Since the problem is that the links to media were broken and we know at least one - Ellen's - was fixed, does that imply the others can/will be fixed too? If so, and if they can be restored programmatically, then this would seem to be a very minor technical stuff up.
But if the pictures/media is effectively rendered inaccessible (e.g forever), that's a much bigger deal.
It seems… unlikely that they’ve just totally lost the data (that is, what the shortened links point to). I mean, it’s clearly not being fun very well right now, but that seems too incompetent.
There's also the fact that the service formerly known as Twitter is running on a skeleton crew. This could easily lead to a buildup in cruft, undetected or unnoticed system errors, or any number of maintenance issues that could result in something like this.
I like to think they cut costs by lopping letters off the word twitter until all they had left was a “t”, and then some bozo walked up and kicked the remaining character over.
Here’s Mark Cuban saying the tech/responsiveness has improved. Does he seem like the kinda guy who needs to suck up to anyone? A guy with fuckyu levels of money?
“ In case we needed more evidence that putting dynamic code between hyperlinks from one page to another, add this to the pile...”
If you add “is a bad idea” after another so that it reads:
“ In case we needed more evidence that putting dynamic code between hyperlinks from one page to another is a bad idea, add this to the pile...”
Otherwise the sentence isn’t saying anything as it is worded. Sorry if I am being mistaken here.
On the other hand, shortening URLs are handy if they are used directly, and it also allows resources to be moved easily which is not really a bad thing either.
We don't refer to websites by IP address either after all, DNS is pretty similar to a URL shortening service: It makes addresses easier to understand for humans and it allows for flexibility in changing the physical address whenever needed.
> In case we needed more evidence that putting dynamic code between hyperlinks from one page to another
Would static code have been better? Or would is problem the code part? It's not clear from your statement, and also, there is code between hyperlinks from any page to any other page, that is just how it is. I'm not sure how dynamic code really introduces problems that static code can't though.
I was like... what XFree86 or X.org glitch can possibly cause that, so I clicked. Then I saw that logo which I see constantly instead of the content when someone link twitter, and I face the login wall, so closed the page instantly.
/blog.
for me twitter is dead. (despite being more-or less on the same page with elon in some topics, this project is really botched imo)
Twitter is fine. I have a large follower account, nothing is wrong with the site, besides the terrible name change.
For the record prior to his takeover, twitter went down a lot more often. What has changed is new features finally getting added unlike before where it took months for them to change anything
Twitter still resolves to a working webpage but what it was as a cultural element is dying. The closest thing to a digital city square we had, and techbro shows up to enshittify it and let his minions vandalize the place.
I kinda agree with the X/Twitter name change but I really want to stress that it is STILL the same service.
I am a large account/heavy user and it’s still very good.
The worst part was changing how DMs worked. Before you could get in touch with Celebs or famous people and know it was them. Right now it could be a parody account, it’s tough to tell. Is that really pmarca in my DMs or a twitter blue user?
Beyond that I think the site has improved. And it will probably get better and you should hop on.
It’s not just political hell fire (which was ‘nerfed’ if you will, in virality during the for-you algo update). I have qualms too but I really do mean it: the site is still very good.
> And it will probably get better and you should hop on.
Nothing advertises desperation more than seeing someone begging people to use the service while dismissing problems with the service in a thread that is literally about a huge problem in the service (but one of a long line of threads about newly-introduced problems with the service).
That's not what enshittifying means. I noticed that there are many assumptions in your post:
1. all leftists/progressives are obnoxious/preponent/deranged (I personally disagree)
2. only leftists/progressives are alienated by the recent changes (I disagree, and know many counterexamples)
3. leftists/progressives even exist as a well-defined group (I disagree, unless you're talking purely in context of American politics - in this case it's worth specifying, since Twitter is used worldwide)
But thanks for your perspective. I my social group nobody is happy with the way Twitter is going, so it's interesting to know that some people see it completely differently.
I made nearly 3k posting last month - no different than I did in the past - there is huge incentive to be a creator their now.
Are you an active user or a hater? I have a feeling most people complaining about the site have some other driving force like hating the guy politically that winds them up.
I don’t like him either but from a heavy user he’s been improving things. Prior management took years to ship.
His biggest sin was scaring away Liberals for the time being.
I am a passive user only reading things related to 1 specific thing and some time ago when logging on I was informed that I can no longer use 2fa for my account because security costs extra. Don't remember the details but it appeared absurd.
SMS 2FA was put behind the paywall - ostensibly because they saw "bad actors" abusing it, but more likely because it costs money to send text messages and they're bleeding like a stuck pig thanks to Musk.
Also non sms 2FA is much more secure. Telecoms are famous for garbage security. There are naughty places on the web where you can essentially buy the privilege of taking over a targeted phone number courtesy of a compromised employee account. For instance T-mobile has reported major widescale breaches in 2023 and purportedly small scale breaches where an employee account is taken over and used to essentially sell control of customers phone number are much more common to the point there was a telegram channel set up specifically for this purpose and hearing "T-Mobile Up" was a common occurrence.
I have for instance entirely disabled SMS 2FA wherever possible and strongly prefer my yubikey.
His biggest sin is scaring away advertisers so they are hugely in the red despite shedding most of their employees. No matter how useful twitter is to you personally if it doesn't make money eventually it will have to make a change or go away.
I was honestly trying to think of how an X11 bug could affect images and links in tweets until I opened the link and remembered that rebranding exercise.
Yeah, I find "X11", while less ambiguous, reminds me too much of macOS users because that's how it's usually referred to as there, as if it's foreign thing.
On Linux, saying "X11" is like calling it by its full first name, and since we're long-time buddies, we're on a first-name basis and just call it by its short nickname X. At a formal dress party, we'll call it the X Window System, and if we were introducing it to royalty, we'd say X Window System, Protocol 11, Revision 6.
On the other hand, this is a 100% self-inflicted problem.
There is no technical reason why links have to be shortened (for SMS users back in the day, the shortening should've happened at the SMS gateway level, with actual Twitter content always using the real links).
You don't need (as many) reliability engineers if you don't add unnecessary moving parts into the system in the first place.
If there was some disingenuous ragebait article every time someone broke something in production at my company we'd be in the news every week. And that's with plenty of reliability engineers and QA.
I don't know who you work for, but something tells me your boss didn't publicly fire a huge chunk of the engineering staff being like, "WTF are all these people good for? lol"
That's the point. We have reliability engineers and QA, but I don't find that they actually prevent or resolve outages. I guess it's funny to poke fun at every outage after the mass layoffs, but in reality I doubt things would have been much better had that not happened.
Remember Elon was strong-armed into the purchase; he tried to back out.
That aside, in his shoes I would have slashed non-essential roles, but been a bit less heavy-handed among the engineers. I do feel that Twitter's popularity is orthogonal to the cost-cutting.
Basic block storage - high capacity spinning rust - is very cost effective and 'cheap', even when used in a high-availability / redundant configuration.
Said, similar storage, supplied by a Cloud provider, is stupidly expensive in relative terms. Albeit, 'cold' versions can be reasonable value if you don't want realtime access to your data, and you can work your way through the maze of egress price charging points.
You forgot about bandwidth costs. The entire benefit of a CDN is moving data closer to the user to not only speed up access time, but cut down on data transfer fees. So you can either replicate your entire database across all CDN nodes (and pay more for duplicated storage), or you can have cold storage in one location (and pay more for transferring the data).
The thesis of deliberately deleting all these images would be premised on the idea that no one was accessing them anyways, hence they're useless. That merely storing (but seldom accessing) them is very cheap is a sufficient rejoinder to that thesis.
How is it possible for a company to use a single letter as a trademark? This is completely stupid. Not only it is confusing (when I read this title I thought its about Xorg/X11) I can't imagine them being able to enforce such trademark. Then there is destruction of one of the most recognisable brands in the world (twitter). It literally feels like the jerk that bought the company is trolling everyone and purposefully running it into the ground. Considering his vast interests in China and who will benefit (bytedance, tik tok etc) I also think there clearly is a Chinese angle to the whole thing.
It is confusing indeed, I usually use X in conversation to refer to any unknowns that isn’t the main discussion point, now, whenever I read these articles it’s confusing to follow, at least call it X-twitter, X-app or anything similar.
- Elon has never operated: a social media company, a freemium product, or an ad-driven company. He so doesn't understand advertising, that he famously dropped Teslas marketing department.
- If you read accounts of the way he treats Tesla and SpaceX workers, the treatment of Twitter employees is on brand.
- Elon has always used Twitter as a way of getting attention for himself and his companies. It's his primary platform. Even ignoring his ego, it makes sense he would bump up his own content.
- "Ridiculous amounts" is relative to what you earn. What sounds reasonable to a billionaire will sound ridiculous to you or me.
- The blue-check mark was one of the few things of value (excluding ads) that Twitter could trade for money. It was a thing that people wanted, and therefore could have a price attached. Selling blue check marks is more similar to selling a tesla, than the roundabout way ad sales generates money.
- A lot of the speech he unblocks, he agrees with. If you dont believe that, and want to believe he wants unlimited free speech thats fine.. but that unlimited free speech belief is from an misunderstanding of the business reason that social media blocks certain content (legal, ad-friendliness, etc).
- Unreliability is from implementing ideas without listening to feedback and planning properly.. and exactly what he does at Tesla. Example: removing the radar from Teslas and updating the software later.
- It's not the symbol of death to Elon. It's the cool brand they wouldnt let him rename PayPal to.
I've seen nothing in Elons behavior that indicates he's behaving any differently that he has at his other companies. Why is it assumed that this guy who has no background in this industry knows what he's doing? When you start a company, you get time while it's small to make all kinds of dumb mistakes. Elon doesnt have that experience, and every mistake is at-scale.
>Elon doesnt have that experience, and every mistake is at-scale.
Several of his mistakes have, I am sure, been born out of ignorance. This is not a good explanation for his decisionmaking in general. Nearly everyone, whether in the industry or not, has been able to foresee the consequences of his actions better than he has.
His worst decisions have been born out of emotion. He has throttled access to websites like the New York Times and slandered organizations like NPR because they don't praise him enough. He rebranded the company to 'X' because he is still hung up on his failures in the '90s. He writes pathetic and incoherent rants at 2:00 AM and demands every user see them because he is deeply insecure. He desperately wants to feel popular, even if it has to be by fiat. He has done the wrong thing, time and time again, because he is weak.
> Elon has always used Twitter as a way of getting attention for himself and his companies. It's his primary platform. Even ignoring his ego, it makes sense he would bump up his own content
also so he can deflect or downboost criticisms of him and his companies
The amount of self-control it takes for people in these positions to restrain themselves is fascinating. Musk seemingly has very poor impulse control, and he veers all over the place accordingly, with the wealth and fame doing the classic thing and amplifying.
Steve Jobs could have veered all over the map. He was anointed with the title of genius by the public broadly (and Jobs may have indeed been a genius at what he was great at, narrowly speaking). He successfully rebuilt a globally iconic company and his leadership resulted in Apple producing extraordinary products that hundreds of millions of people have enjoyed. He was also one of the richest people in the world when he died and quite famous. Instead of veering widely, he had the self-control to stay on task, stay focused, and more or less had the discipline to not veer far outside his sphere of competency. The self-control to stay on task seems to have been something Jobs intentionally made himself get better at over the years. He recognized the more important thing was to do fewer things and do them well and he preached that to anyone that would listen. He recognized that our time limitations (and time-productivity limitations (you can only be highly productive for a fraction of a day)) are aggressive, so you're better off focusing heavily rather than sprawling. We're quite finite in our capabilities, at best. Even when Jobs was doing Pixar, he was very careful not to go too far away from focusing on Apple, and he didn't attempt to keep sprawling his focus even though he easily could have (this is a big separation for Jobs and Musk; maybe someone with high productivity potential can do an Apple + Pixar simultaneously, with good management; do more than that? I think Musk has potently found the point of imploding returns on sprawling focus).
Musk is at risk of producing a lot of duds as he sprawls his focus, and maybe he doesn't care if that happens, however there is a significant time-productivity cost to what he is doing (and a huge monetary cost). The Twitter time and $40 billion could have been spent on getting to Mars. $40 billion would probably get SpaceX to Mars. This is something that makes me understand why some people like to hurl invective at him. Guy spends two decades with a supposed overarching goal of chasing Mars, acquires a quarter of a trillion dollars, some of which he can liquidate to accelerate the mission, and then he does this. Talk about veering off. Jobs would have sold $20 billion of Tesla and pumped it into chasing Mars, if that were his primary goal.
Despite how much certain people hate Musk now (in the same way they hate Trump, and for similar reasons), he is brilliant at what he's good at. No matter how much his detractors wish to tear him down, and no matter how much he makes it easier for them, it's simply true that he is a very intelligent person and at least narrowly highly competent. Most of the HN crowd would instantly vaporize when confronted with what he has taken on over the past 10-15 years (being worth $200+ billion and globally hyper famous would melt nearly everybody on HN, and that's just one point). Trying to do things well outside your competency, when you're already stretched thin on your primary mission/s, is a very bad mistake of impulse control / focus. Your line: "Why is it assumed that this guy who has no background in this industry knows what he's doing?" pretty well nails it. It reminds me of the average Joe thinking they have an idea for a restaurant or bar, and that that'd be a great business to pursue (because they've eaten at restaurants before and like most people they have strong opinions on food/service); Musk's mistake on Twitter comes from a similar place, he was a heavy social media user just as Joe eats at restaurants.
Musk will require another beating (akin to Tesla and SpaceX nearly failing simultaneously) to pull his focus back to Earth. Otherwise he'll just continue to sprawl, his impulse control is too mediocre to self-impose that course correction without hefty pain prompting it. Something sharp and negative has to affect him, in proportion to his financial capabilities and or something very bad has to happen to Tesla or SpaceX. Maybe he'll remain hyper rich and just waste his twilight days sprawling around, either occasionally getting in the way of the SpaceX mission or being fortunate enough that it succeeds in spite of his erratic approach.
What is that exactly? Seems like he is primarily good at having money, well at least until he set so much of it on fire with his Twitter acquisition. Otherwise, what is his achievement that isn't effectively just throwing money at a problem in a way that no one had previously done?
I think it should be ok to complain about things that you benefit from, and I don't think it is hypocrisy. I benefit from the world's growing inequality but I still think it's a bad thing and will be long term detrimental and I complain about it to anyone who will listen.
Musk complains that taxes on him are too high. He's fine receiving subsidies paid for by my taxes and your taxes. It's worse than simply being hypocritical it's being sociopathic. It's not at all like you complaining about a system that's unfair to others.
You've summed it up perfectly: "40 billion would probably get SpaceX to Mars."
He could have spent that money on practically anything else and benefitted humanity. People would have been awarding him Nobel prizes and fawning over him for the rest of his life.
Instead he bought twitter and let the fascists run riot.
> The smartest people are the ones who know the limits of their expertise and say so.
No.
This is the most common mistake the anti-Musk crowd makes. They fail to differentiate between a person being intelligent and having good self-control. They are not the same thing.
Musk failing at Twitter doesn't make him stupid. Musk having poor impulse control does not make him stupid. What you see in the Musk detractors is their own idiocy and or poor impulse control on display, in the way they go after him by proclaiming that he's stupid or the equivalent, it shows off their inability to think deeply and to control their own emotional impulses (to lash out; a failure to think rationally, a failure to be able to dissect a topic dispassionately). It's rather interesting that Musk's poor impulse control lures the same behavior out of his detractors (which is exactly what Trump's wild behavior did to his detractors, they have been wildly rabid for seven years non-stop; Trump acted wild, they reacted wild).
Intelligence is no guarantee of self-control, discipline, focus, integrity, work ethic, et al.
Smart people can be cruel. Smart people can be very lazy. Smart people can be liars. Smart people can be x y z. And in exactly the same way, smart people can have poor impulse control, behavioral disorders of all sorts, or just be lazy and not develop their work/task focus capabilities throughout adulthood.
There is also an interesting difference between smart/intelligent and wise. Musk is very intelligent, he may not be particularly wise. Knowing, understanding and accepting your limits is generally an area of wisdom rather than smartness. Properly acting on your acquired understanding of your limits would be maturity / personal responsibility (integrity is typically a major factor in that mixture). I don't think Musk is a very mature person, and of course his tweets have put that on display for many years now.
>This is the most common mistake the anti-Musk crowd makes. They fail to differentiate between a person being intelligent and having good self-control. They are not the same thing.
"Smart" does not just mean "high intelligence", as you very well know. In common parlance people use "smart" to mean an ill-defined combination of intelligent, knowledgeable, careful, and wise. A smart person is one who can deal with complexity and make good decisions.
Deliberately misinterpreting what someone has said in such a way that it is obvious nonsense, then claiming what they said is obvious nonsense, is not a clever trick. All too often effective, but not clever.
I am not willing to conclude Musk is especially smart, for the record. SpaceX seems pretty competent, but Tesla, Twitter, Neuralink, and several failed projects are technically dreadful in numerous ways. What can be attributed to Musk's intelligence, what can be attributed to his behavior, and what can be attributed to the fact that any fool with a big enough bag of money can hire brilliant people? I do not know.
What I do know is that every time he speaks on a subject I know well his remarks are word salad.
This is a well thought out post, and the blindness rage causes will lead people to continue to underestimate people, and wonder why things don’t turn out the way they expected.
> Think about what he's killing - one of the internet's most powerful drivers of social change.
As someone watching from the sidelines, a lot of the social change Twitter created was negative, and harder to see from inside the social media sphere. People getting dumber, angrier, and more dependent. Personally, I'd love to see it all go away, so I'm fist-pumping every time Musk does something stupid. Unfortunately, I haven't really seen any evidence that makes me believe he can actually kill it, let alone what it represents.
Yeah what I hate about Twitter the most (and have always hated, even before Musk) was the way it prioritises thoughtless fleeting remarks and deprioritises insightful content.
Because it's easy to tweet "just had dinner at grandmas, was great!" and much much harder to make an insightful statement in those 160 characters or whatever still-short limit it is now.
Almost all the posts I've seen on Twitter that were actually worth reading, were cut up in tens of pieces, each with their own sub-thread attached. Basically making the whole content unreadable without using threadreader.
To me it's not surprising people who are disjointed and thoughtless thrive in this environment but for me the ratio of pure shit vs insightful stuff is so low I've always hated this platform with a passion.
I don't have an account there and I never look at it, if there's something worthwhile reading on twitter I count on Hacker News to bring it to my attention.
Thing is, to you, that's not "insightful" (whatever you mean by that.) But to some of Malcolm's 30 followers, it's an interesting piece of content. To future historians, it might fill in a tiny piece of context they were missing when they're trying to piece together how Malcolm's life turned out.
I don't get the hate - not everything has to be insightful and not everything is for you. Just ignore it and get your "insightful" content elsewhere.
> How can anyone believe he's acting in good faith here?
Is there a particular reason to believe that he's doing so? Recall that he didn't voluntarily make the purchase; he was forced to by a lawsuit. And, given that the persona he presents publicly is childish, spiteful and petulant, I think it makes a lot more sense to take his actions at their face value and conclude he has no intention of running Twitter well (or, in the long term, at all).
> Recall that he didn't voluntarily make the purchase; he was forced to by a lawsuit.
He was forced by a law suite since he signed papers about him buying it. It was his free choice to sign those papers. It was his free choice to have them even drafted. Also the value, is a value he came up with. (Maybe while stoned)
He intended to back out of the deal from the start, it was supposed to be an attention-grabbing stunt, and if you believe conspiracy theories there was some financial upside from doing so, though I can't remember exactly what.
> if you believe conspiracy theories there was some financial upside from doing so, though
Well, theoretically you could make an offer, that raises the share price to the offer and then you can cancel the offer and sell your shares fornthe high price and profit.
However the SEC would investigate very carefully. Especially in the case of Musk, who has a history of stock manipulation. He'd need very good arguments.
However there was something else: After his offer markets crashed to some degree. Thus he overpaid compared to what he'd have to pay, if he had made the offer a few weeks later. So maybe he only wanted to lower the price.
It's likely that the initial offer came out of a rage. Just see the back and forth with him joining the board ... or not. However the key point is: He's not a poor victim who was forced to buy something he didn't want at all, but he initiated this and signed papers about it. The court just decided that he can't get out.
> However the SEC would investigate very carefully. Especially in the case of Musk, who has a history of stock manipulation. He'd need very good arguments.
Yes but his history also shows he doesn't really care what the SEC thinks and does what he wants regardless. I think this is still a pretty plausible reason.
I think the usual rule of conspiracy theories applies: in the absence of actual evidence, go with Occam’s razor. We know Musk spends a LOT of time on Twitter and he disagreed with some of their moderation policies around issues which were catching some of his political friends such as pandemic misinformation or trans rights (especially after becoming estranged from his trans daughter).
Everything we’ve seen so far fits the theory that he didn’t have a plan other than changing their policies and has been winging it ever since.
I'm really worried about the anti-trans thing the last years. Even some of my "friends" who were really LGBTI+ friendly, are now rabid anti-trans and want them to die (literally in some cases, I'm not exaggerating). I don't get this. What are trans people doing to us? They are just going about their lives not hurting anyone.
It seems to be mostly under the flag of 'for the children' and in the US it seems more religiously/GOP oriented but if you actually start a discussion and dismantle some of their talking points with actual proof (no, kids are not indoctrinated into becoming trans or gay, it's just about understanding), the actual underlying rabid hate comes out.
I'm not LGBTI+ myself but I'm very good friends with many of them and I find it sickening. Leave people to be who they are.
I had no idea about Musk's daughter though, that explains some of it in his view I guess.
> I'm not LGBTI+ myself but I'm very good friends with many of them and I find it sickening.
This is where I consider "pride month" relevant: I'm not LGBTI+ either and for large parts consider the hate a edge phenomenon on internet and in some groups and more or less forget about it. During pride month there are so many anti-gayncomments one can overhear, which to me serves as a reminder that in my bubble it's not a problem, but once you step out it's a crazy world ... (I'm outside the US)
I'm from the Netherlands and to me it feels like things are going backwards.
When I grew up in the 80s it was all totally OK. A bit uneasy still but OK. In the 90s things improved even more. Being gay was just normal, not even special. Not that everyone was gay but it was just normal the way some people are blond and others brown-haired. It wasn't even a 'thing' anymore. It just was.
But now it has definitely become a thing spurring lots of hate again. And it saddens me. We had this covered. Only trans wasn't really a thing when I was young but queerness was. I think it was more just not a thing because the medical options weren't as advanced as they are now.
I think polarisation of society has played a big part in this. I think religion also plays a role as many religions frown on this. In the 90s our society was really 'done' with religion, young people were completely disconnected from it. But it has made a comeback for various reasons.
> I don't get this. What are trans people doing to us?
I've done a lot of thinking about this. People point to religion or society or statistics, but I believe that those are mere fig leafs to justify their hateful gut feelings.
I think it's an offshoot of homophobia. Some men are simply terrified that other men are looking at them the same gross way they or their acquaintances look at women. By the same token, I believe that the disgust felt towards transwomen by some men is that it's "tricking" a man into being gay, and that some women perceive transness as some sort of "stolen valor."
Kids and teenagers end up gay and transgender regardless of if they have access to the knowledge to explain their feelings and what to do about it or not. The only question is how much confusion, pain, suffering, and possible ostracism you wish for them to endure.
It's long been considered okay for teenagers to get breast implants and other cosmetic surgery. By comparison, gender-affirming care has some of the most positive long-term outcomes not only of all cosmetic surgery, but in all of medicine, period.
If you truly care about the well-being of kids and teenagers, don't get between them and their doctor.
If he backed out of the deal at the last minute and never signed his name, I might agree with you on "supposed to be an attention-grabbing stunt". The revisionist view here is mind-blowing.
You are underestimating how much work went into securing the capital needed to sign those papers. He probably used the last fake resistance to do some edgy trading and profit a bit out of the public.
I don't think buying twitter was a very good business decision, but it was certainly calculated.
The value he got from owning the public discourse platform is enough for someone who is a billionaire and doesn't really need money anymore.
He paid $44 billion on it. This is a substantial amount of his wealth, close to a fourth of it at that time. The default assumption is that he would try to extract some value from it.
> This is a substantial amount of his wealth, close to a fourth of it at that time
He debt financed the buyout. While he had to put up a non-trivial amount of his own money he also borrowed a non-trivial amount of money. Part of Twitter's problems today is paying an extra billion dollars a year in interest payments on those loans.
My understanding is that he got capital by using his Tesla stock as collateral - having liquidated all at once would have damaged its value, which happened anyway to a lesser extent. I don't know how this debt is structured now, but I would be very surprised if running the company to the ground would simply eliminate it.
I'm hearing a lot of commentary that he's removing the ability to block people. Reads to me like he got offended somebody blocked him and he's taking away the feature.
The flip side is anytime you mention twitter’s descent on HN, you’re certain to attract the “I dunno man, everyone i know says their timeline is a lot more interesting now” bros.
my favorite part is Twitter's new open hostility to vendors and advertisers ( refusing to pay rent, threatening big advertisers with Consequences if they don't continue to use the platform )
> The blue check-mark saga - destroying a lot of it's hard-earned value
Hard-earned value? Please tell us this is satire.
Are you referring to the creation of the segregated online society of haves and have-nots? Where many of the checks were handed out based not on merit but on industry connections?
The blue checks were one of the biggest displays of inequity in all of modern existence, and we are all fortunate that the old model was swiftly killed off.
The checkmark didn't represent any privilege, it meant verifiability that the account is actually that person. It makes sense it was mainly used by celebrities who are going to have a lot of impersonators.
I can understand being optimistic about "Arab Spring" when it was starting, but what makes you think it helps your argument to use it now that we know how disastrously it turned out?
Yes, Tunisia is more democratic that it was before Arab Spring, but Tunisia still only scores at 5.51 on the Economist Intelligence Unit's democracy index (compared to 2.79 at the start of the Spring). (Mexico by comparison scores at 5.25.) More importantly, Tunisia's population (11.7 million Tunisians) is only about 1 or 2 percent of the Arab population, and more Arabs than that have been killed or made homeless by the unrest and the civil wars in Egypt, Yemen and Syria.
firstly, he said social change, not positive change
secondly, why not champion the _potential_ for tools like twitter to act to release all of that energy -- just because arab spring didn't turn out as positive as people hoped, doesn't mean that that arab spring ii won't.
I have a large follower account and it’s been a mixed bag BUT my biggest complaint prior to his takeover was how slow it took them to change anything.
And now things do changed quickly but not perfectly.
And you may be missing his greatest creation: Revenue share. Big account get a share of revenue for ads shown.
I have 70k+ followers and made $3000ish last month (I rounded up it was a little less than 3k). That’s a huge incentive for something I did for $0 these past 10 years.
You should definitely keep this list going. Also, I couldn't make it past the Google captcha after about 10 tries for some reason... so I couldn't read it.
Twitter is still an important resource for many people around the world, most of which are not English speakers and are indifferent to the topics that brought Twitter so much hate. I understand some of the feelings behind these "good riddance" comments, and perhaps Twitter deserved it, but for a lot of the users it's just unhelpful collateral damage.
I wish Twitter was split and/or sold off to someone else.
> but the way the movement was carried out made women in general a liability to interact with.
That statement only begins to make sense from the POV that the default human being is a man and that whatever benefits women received from the heightened scrutiny of sexual offenses in the workplace aren't even worthy of enumeration.
As a thought experiment, how do you think the women you know would react to your characterization of the #metoo movement? Would you feel comfortable showing them your comment?
Back during OWS the main point of outrage was large banks using government money to subsidize their bad bets. Nobody liked this, not even the people giving the banks that government money. But we did it anyway, and the resulting moral hazards of over a decade of 0% interest rates and no antitrust enforcement gave us something even more insane than capitalism: techno-feudalism[0].
I question your read of MeToo's effects, mostly because it does not jive with my experience. What line of work are you in where women are a liability to work with?
Twitter causing the Arab Spring was largely marketing to westerners and not truth. The Arab Spring happened because the price of food spiked, not because Twitter was magically easier to access than the hundreds of other forms of communication people had access to.
[0] As coined by Cory Doctorow. Some other left-wingers call it "late-stage capitalism".
Obviously not since the lights are still on, and there's more features. There were too many staff before. Nobody is irreplaceable.
> While attracting lawsuits for the manner of firing people.
You mean the lawsuits that turned out to be bullshit lawsuits?
> Keeps tweeting pretty deranged stuff...
You mean pretty entertaining stuff?
> Unblocking hate-speech accounts
What is a "hate-speech account"? Is it one where name-calling and ridiculing individuals with hit-list style rundowns is celebrated? Like what you're doing? Or is what you're doing "love speech" and I'm just not seeing it?
Not really. That "arc of history" line is just propaganda. Twitter did play a roll in these changes. Whether these were towards "justice" or not depends on your viewpoint, of course.
To make an example of my point, how could the American Revolution start in 1765 without Twitter? Something else did play a roll and was good enough. That revolution even succeeded.
Thousands of other data points scattered all along human history, successful or not.
Everybody is born with a mouth. It's all we had for so much of our history. Add ink. Those were enough for all the movements that shaped the ancient and modern world.
If they were so essential I'd expect the service to have crashed and burned long ago and never came back up.
Trading off hundreds (thousands?) of people at US salaries for only a 10% impact in uptime is a sane business decision.
Having this many people working on a system that was built and "finished" 10 years ago (there have been no major feature updates to the core Twitter experience) in a decade, it means:
1) the system is built and working well but the engineers continue building complexity for complexity's sake in order to justify their continued employment and/or polish their resume (very common in any kind of large tech company with no clear product that people pay for - I call these "engineering playgrounds")
2) if the system is not actually working and needs hundreds/thousands of engineers to tend to it, then those people are incompetent and should be let go either way
> If they were so essential I'd expect the service to have crashed and burned long ago and never came back up.
False dichotomy. There is a vast space between continuing to run normally and turning into a smoking crater overnight. This includes brief outages, "secondary" functionality being broken for longer, slowdowns, inability to handle spikes or add new features, etc. All things we've actually seen with Twitter BTW. No one of them is enough to kill the site outright, but people do notice when a site is flaky. It erodes trust, and they seek alternatives.
The fact that Twitter hasn't experienced a more serious collapse since Musk's takeover is a testament to the quality of the engineering that was done before. But there's little difference between a sudden death and a slower one, in the end. If you want to rail against "perf-review driven engineering" or churn for churn's sake, you'd do better to aim your invective at Meta or Google instead of kicking people who are already down.
Maybe some of the people he fired could have helped him understand how not to lose half of advertisers or all the people put off by the presence of actual Nazis who will soon be unblockable and if they commit 8 bucks a month boosted in threads. Also if he was going to lose people maybe it should have been more of the low performers rather than high performers who didn't want to come into the office.
It seems clear to me already that the impact is more than a 10% impact on uptime and a lot of that value lost is going to be evident over years not immediately. EVERY software product on earth could fire the majority of its staff and be OK for a while.
Despite all the ridiculous headlines, he's not "killing" Twitter. He's using it to drive a different kind of social change: a shift to the right.
That's something a lot of journalists dislike, hence all the attacks and hit pieces on him.
Note how the headline of even this very article is misleading: using the word "wipe" to suggest that the data was destroyed, as in wiping a hard drive, while that's not the case.
HN users have been giving Twitter 2 weeks for a year now. You can root for someone to fail and still have a gauge on the truth but it looks like a lot of people here don't.
Maybe it takes being a sports fan of anything but the dominant team. Your team's playing Manchester City at the Etihad this weekend. Do you say "we're going to crush them" or do you say "I think we can hold them, maybe even nick a point. They're not invincible"?
Does anyone honestly care? I can’t think of anything less important than any tweet that is more than a few days old. Literally trillions of tweets could be deleted and no one would care
Tweets are embedded in tons of news articles as primary sources, and often require the image to make sense. Like it or not, Twitter is a primary source for a significant proportion of history worldwide, as it contains a lot of first-person reporting and evidence.
Twitter's not just about documenting what you had for breakfast; it's also about documenting civil war atrocities.
I would care. There’s an active community of artists and developers who regularly post images of their work, as well as educational material. I can also conceive of other such communities that I’m not aware of whose members would feel the same. Losing years of those resources would be a great loss.
Twitter really has a PR issue. So many people still see it as the place to post “ate a sandwich for lunch today”, when it’s so much bigger than that.
In case we needed more evidence that putting dynamic code between hyperlinks from one page to another, add this to the pile...