Twitter/X hasn't seen notable user growth since ~2015/16 and has been absolutely flat since then, coming up on a decade now. It was 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today (spring 2024). A decade of no growth. I don't know if twitter is functioning exactly the same as it was before, but if you have to pay the bills, cutting 80% of the workforce and holding the line seems to have worked in this case.
Having 5000 engineers on tap for... potential user growth? Makes sense if you're planning on user growth, but Twitter is kind of the poster child of "we don't need engineers for anticipated growth" given a near-decade of totally flat userbase number.
I worked at Twitter and let me tell you that's not how it works. When you whack most of the engineers out of the company, and if it still continues to work, that doesn't mean you don't need that many engineers. It means the following:
1. The ones remaining are practically working 24x7 every day for essentially the same pay, with the promise of more.
2. You keep falling behind on all the things you need to do to keep things alive and compliant. This eventually comes back in the form of outages or worse, FTC fines.
3. There is very little room for forward looking work, which means you are sacrificing opportunities for growth. E.g.
> 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today
These were two very different numbers. The numbers in 2015 were DAUs and the numbers today are mDAU. mDAU are in layman terms users that can be monetized. This number was ~180M in 2018, so the growth was there. Part of the reason why the ad revenue was growing for Twitter during that phase.
4. Safety and Trust on the platform drops quite a bit when you are understaffed. Regardless of your political beliefs or whether you're team Elon, when there are 10 people banning CP instead of 100, there is no way you could argue objectively that the platform stays the same.
There's plenty of other problems, but you would not know they exist unless you're one of the people left after the figurative massacre.
As a company grows (in size and age), there is definitely more waste and more bureaucracy. No impact in trimming that. But, larger, older companies also spend a lot of effort on defending their business or uncovering future business. Fire the people who do that, and you won't see any immediate impact to revenue or core metrics... But, you've probably reduced the future viability of the product (lower chance of uncovering new growth, higher chance of being disrupted by a competitor, etc).
You can see this a lot with companies bought by Private Equity firms. They slash costs and save a lot of short-term costs, and all looks good, but the company is now on a path to death.
I like your optimism, but twitter had already hired the best and brightest for a decade and were completely unable to move the needle, barely maintaining existing user count. You can see the same usercount story for traditional message boards/forums. There's just not that much demand for this kind of social media.
> the company is now on a path to death
Probably, but it's going to be a very long tail. Forums do not cost that much to run.
Technically maybe everything works more or less as well as before, after a year.
…but the experience is quite bad now: every other thread is full of crypto and/or onlyfans promoting bots. The algorithm displays a lot of obvious attention grabbing posts which have 300 replies, 10 of which are from humans. There’s a constant stream of bots trying to connect with you via follows or likes.
It’s a mess and a fantastic example of why anonymous and free communication platforms absolutely need professional moderation.
>every other thread is full of crypto and/or onlyfans promoting bots.
Remember when we were told Elon was going to unleash AI on the bot/spam problem and solve it in a month?
It's worse than it ever was. I hardly ever saw bots or spam. Now I have 100+ spam followers, and on the very rare occasion where I reply to something, it gets 90% spam likes. Ads are also crypto, soft porn games and drop shipping companies.
I don't think it even technically works as well as before. The iOS app seems mostly fine, but on web the feed or tweet fails to load and shows the blue retry button probably 1/3rd of the time for me now. Combined with all the bot issues you mentioned, that has dramatically reduced my Twitter usage. It's become incredibly frustrating to use. I only use it now when I click on a tweet link that's been shared with me.
If you're logged out, you can't see any Tweets unless you're directly viewing a specific Tweet, and even then you cannot see any other Tweet apart from the one you're directly viewing.
This was one thing we had tried on Twitter before Elon, and had found that it is detrimental to the platform and engagement. So, had to roll it back. But now it is a thing again. This drives down the popularity and overall usage of the platform, but some people will still claim it works the same (or even better).
On the other hand, I love it now and hated it before. Guess it depends on what you're looking for. Me - I like little to no moderation and government interference and don't find much offensive and have no problem just ignoring anything I do find objectionable. All worth it to be able to speak honestly.
I don't post a lot and I also find Twitter really annoying these days. I am used to getting pinged only by my friends to talk niche tech stuff, now I get porn/crypto bot spam... Trying to follow technologists I like, but their discussions are also mired in dumb blue checkmark takes and bots... OK maybe those blue checkmarks are speaking honestly but I'd rather have intelligent speech over honest speech at this point
>I like little to no moderation and government interference
My personal politics better align with based Elon than the previous regime, but let's not pretend there's no moderation happening. It's just different.
True enough, but I'd rather take chances with the guy who proclaims he loves free speech, even if he turns out to be a hypocrite occasionally, than with the censorship regime whose only constant worry is they don't censor enough and need to find more ways to censor more.
Twitter almost doubled their mDAU between 2016 and 2022. They definitely weren't doing anything. (I have no idea what the recent acquisition has done to the numbers, though.)
Is there really a space for unbounded growth with these numbers? I mean, everybody who wanted Twitter account got one. Discounting bots and campaign accounts, where would growth come from? Would one expect literally every single internet user have active Twitter account? I don't think it's going to happen.
Having 5000 engineers on tap for... potential user growth? Makes sense if you're planning on user growth, but Twitter is kind of the poster child of "we don't need engineers for anticipated growth" given a near-decade of totally flat userbase number.