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Thoughts about Twitter

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Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#31

Post by mjr00 »

tomlue wrote: post #11

I 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?

I'm former AWS. Yes, it's true. You'd be surprised how much human intervention is needed for large-scale SaaS/cloud stuff. A lot of it's just scale and probability. If an IT problem has a 0.0001% chance of happening on any given day for an org, a single organization will likely never see it happen during its entire existence. But if you're managing IT for 10 million organizations, it'll statistically happen 10 times per day!

Giant tech companies do obsess about reducing the need for human intervention. Teams in my org at AWS kept track of failures/intervention rates per thousand instances. If it gets too high, it means you're spending too much engineering effort resolving on-call issues and need to fix it.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#32

Post by warkdarrior »

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.

I can tell you that there are lots of great conversations among people from same domains of expertise or interest. The general exchanges with random folks are indeed meaningless and quickly devolve into rants. But once you find experts in niche areas, it is great stuff to follow, read, and interact with.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#33

Post by friedman23 »

marcinzm wrote: post #15
friedman23 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't want to buy it.

Then he shouldn't have signed a binding contract. Only an idiot investor wouldn't take twice the market value for an asset when given the chance.

Ok, so he signed the contract. Decided not to buy it because it was a massively overvalued money pit but they forced him anyway.

So now he is supposed to keep dumping money into the burning dumpster fire that is twitter?

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#34

Post by howmayiannoyyou »

If he's right (too soon to know), then nothing of value was lost.

Twitter wasn't profitable and probably was never going to be. Those tweeting will probably lead healthier and more productive lives doing other things. Those consuming content may have to actually read substacks, blog posts, reddit posts and other means of delivering content that are less a knife fight, and more a reasoned argument.

Twitter was rarely the Budapest cafe. It was more the favala rival gang war. If it dies at Elon's hands then its another boon to society, along with electric vehicles and comparatively cheap and reuseable space flight.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#35

Post by feifan »

tomlue wrote: post #11

I 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?

Both are true — if a team can figure out how the reduce the need for human intervention, they generally will. In the limit, what's left is the really-hard-to-anticipate/automate stuff.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#36

Post by grumpitron »

friedman23 wrote: post #33
marcinzm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then he shouldn't have signed a binding contract. Only an idiot investor wouldn't take twice the market value for an asset when given the chance.

Ok, so he signed the contract. Decided not to buy it because it was a massively overvalued money pit but they forced him anyway. So now he is supposed to keep dumping money into the burning dumpster fire that is twitter?

Correction - HE forced himself to buy it by signing a binding contract to buy it.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#37

Post by throwaway82388 »

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 acquisition looked more like an impulsive decision that Musk might regret, the prevailing mood was gleeful. He was stuck with a white elephant. Schadenfreude. And since he clearly no longer wanted it, the consensus now he was legally and morally obligated to buy. Twitter itself demanded it. They weren’t going to let him weasel out of that one.

Now that he seems to have accepted his obligation and the sale has gone through, we’re back to opprobrium.

It’s callous to laugh when so many people have lost their livelihoods (although I’m confident any former Twitter employee has plenty of employment options). But the commentariat consistently outdoes what a satirist could invent.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#38

Post by usaphp »

> They were dumped unceremoniously, the result of the addled whims of a walking meme

How is that different from Stripe layoffs from yesterday? I believe Stripe employees also didn't know that they will be laid off, and they got similar compensation to what Twitter employees got.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#40

Post by Levitz »

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, kiwifarms and twitter were hosted and I had a revolver with two bullets I'd shoot the twitter server twice. I'd be baffled if I ever learned in some quantitative way that the site was a net good.

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