priced car than the Tesla that they bought. The people that I know that came from equally priced or higher priced cars are satisfied with their Tesla but they do not love it.

I think that is a lot of the bias with Tesla owners many of them have never owned a car in that price range before and they bought it because of the hype surrounding the Tesla. Prior to that they would have never thought of buying a car in that price range. Often times when you buy a car in that price range you're getting a better quality car because it's from a manufacturer who's been around longer.

> supposedly Twitter would die in 3 days without their staff.

It’s true that the smaller team has succeeded with uptime on the core service. It’s also true, however, that the platform is in serious decline, and that’s partly due to the product becoming more and more shitty over time. It turns out skeleton crews can’t make things that are nice to use. Have you tried the X mac app lately? It’s just horrible. Broken modals, empty loading screens, janky layout with desperate upsell message slapped everywhere.

Keeping the platform online with a smaller team was a win, sure. But don’t pretend there’s been no impact.

>It’s also true, however, that the platform is in serious decline, and that’s partly due to the product becoming more and more shitty over time.

A vocal minority of leftists moving to Bluesky isn't a decline.

I was actually referring to the financial institutions who backed the takeover writing off ~75% of the value of their investment in the platform during Musk’s leadership, which predates the recent Bluesky enthusiasm.

But since you mention it: yes, a vocal minority of leftists moving to a new platform is indeed a decline! Get your politics out of it and think about what it means for a business. Part of twitter’s value was that it was where news broke, people made statements, etc. It was cited on the news. There was no other platform like that (except perhaps Instagram, usually with pop culture figures). There is indeed a small group of people who, if you lose them, cause enormous damage to a platform like Twitter, because for many people using it they are using it because of the other people using it. Network effects cut both ways.

>I was actually referring to the financial institutions who backed the takeover writing off ~75% of the value of their investment in the platform during Musk’s leadership, which predates the recent Bluesky enthusiasm.

Makes sense. Valid argument.

>yes, a vocal minority of leftists moving to a new platform is indeed a decline! Get your politics out of it and think about what it means for a business.

Nothing. They will all come back.

>Part of twitter’s value was that it was where news broke, people made statements, etc. It was cited on the news.

It still is. Nothing has changed.

>There was no other platform like that (except perhaps Instagram, usually with pop culture figures).

There still isn't. Bsky is no competition in that regard. There's nothing of value for 'normal' people there.

>There is indeed a small group of people who, if you lose them, cause enormous damage to a platform like Twitter, because for many people using it they are using it because of the other people using it.

And yet they are not the people leaving. How many of these supposed giant exoduses were we supposed to have by now? First the death of artists on Twitter after the Japanese left to misskey? Out of whom many are back on Twitter regardless? All the Mastodon refugees, who also in great numbers have returned and only the fanatics have stayed? Twitter is not dying anytime soon and you (and others like you) are once again crying wolf over a situation we've been in multiple times.

My point isn’t that Twitter is dead, remember. It’s that it is in decline. Bluesky isn’t a twitter replacement today, sure, but it’s a risk, even if the risk is only that the end result is fragmentation. I’m not sure why you say it’s impossible for anything ever to seriously damage X. That’s fanaticism.

And as for people crying wolf, remember: at the end of the fable, there were indeed wolves. The boy was lying, yes, but the lesson is not that there was never any danger - it’s that people stop listening.

> There still isn't. Bsky is no competition in that regard. There's nothing of value for 'normal' people there.

I'm finding Bluesky a perfect Twitter replacement so far. Twitter was becoming a cesspool; an increasingly rancid algorithm that promoted one particular person's politics, and a lack of moderation that meant many conversations just degenerated into abuse.

> How many of these supposed giant exoduses were we supposed to have by now?

All platforms eventually get superseded.

Twitter only thrived over competitors because of the network effect. Other platforms were technically superior / had better QoL, but either had flaws or didn't achieve critical mass.

Bluesky is different. It's as easy to use for the average person, gives more control to the user, is far more civil, and is now big enough already be a replacement.

Almost all the people I was following on Twitter are now posting on there. I followed a lot of scientists, and many have moved entirely. That fewer people are on Bluesky is a feature, not a bug; the signal to noise is more distilled.

It's not just leftists. My Twitter feed had a large number of military experts in it since the start of the war against Ukraine. Almost all of them are posting on Bluesky now, and they're certainly not a leftwing group.

I think another interesting aspect is that Musk confirmed that tweets with links to external sources are penalized on Twitter. That would particularly hit the kind of people that make these platforms interesting to me because they also post longer content somewhere else.

I owned a Tesla. I sold it. Loved it for three years then hated it. It became a nightmare to own and the service dept was such a hassle. They refused to fix recall issues, things broke all the time. It was trash, and I was so blinded by speedy car that I didn't notice it was trash until years later.

> which people do a lot with Musk stuff.

Rightfully so? I mean you can't build up a personality cult and then separate the guy from the product.

But regardless of musk, you have to agree that the cybertruck has issues and underdelivered.

I have heard from three Tesla owners how uncomfortable they find the seats during very long drives, so not everyone "loves" it. Perhaps if you don't drive long distances in it, your experience will not reveal this.

Seats are extremely uncomfortable for people of certain heights. The main issue seems to be the headrests aren't adjustable without tools.

>Everyone I know who owns a Tesla loves it.

Small consolation for the pedestrian who gets run over. Massive cars and distracting screens are two of the main reasons traffic deaths are on the rise, and they're both two selling points people like about Teslas.

> Everyone I know who owns a Tesla loves it

Where do you live? In the bay area, I know a lot of Tesla owners, and 100% of them are absolutely sick of Elon's antics and are not considering another Tesla. (They also all are sick of the poor reliability and terrible service.)

Seriously. This is a virtually universal opinion in my experience, but, I wonder if it's different depending on the political alignment of your area. People may be starting to consider Teslas as political signaling.

I live in San Francisco.

(Anecdote alert)

Most of my Asian friends (mostly first-generation immigrants) have Teslas. Same with many Asians (East & South) at work. The politics don't even register, so the evaluation is purely based on utility. Based on that, they all seem to be satisfied.

Among the second-generation Asians there is more political awareness and it's more 50:50 whether they go for a Tesla or not.

All the hate comes from deranged people who have never driven a Tesla, let alone had one. They take any negative story and spin it forever.

I have driven a model 3 and it is hands down the worst 45k (CAD) car I’ve ever driven. Horrible ride quality, uncomfortable seats, terrible (in my opinion - beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose) and slightly dangerous interior, not really all that fast compared to other cars in the price bracket. I’ve also ridden in one with 100k km and it was falling apart - even ignoring the interior, the suspension was horrid (you shouldn’t need new shocks and springs all around after less than 100k lm of driving), the paint was faded to crap, panel gaps were notably worse than when the same car was new.

They are a 15k car at best with 20k worth of batteries masquerading as a nice car. They’re not. They’re a reasonably cost-effective EV, compared to the rest of the market, but they’re not even close to gas cars in the same price range when it comes to anything other than cost per mile.

We need a special #RocketManBad for these stories.

Everyone’s giving their anecdotes of “no not every Tesla owner loves them” so I’ll give my own. I’ve owned a 3, a Y, and now a cybertruck. These cars are awesome.

We had a “bomb cyclone” last week in the PNW that took out power for half a million homes, and my cybertruck was a lifesaver. Powered my house for multiple days, allowing my family to stay at home. Our fridge and freezer stayed powered and I even ran my clothes dryer one day just because I could. I can’t sing its praises enough after this experience.

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