> This endeavor will be one of their lasting legacies: taking a much-loved, revenue-generating cornerstone of the web and smothering it within weeks
One can only hope!
Thoughts about Twitter
21–30 of 235 posts
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
They led to a stagnant company with -$200m in profits. Elon instantly led to a company that is now $1-2 billion in the red a year, and needs to aggressively cut costs and increase revenue to make it up. I'd say the current situation is 99% on Elon. edit: For those not aware, the buyout included $13 billion in debt to Twitter which they need to pay $1-2 billion a year for in terms of interest alone.
Copy pasting my reply from a different thread on that topic: You think that if he paid completely up front he wouldn't care about cutting costs? Why? The pressure would still be there -- it would just be in the form of pressure to recoup his investment
With debt interest he needs to squeeze money NOW versus in the future. In either case he overpaid severely for a company and now needs to squeeze money out of it at some point. Point stands that this is 99% Elon.
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#23I don't work at a giant company, but I'm curious: > Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop. Is this true? Shouldn't giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?
Yes, but complex systems are always changing and in some ways in a constant process of degrading. A lot of the biggest companies are growing exponentially faster than their processes and it ends up being nearly impossible for the tooling and supporting software to keep up. At that scale all the automation software you buy off the shelf won't scale with you. With over a billion dollars a year in surplus infrastructure costs, I would have to imagine Twitter is at that scale.
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#24Quoted post unavailable.
Are we not allowed to voice our opinion on your words in the form of an upvote or downvote? I am assuming those are buttons you never use on hackernews yourself.
Sympathy can still be something you can have for people you disagree with.
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#25I don't work at a giant company, but I'm curious: > Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop. Is this true? Shouldn't giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?
Sure they should, but there are a lot of moving parts, written in different decades. Bugs are found every day even in projects that have 100% code coverage
PagerDuty is a multi billion dollar company for a reason, and they're not even the only company doing what they do.
I don't think it's relevant if one has worked in a giant company to understand how bad on call can be, every engineer knows that. I personally assume on-call is much worse/harder/nerve wracking in bigger companies
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#26No post body was provided.
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
They led to a stagnant company with -$200m in profits. Elon instantly led to a company that is now $1-2 billion in the red a year, and needs to aggressively cut costs and increase revenue to make it up. I'd say the current situation is 99% on Elon. edit: For those not aware, the buyout included $13 billion in debt to Twitter which they need to pay $1-2 billion a year for in terms of interest alone.
He didn't want to buy it.
Then why'd he offer $45bil for it?
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#28> But, what is gone? Twitter was a unique spot where journalists, celebrities, titans of industries, your family, friends and co-workers, would join a daily mosh pit filled with a mix of truly important cultural moments and the most inane things you’ve ever seen. [...] Twitter will likely go from Elon’s new toy that is too difficult for him to play with, to being passed on to his legal and finance advisers to sort ou…
No post body was provided.
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#29> Twitter was a unique spot where journalists, celebrities, titans of industries, your family, friends and co-workers, would join a daily mosh pit filled with a mix of truly important cultural moments and the most inane things you’ve ever seen. It’s a toxic pit where people with boosted self-importance exchange silly reactions and replies, with no meaningful conversation whatsoever.
That depends on who you follow and how you follow them. If you follow non-toxic people using Lists instead of the algorithmic timeline, it's not bad.
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#30I don't work at a giant company, but I'm curious: > Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop. Is this true? Shouldn't giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?
Yes, but complex systems are always changing and in some ways in a constant process of degrading. A lot of the biggest companies are growing exponentially faster than their processes and it ends up being nearly impossible for the tooling and supporting software to keep up. At that scale all the automation software you buy off the shelf won't scale with you. With over a billion dollars a year in surplus infrastructure…
At Amazon, near Black Friday and Prime Day, there are company wide deployment freezes, where no one is allowed to push to prod.
When I was oncall for my team, I found there were less pages, less issues, and the system was generally more stable.
Entropy, leading to availability problems, grows with rate of production changes.
If no one touches the code, my guess is the system is more stable rather than less.