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Thoughts about Twitter

nolancaudill.com

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Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#141

Post by ZeroGravitas »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #109
WorldMaker wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you don't think you need that much operations labor at scale (and I'm assuming you are drastically under-estimating Twitter's current scale), when you do a 50% layoff before you even know your exact bus factor and are assuming a 100x/1000x redundancy (somehow), what are the odds you lay off one of those "few" people that are critical to operations? How do you know you haven't thrown out the needles in that bi…

Software engineers: we’re engineers Also software engineers: be sure not to fire Ned or else the whole bridge might collapse

Bridges have ongoing inspection and maintenance work that will lead to collapses if you decide to just skip it for no good reason too.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#142

Post by johannes1234321 »

arein3 wrote: post #134
johannes1234321 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but if you happen to fire "the wrong" people it can take a while till the remaining one understand that component well enough for a hot fix, which for the original team had been easy and if ops are wieder to the specific dev team one can assume there are a few components with little attention now in the mix.

So then you have to keep 6k engineers on payroll?)

Depending on what you want to do. But it's unlikely you can fire 50% after a weekend in, even if you are willing to let quite a lot of projects die.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#143

Post by browningstreet »

matwood wrote: post #48
mjr00 wrote: post #20

> 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…

> Regardless of your opinion on Elon, it's simply too early to conclude that this is "likely" to happen, or that all those people will stop using it. Agree. Twitter was a going nowhere dumpster fire before the purchase. It's going to be a bumpy ride, but it could end up better or disappear. Either would be fine with me. Everyone on this site (and even many non-tech people) had their own ideas on how to fix Twitter. I…

When people subscribe to a service, they want a sense of the tangible and intangible aspects of the service and the company behind it... they want to know what they're paying for, and what they're getting for that money.

So far, Elon's been a dynamic and inconsistent figure. He's not representing a stable, known offering where things won't radically change with his whims.

IMO, he needs to stop tweeting and he needs to build a team who can represent the policies and offerings of the company. Obviously he has that in place at Tesla and SpaceX (in greater degrees than he has brought to Twitter so far).

Even if the $8/mo offering is a bargain, it also has to feel reasonable. So far, Elon's not making that case for himself, even while he's basically making the case that he is Twitter now.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#144

Post by philosopher1234 »

Levitz wrote: post #40
bluetomcat wrote: post #3

> 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.

Which wouldn't be half as bad if it wasn't for the potential for echo chambers and tribalism fostering political radicalization. This seems to be a person that thinks that they had something beautiful and nice that contributed to the public sphere and doesn't realize that for many this event in which twitter may change drastically or die is a good thing either way. Then again if I was in a server room where 4chan, ki…

What political radicalization specifically are you concerned about?

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#145

Post by throwaway82388 »

wnevets wrote: post #70
throwaway82388 wrote: post #37

As a relatively disinterested observer (don’t tweet, don’t own a Tesla, don’t feel particularly strongly about Mr Musk), I’ve found the media/commentariat reversals of position on this funny. Musk’s initial Twitter takeover talk was met with general opprobrium, to put it mildly. I must have read more than one take that it was a threat to democracy itself. Then, after a stock market downturn, and when the Twitter acqu…

That is because most Twitter users knew Musk would ruin what made Twitter Twitter. Twitter users just assumed the process of "muskifying" Twitter would be subtle and over the course of years. Watching him speed run the destruction of a $44 Billion company in a matter weeks has been absolutely shocking.

That may or may not be true, it's all unclear. All I know for certain is that the people commenting have no idea either.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#146

Post by gonehome »

matwood wrote: post #48
mjr00 wrote: post #20

> 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…

> Regardless of your opinion on Elon, it's simply too early to conclude that this is "likely" to happen, or that all those people will stop using it. Agree. Twitter was a going nowhere dumpster fire before the purchase. It's going to be a bumpy ride, but it could end up better or disappear. Either would be fine with me. Everyone on this site (and even many non-tech people) had their own ideas on how to fix Twitter. I…

At the very least it's nice to see a power user in control of the platform.

The status quo was so bad - I'm really curious what's going to happen. I'm optimistic.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#147

Post by paxys »

summerlight wrote: post #130
DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #64

The claims in this article assume a lot. To pick just one, regarding stability/uptime: without knowing the distribution of layoffs by department, this may not just be incorrect, but the opposite might be true: if most SREs were retained, and engineers who know the systems well are still around, stability will likely improve as there will be fewer changes to the systems (usually the number one source of outages). If P…

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/03/musk-orders-twitter-to-cut-i... Musk wants to save $1B from infrastructure costs, so the service quality will very likely degrade. The current business focus is money saving at all cost so I don't think SRE or whatever engineers are not very safe from layoffs.

Services that are on the hot path of serving requests and generally keeping the site up and running are a tiny, tiny fraction of overall infra costs at companies like Twitter. The majority of spending is on storage and processing of logs, metrics and analytics data. Now you can argue that Twitter will be worse without this data, but it isn't as simple as "Twitter will go down more if you cut infra costs".

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#148

Post by fdsafdewe »

>Twitter was a unique spot where journalists....

It's telling that "journalists" was put first. I've heard many times that Twitter is "useful" to journalists, who I assume feel like they have their finger on the world's pulse. It might explain why so many news stories include random opinions from unknown Twitter users, and why they are so out of touch with (at least my) reality.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#149

Post by olivermarks »

I doubt this post by Nolan is going to age well.

I'm not a fan of Elon Musk and his vaporware vehicles.

I'm not a fan of Twitter, but have been using it more than usual recently.

I am a fan of free speech and associated universal laws whether online or off based on a level discourse playing field.

I feel terrible for all the people suddenly left at the beginning of winter in one of the most expensive places on the planet without a job, and hope they all go on to better and brighter things!

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