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Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

reuters.com

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Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#71

Post by dragonwriter »

akomtu wrote: post #69
moistly wrote: post #7

I suppose if everyone is fleeing the service, less infrastructure is required.

Why would everyone flee? Twitter had a problem with censorship and Musk is going to fix it. Some will come back, some will leave, the tone overall will change a bit, but that's about it.

> Twitter had a problem with censorship and Musk is going to fix it.

A substantial share of the userbase either disagrees with Musk that there was a problem with content moderation or has a view of the nature of the problem that is at odds with Musk’s.

The other thing Musk seems to be surprised to discover is that the while tweaks might be desirable, the basic outline of content moderation and advertisers confidence in it was very much tied into Twitter’s ability to make money, and since he’s saddled it with a very large amount of additional debt service costs, that is something that becomes quite an acute problem if it is lost.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#73

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

koyanisqatsi wrote: post #13

Elon used to be a software engineer so it's kinda weird how he thinks a legacy codebase like Twitter can be fixed up to use $1B less every year. Twitter is limited mainly by storage, their compute costs are negligible in comparison. So unless there is so much bloat in their hardware procurement process that they're over-provisioning storage by more than $1B a year there is no way to reduce costs. The hardware costs w…

There’s always a way to reduce costs. For storage specifically one could spend engineering time compressing data, storing it in a colder way, etc. The question is whether the trade offs, short term or long term, are worth it.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#74

Post by shawnb576 »

I worked at a large valley based company that had their own data centers and badly wanted to decrease infra spend.

It's WAY harder than it sounds.

Remember Twitter is not a profitable company which means the likelihood of a bunch of low-hanging fruit for savings is very low. That's been done already.

There are not likely "oh look we found a whole DC sitting idle, oops" sort of savings. Any vendors they use are ALREADY giving them huge discounts.

I'm not saying Twitter is efficient or that this is physically impossible (tho it might be), I'm saying its not easy and takes skilled people a long time to iterate to lower-cost systems or designs that don't have massive stability or performance tradeoffs.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#75

Post by bumblebritches5 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #71
akomtu wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would everyone flee? Twitter had a problem with censorship and Musk is going to fix it. Some will come back, some will leave, the tone overall will change a bit, but that's about it.

> Twitter had a problem with censorship and Musk is going to fix it. A substantial share of the userbase either disagrees with Musk that there was a problem with content moderation or has a view of the nature of the problem that is at odds with Musk’s. The other thing Musk seems to be surprised to discover is that the while tweaks might be desirable, the basic outline of content moderation and advertisers confidence…

No post body was provided.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#76

Post by akomtu »

dragonwriter wrote: post #71
akomtu wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would everyone flee? Twitter had a problem with censorship and Musk is going to fix it. Some will come back, some will leave, the tone overall will change a bit, but that's about it.

> Twitter had a problem with censorship and Musk is going to fix it. A substantial share of the userbase either disagrees with Musk that there was a problem with content moderation or has a view of the nature of the problem that is at odds with Musk’s. The other thing Musk seems to be surprised to discover is that the while tweaks might be desirable, the basic outline of content moderation and advertisers confidence…

I don't know if that particular userbase is valuable to Musk, advertisers or the quality of Twitter in general. I've seen numbers that about half of Twitter users are young, infantile in other words, and they tend to drive emotional crusades. On the other hand, this segment of users may be valuable to advertisers. They may be valuable not because they have money to buy things, but because it's easier to impress them with false values, so when they grow up, they'll start buying stuff from those advertisers. In any case, a good shakeup will only help Twitter.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#77

Post by koyanisqatsi »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #73
koyanisqatsi wrote: post #13

Elon used to be a software engineer so it's kinda weird how he thinks a legacy codebase like Twitter can be fixed up to use $1B less every year. Twitter is limited mainly by storage, their compute costs are negligible in comparison. So unless there is so much bloat in their hardware procurement process that they're over-provisioning storage by more than $1B a year there is no way to reduce costs. The hardware costs w…

There’s always a way to reduce costs. For storage specifically one could spend engineering time compressing data, storing it in a colder way, etc. The question is whether the trade offs, short term or long term, are worth it.

I'm pretty certain that Twitter's code is essentially append-only. It's possible to add new features and keep the old stuff running but there is no way to re-architect it to reduce costs. They are already compressing the data so there is no improvement to be gained there. As for cold storage, re-engineering backups and other forms of redundancy will reduce long-term costs but it won't reduce their yearly operating requirements for storage and compute (storage fundamentally being the main limiting factor).

So either enough people pay to subsidize Twitter's operating costs for everyone else or it continues to get worse over time. There really isn't a 3rd option with better engineered software because there are no software engineers that can work on software of Twitter's scale and make it meaningfully more efficient in terms of storage and compute requirements.

Presumably we are on the brink of AGI, so maybe Elon knows something everyone else doesn't and he's just gonna use AGI to rewrite all of Twitter in assembly. /s

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#78

Post by dragonwriter »

akomtu wrote: post #76
dragonwriter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter had a problem with censorship and Musk is going to fix it. A substantial share of the userbase either disagrees with Musk that there was a problem with content moderation or has a view of the nature of the problem that is at odds with Musk’s. The other thing Musk seems to be surprised to discover is that the while tweaks might be desirable, the basic outline of content moderation and advertisers confidence…

I don't know if that particular userbase is valuable to Musk, advertisers or the quality of Twitter in general. I've seen numbers that about half of Twitter users are young, infantile in other words, and they tend to drive emotional crusades. On the other hand, this segment of users may be valuable to advertisers. They may be valuable not because they have money to buy things, but because it's easier to impress them…

> I don’t know if that particular userbase is valuable to Musk, advertisers or the quality of Twitter in general. I’ve seen numbers that about half of Twitter users are young

Young adults are the prime advertising demo, and have been for quite a long time.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#79

Post by refurb »

nemothekid wrote: post #23
refurb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why a waste? Sounds like a smart move? Buy a company, drastically reduce unnecessary expenses.

> Buy a company, drastically reduce unnecessary expenses. This famously works out very well for PE firms. It seems very naive to assume Twitter was casually spending 1B/yr in "unnecessary expenses". Maybe the previous CEO/CTO was a baffling moron, but I tend to have more faith in people absent of evidence otherwise. I'm going to be surprised if Twitter is around in year - I'm just they have the capital to keep the li…

Twitter has expenses of $5B per year.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR/financials/

So just view this as "A 20% reduction in expenses". Doesn't seem quite to scary huh?

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#80

Post by SanjayMehta »

partiallypro wrote: post #49
frellus wrote: post #20

To be fair, there are going to be plenty of critical leaks coming out of Twitter with a 50% cutting of staff. That's so many whistleblowers, my backyard is completely leaf free now. Frankly, if Musk cuts $1B from the run rate and there isn't a bad outage, a lot of people will look pretty stupid. To be fair, I don't know if Twitter is overspending on infrastructure, but I would guess there are always places to streaml…

I had a friend that worked for a massive company in the Valley which I'll leave unnamed, that told me about them just leaving servers running hot with no throughput for months at a time. So, I guess it's possible. I doubt his estimate was pulled out of a hat (but I could be wrong, or the article could just be pulling that out of a hat/using an unreliable source.) I've taken over AWS and Azure accounts before that wer…

One of our smallest customers had a VM for each application server process. CPU occupancy alone was rarely over 20%.

Easily cut 70% of cloud costs.

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