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Thoughts about Twitter

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Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#201

Post by xiphias2 »

watwut wrote: post #195
baryphonic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where you got "rightwing" from. David Sacks is to the right, Elon is center-left, and Jason Calcanis is a bigtime lib. For the past three days, rightwing Twitter has been screaming that Elon has "caved" and so on because Trump, Alex Jones and a few others haven't been unbanned. (Personally, I'd like to see the Babylon Bee brought back as a gesture of good faith, pun intended.) How is the combination of those…

Musk is not center left. The most radical and literally proviolence people pressuring you don't make you center left

I'm not sure where you are getting this from. He was literally pushing for peace talks in the Ukrain-Russia war, where lots of people are dying right now.

Also he has manufacturing plants all over the world (China), so he would lose the most from violence (while many other billionaires are profiting from war).

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#202

Post by infamouscow »

macmcirish wrote: post #181
infamouscow wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a typo. There isn't some kind of grave epistemic problem with the first sentence where everything that follows is predicated on a falsehood. We don't discard the contents of books just because the publication has a typo.

As noted in their other reply, it is actually not a typo. A central part of their point is in that first sentence they note the extra eyes on marginalized people making more money than other marginalized people, but it’s blown out to being extremely exaggerated. So yes, I think there is a “grave epistemic problem” with the first sentence that hurts the argument and its credibility as a whole, without having to get in…

The charitable interpretation of the argument was the exponent was intended to be a multiple of two. That's reasonable when comparing salaries in big tech to elsewhere, and I agree with this.

The fact nobody will engage in the good faith argument, but rather take the least charitable interpretation and spew verbal diarrhea around the assertion instead of directly addressing it is further evidence of the point.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#203

Post by f1shy »

lapcat wrote: post #112
sebastos wrote: post #75

If there was some way to wager my own money that this blog post will age poorly, I would. One of my hobby horses is pointing out people that bend themselves in knots predicting that Uber will fail tomorrow (still waiting!) because they, personally, _don't_ _like_ Uber. There's a similar phenomenon with Elon Musk. Behold, Elon Musk, the guy who runs a car company and a space rocket company, will be completely stymied…

> One of my hobby horses is pointing out people that bend themselves in knots predicting that Uber will fail tomorrow (still waiting!) because they, personally, _don't_ _like_ Uber. Just 3 days ago, Uber announced another quarterly loss of over $1 billion. They are failing, if you judge by profit and loss.

After billions of quarterly losses, and still kicking around... I would love to fail so...

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#204

Post by reducesuffering »

93po wrote: post #69

> The illusion of Elon Musk, David Sacks and Jason Calcanis as savvy operators is completely gone. Elon has owned Twiter for less than a week. How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure? How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?

The guy did just buy a $15b business for $45b, instantly losing $30b...

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#205

Post by WorldMaker »

woooooo wrote: post #176
WorldMaker wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possibly not that foolish depending on how hard you believe the Peter Principle applies to billionaires. Musk didn't start Tesla, he swooped in and meddled exactly like Twitter, because he had extra money and wanted to swing it around. Is picking a good bet, one that survives your meddling, a skill or just luck? It's possible to believe the Peter Principle applies and it was entirely luck.

He came in years before the first car was shipped and, like, 15? years before they got to sustained profitability with their third-gen cars. I'm not trying to dickride the guy, obviously a lot of people contributed, but this literally just happened and we all saw it. How are people rewriting it successfully?

Most of Tesla's current profitability is still in carbon credits trading with other manufacturers. Their own manufacturing is still not stably profitable. Where it is profitable it in part relies on continuing sales of a feature that has yet to be delivered (and may not be ever delivered).

Tesla has done a great job to shake up a complacent status quo of car manufacturers, and to especially lead the curve of EV adoption in the US. That's not nothing, yes, and is absolutely a team effort. It's also not the best run business model and there's a lot of questions still about the long-term sustainability in their cost cutting and their over-reliance on credits and promised but not delivered features. If we want to credit Elon as the sole "business guru" and the company is relying on business models that are less than stellar, it's fair to criticize Elon's role in Tesla with respect to their ongoing business model issues.

There have been times where Tesla's stock, to generate additional liquidity, has had SEC violations alleged against it and most of those were directly "great business man" Elon Musk posting SEC violations directly to social media and pretending they were honest mistakes (and having enough reasonable doubt to not get the "Martha Stewart treatment").

I don't think there's "rewriting". There's 15 years of questionable business practices that was criticized at the time, yet seem easy to sweep under the rug now that Tesla looks popular and is a darling of certain investors.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#206

Post by throwaway82388 »

wnevets wrote: post #192
throwaway82388 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't heard a single proclamation on this that isn't likely to be reversed at some point in the near future. People may quit using Twitter in protest and come back in a week. Or they may all leave for good. Or they may join mastodon, or whatever. Remember the mass Facebook departure to ello? The point I was making is that nobody seems to think any particular thing, other than that which can be post-rationalized f…

> Sure. QED. But not related to anything I wrote. That just means what you wrote is not related to anything I wrote

I've seen it remarked and it seems generally agreed upon that Twitter was overstaffed. The extent to which that was true is unclear, because whether Twitter's service meaningfully degrades or not remains to be seen. There's an $8 blue subscription being floated, but otherwise, to what extent the new leadership will change the core service remains to be seen. Whether power users sustain a revolt or exodus remains to be seen.

Dorsey left, didn't he? There's been some fairly major executive turnover over the years. Twitter sort of hummed along, didn't it?

You remarked, hyperbolically I'd say, that he speed ran the destruction of a $40 billion-whatever acquisition in mere weeks. That may turn out to be true. But it hasn't happened yet. I think many people want this to be true, but this is an exceptional event and is hard to make dispassionate predictions about. It's possible, but improbable that it'll take the shape of Newscorp's myspace acquisition, or Verizon's yahoo acquisition. Those were services that were already in steep decline. I don't know for sure, but Twitter appears to be relatively stable when it comes to user activity.

Overall, I think the prognostication around this acquisition has been inflamed by culture war biases.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#207

Post by ricardo81 »

ricardo81 wrote: post #188
macmcirish wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t troll here. If there is something that x is referring to that is not wage, then please enlighten us because I honestly cannot read it as any other way. There are no realistic values of x for x^2 that work with this argument.

I'm not trolling. My basic point was that people in SV make orders of magnitude more money than the average person. But if we want to be pedantic, you don't know X so you can't refute. If OP wants to say I don't know what exponents are, that's on them. The whole thing stands.

@macmcirish fair enough, I meant in context to the reply.

Folk can be pedantic about numbers and take the mick out the average intellect of the average HN user I suppose. I'm not on the spectrum so not especially retentive to those minor points.

The main point was that a lot of these employees were on very large sums of money, and in control of the information flow across the web. It's a centralised platform. Anyways, doubt it's worth making the point any more.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#208

Post by shawnb576 »

arein3 wrote: post #57
vineyardmike wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s too early to claim it’s dead but he’s right that it’s a coin toss to see if the service can stay running (without downtime). With 50% layoffs (and the rumors of how lax their security was) it’s only a matter of time before the on-call needed to save some issue won’t exist. A breach or bug or something is inevitable. Remember when meta -a far bigger and richer company- messed up basic networking and took the comp…

You need a few people to maintain the servers, not a few thousand people.

It's not a few people.

Twitter runs their own data centers, which means they own all of the THOUSANDS of machines in them. These machines, and all of their parts, have shelf lives and CONSTANTLY need replacement.

When they are replaced you can't just go to Best Buy with a credit card. At scale VERY SMALL changes matter: oh look they changed something in the disk firmware and haha now your databases corrupt data one out of 1M writes.

New machines need to be tested, burned in, installed. Old ones need to be cycled out.

Same goes for power equipment, networking, all that.

Because you built your own data center, and you were an early scale company it ALSO means a huge percentage of your systems are home grown - asset management, deployment, health checking, metrics, you name it. There are no articles on Stack Overflow. There is no blog post. How that shit works is mostly a function of what people knew about it and, well, at least half of those people are now poof - gone.

This hasn't even gotten to the services themselves, many of which are now running without an owner or any person at the company who has ever looked at them before. The remaining people are now up to their eyeballs in drama, survivor syndrome, fear, and, oh yeah, the work of many of their laid-off peers.

Few people, pfft, give me a break.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#210

Post by summerlight »

paxys wrote: post #147
summerlight wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I don't think you understand what you're talking about or Twitter's business model. Those log and metric, analytics are the reason for advertisers paying Twitter. What's the point of saving $1B if you lose $2~3B of advertising revenue?

Oh and good luck with cutting dependencies on those storage while firing all those engineers with knowledge on those infrastructure. From my experience, migration and deprecation is usually much harder (I would say 2~3x difficulty) than launching a new stuff especially in an established big company.

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