Hacker News Reader

Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

It’s rhetoric like this that has created the market we have today.

The perceived success is not the same as actual success. Remember it is a private company and you don’t actually have any idea how bad the balance sheets were after the layoffs. Before the financial engineering that Musk did by using his other companies to invest in Twitter to preserve its valuation, the company was down almost 80%. [1] If public companies go down that route, they’ll very quickly find out what the actual impact of that model is.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/29/fidelity-has-cut-xs-value-...

View on HN

Twitter's failures are solely due to Musk's changes in corporate governance (e.g. boosting fringe right-wing content causing its existing userbase and advertisers to flee the platform), not due to any engineering problems caused by reducing headcount. Strictly from an engineering standpoint, Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took it over.

As I wrote in another post, 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.

> Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took over

Just because it works on your phone doesn’t mean there are no engineering problems behind the scene. You’re just not aware of the problems that exist because it’s a private company and you’re not privy to the information.

> Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took it over.

Not true. The main reason I stopped clicking Twitter links in the first place was the abysmal chance of the tweet loading and not just displaying a generic "Failed to load. Try again?" after the takeover. I mean it occasionally happened before as well, but it became the default behavior.

It lasted long enough that by the time (over a year) they'd finally fixed it, the platform had deteriorated to a right-wing cesspool anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com