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Comment by dpc_01234 | Hacker News Reader

The stab at Musk seems out of place. You might not like him, or his politics, but he took over and reformed a slow and bloated place, and despite all the doomsayers Twitter is still working and IMO better than before. And he has a solid track record of delivering: finance app, electric cars, rockets. Sure he over-promises and under-delivers, sometimes borderline lies, etc. but there is a huge amount of wisdom behind what he's doing, and you're doing yourself a huge disservice by just dismissing one of the most successful technical entrepreneur of our times.

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He did all but the Twitter takeover prior to turning shitheel. And I wouldn't consider Twitter reformed, so much as its goals have changed.

Do we really have to do this? How can this possibly be in good faith? Like, its 2024 dude, he is literally going to hold unelected office in the US. He is unquestionably a polarizing person. I'm not saying you have to have one opinion or another, but unless you are truly living on mars right now, how can you even feel the need to make this comment? Are you not witness already to the surely GBs of text saying different variations of what you said and all the replies and all the next replies. Like it is borderline insane to me!

How can you possibly care? Do you really not feel like you have won yet? What is even at stake!?

I just dont even understand the discourse anymore. Can't yall all be like "oh he is simply genius, of course all these normies won't get it. we dont need their validation anyway!" And then maybe we can stop doing this? Please?

> despite all the doomsayers Twitter is still working and IMO better than before

a) According to Fidelity it is worth 80% less than when he purchased it.

b) Threads and Bluesky are growing at 1m users a day. Former at ~300m MAU.

c) EU is going to be throwing the book at X over a failure to manage trust/safety.

By any definition X is not doing well.

Musk aside, I personally don't think Twitter is working better than before.

On a technical level at least, there's times when it makes my phone warm up. There's random layout bugs, and things not rendering properly. At some point ads started opening on press-down, as opposed to a proper tap interaction (press-down, don't move, press-up). Now I accidentally open ads all the time.

Moreover, it's slower. Media and search specifically take longer to load. I work on web performance, so I very much noticed that suddenly one day things started loading more slowly for me. I thought it might be some temporary issue with their CDN or bad change messing up the way they schedule network calls, but it just stayed that way.

Perhaps you mean Twitter the company, in which case I don't know, maybe it's making more profit now and in that sense "works better"— but Twitter the app in my experience definitely doesn't.

Separate from Twitter the company and Twitter the app, there is Twitter the community. That is absolutely dead, rotting, and never coming back to what it once was.

And he'd be even more successful if he didn't insist on also being a complete, utter egotistical asshole. Leave whether or not you agree with his policy positions aside for a moment; it's fairly obvious that the guy is a complete shitheel of a person who's basically the dictionary definition of "brilliant asshole."

Steve Jobs seems to have poisoned the brains of whole huge swathes of people into thinking that "being an asshole to others" == "success," because it shows you're powerful enough to not have to deal with the consequences or something.

First, I have no idea if he's a "utter egotistical asshole". Never met the guy, and I assume that most people hating on him formed opinion of him by consuming heavily negatively biased sources.

However, I assume he is some type of an "asshole". And "he'd be even more successful" if he wasn't is just very wrong, IMO. From my experience the top of any organization is completely overrun by assholes. Some smart, some dumb, some more moral, some less, but generally assholes. Being an asshole is selected for in hierarchical organizations and simply required. Part of the reason why leftists dream about some socialist utopia, when attempted in practice is ruined by some asshole(s) taking over power and turning the social utopia into totalitarian distopia.

> and I assume that most people hating on him formed opinion of him by consuming heavily negatively biased sources.

You know what they say about assuming.

I won’t begrudge the guy his successes, but I formed my opinion of him based entirely on his own actions. He broadcasts every other brain fart he has, I don’t need to rely on reporting to influence my decision making when he had himself and his half baked shower thoughts inserted into my feed directly.

I’d probably agree on the asshole front but. As in it being a contributing factor in some manner to some of his upwards trajectory.

What is the wisdom, in your opinion?

Revenue and user ship are steadily decreasing according to most estimates. Glitches and outages started happening immediately. Third party apps have been exiled. Hate speech and misinformation has surged.

From the outside it seems like the ship is gradually, painfully sinking.

Lean and focused execution, quick iteration, over promise and under deliver (yes, in business it pays as much as engineers hate it), most people are actually a drag to productivity. Specifically with Twitter he drastically cut the head count and cost and all the people swearing how irreplaceable people being fired were and his Twitter is going to collapse any minute now were all wrong.

Unlike most people praising the idea of egoless I don't need to like the guy to learn from him.

> all the people swearing how ... Twitter is going to collapse any minute now were all wrong.

This I agree with you on. I was one of the people thinking that it couldn't last long, and I eat my words. It's remarkable how long a stubborn maniacal captain can keep a sinking ship above the water.

> I don't need to like the guy to learn from him.

This is the bit I don't get. Estimates put total revenue at well under $1b this year, compared with over $3b in 2023 and over $4b in 2022 [0]. Cutting the headcount would mitigate some of this, but surely not that much?

It seems likely that the daily active users are also seeing a big hit, although the company has been very guarded about this figure since Musk's takeover. Instead Musk has given platitudes about being the "number one source of news" in some countries. If the DAU was doing well I think he'd be talking about that instead.

[0] https://www.demandsage.com/twitter-statistics/

It was illustrating narcissistic personality disorder. Debating whether or not Musk delivers, or what personality traits might be behind delivering or not, is irrelevant to whether or not Musk illustrates NPD. It is easy to find examples of his behavior that matches [a layman's understanding of] NPD, so it seems fair.

Saying that Musk's personality resembles NPD doesn't say whether he is or is not effective at some tasks.

It has nothing to do with the rest of generally good article. It's just a forced personal stab at disliked public figure. Ironically quite the opposite of egoless. Your politics are a big chunk of your ego. If you can't leave them aside and when dealing with technical stuff, then it's very much egocentric. Which surprise surprise is typically the case.

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