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Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

Those are due to deliberate policy changes from Musk to boost engagement of his right-wing sycophants, not due to any technical failings. From a strictly technological point-of-view, Twitter works just as well as it did pre-takeover, and certainly did not catastrophically collapse as many predicted.

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I would categorize what happened to the site and it being rendered unusable by anyone even halfway serious as catastrophic - but perhaps my bar is a little higher for the "smartest man in the world" than "I can still get a 200 response from the site" (which actually is also down, in terms of outages).

I agree that the site is barely usable, but that's entirely due to a shift in Twitter's userbase caused by top-down policy changes (e.g. boosting right-wing spam), not any engineering shortcomings.

If Musk had never purchased Twitter and Jack Dorsey performed the same reduction in engineering staff, I doubt the site would be materially different from how it was pre-Musk.

That's because software is immortal. It will continue to run even if you do nothing. What happens, though, is that stuff around it moves.

Of course twitter still works. Even with 0 engineers, it would still work. That's never been the goal of a software company. I can compile Mario 64 right here, right now, decades later. Should Nintendo just go home? Call it quits? Of course not.

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