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The people claiming that Twitter still being up proves they were vastly bloated need to read the following paragraphs until they "sink in": > Our entire accoun

The people claiming that Twitter still being up proves they were vastly bloated need to read the following paragraphs until they "sink in": > Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet. > Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.

kristintynski 4y ago
This is so damning. Twitter always had mediocre ROI as an ad platform in my experience. Now it is literally becoming dangerous for your business. Imagine a 10-100k per day ad campaign from years ago being made live by buggy software and not realizing it...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bathtub365 4y ago
  Wouldn’t you have standing to sue them if they did this? I guess it depends on the legal agreement you have and how it stipulates they can bill you
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    There was definitely a bug and everyone knows. No one is going to pay for the accidentally reactivated campaigns, and if Twitter tries to force the matter it'll turn into a bunch of expensive individual suits plus at least one expensive class action for them.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    suing them only helps if you think they'll still be running in a year or two.
kelseyfrog 4y ago
That's the engineering bias at play. While I agree that can still be "up" with a skeleton crew of DevOps and SREs, being "up" doesn't mean making money. It completely ignores the fact that Twitter makes their money on B2B with advertisers and even in 2022, those are human social relations. Firing the people on the Twitter side of that equation destroys those relations and ultimately the dollars they represent. It's perfectly natural for an engineer to de-value B2B relations - I expect it, but at the same time that's the grain of salt we should take when we read an engineer's hot takes.
- autotune 4y ago
  > with a skeleton crew of DevOps and SREs Except didn't he fire them too?
  - FranzFerdiNaN 4y ago
    He still has a few hundred people who couldnt afford to lose their job due to H1B status, and probably a couple dozen people who are members of the cult of Musk.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  It's also what Musk's fans often refer to as 'moving the goalposts.' Keeping Twitter up is not success for Elon He needs to make it worth well more than the $44bn he paid for it in order to achieve anything resembling success; the Twitter is going to crash thing was just a dumb hashtag, no one believed that he's just let it go down and stay down. what would that even look like? Yet, not achieving that insane failure is now what people cite as success.
  - throwntoday 4y ago
    But Twitter/Musk's detractors are moving the goalpost. The initial argument was that twitter would not be able to function without much of the staff that were fired, that they were somehow imperative to the site staying up. Now that it's been over a week, and the site is taking on more traffic than it has in a while, the goalpost is being moved to "this will never be profitable". I understand people hope it will fail, because they don't want to admit how useless much of the staff these big tech companies have accumulated over the years are to the core products. But, you will only be setting yourself up for disappointment. Elon has done much more impressive things with a small team of "hardcore" engineers (as he puts it). I think many sticking around are the type not to shy away from a challenge, though again I understand many are not in a position to be playing competing in the workplace.
goalieca 4y ago
> Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. The rest of Twitter is pretty solid. Why this? This is the money maker. Is it because product wanted the human touch of sales instead of self-serve?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fragmede 4y ago
  Customers like Coke or Nike don't want self service though.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    Coke and Nike don't directly deal with twitter tho. Agencies deal with all the delivery of adverts to the different advertising platforms. The agencies use what ever is available. They would sit and make dozens of different sized video files to fit different adverters specifications to upload into Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc.
    - nemothekid 4y ago
      That's only when the budgets are small that they pawn off the execution to some operations intern. For large budgets you have every chef in the kitchen on calls with the Twitter's Ad Sales manager who in turn will make sure all the assets work in the system.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- DisjointedHunt 4y ago
  Because the author seems to have a bone to pick.
- orange_joe 4y ago
  I’ve been noticing bugs, particularly around not having tweets load, and for a few days it seemed that iMessage previews were quite broken.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
>Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken if all of those have somehow deteriorated in 1-2 weeks, this is further justification for axing the people who made them.
- shagie 4y ago
  If I've got something that needs an hour of care every week by a sales person, https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ puts it at about 10 days (two weeks) of work to make it more efficient. However, if shaving that 1h a week off takes more than 10 days of work, it is probably better to leave it as it is. https://www.fincher.org/tips/General/SoftwareDevelopment/BugTracking.shtml https://www.fincher.org/tips/General/SoftwareDevelopment/Bug... This bug tracking works on Pain / Effort / Frequency and Risk / Effort / Verifiability Realizing that I'm making up numbers here (and you can make them up too for the story we're telling each other): Pain : 2 (low pain) Effort : 2 (low effort) Freq. : 4 (fairly often) We've got a PEF of 8 there. Note that this is the pain for the hypothetical sales person - not the pain for the end advertiser who the sales person works with. So, what's the risk of making the change to make it so that the sales person doesn't have to do that 1h/week task? How much effort does it take? How easy is it to verify that its actually working? And so now we've got bugs where we can put them on a grid and say "these fixes are the low hanging fruit" while "these other ones are risky and don't get us much." Its quite possible that that this issue would never get into the "this is painful and so we need to do the analysis for it" or "this is low hanging fruit that can be fixed and have a big impact on 'stuff'". Nonetheless, you've got something that takes 1h/week from someone who knows what they're doing with their accounts... and they're not working there anymore. Even in a perfect org, this could fall apart rather quickly.
- mjmsmith 4y ago
  If Twitter goes down, it just shows that all those people were incompetent, and he should have fired them. If Twitter stays up, it just shows that all those people were unnecessary, and he should have fired them.
  - throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
DisjointedHunt 4y ago
Large accounts >$1mm spend routinely get zero support on platforms such as Facebook. That side of the business also goes through ridiculous re-orgs. This quote makes it sound as though they had an AE/AM visit them every week ? Most advertisers count themselves lucky to hear from the ads teams once a quarter outside regular scripted emails.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  That’s not my experience at all. My employer is way below $1m annual spend on FB and our in-house ad manager has regular check-in calls with a FB rep who is local to our city. Same with Google and LinkedIn.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kristintynski 4y ago
  Those teams help grow revenue. The more help they give, the more the advertiser is likely to increase their spend. They do a lot of heavy lifting to help educate ad teams about about new ad products and software changes.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
> One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money. That....can't be coincidental, and smells an awful lot like fraud.
nailer 4y ago
Twitter advertiser here. Even before the takeover Twitter advertising was broken and unreliable - starting a new campaign on a desktop would fail as the payment UI loaded a bunch of internal DNS names and failed. Note again: this is a few weeks BEFORE Elon took over. So yes its broken, I think they generally weren’t working particularly hard on it before either.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  WTAF? At the end of the day, advertisers are the real customers. How is their experience not a priority?!
  - nailer 4y ago
    IDK from what I hear many Twitter employees basically worked on anything they felt like. At Google advertising rules the roost and everyone knows it.
thwayunion 4y ago
>> One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. This happened to me as well. Absolutely wild and will go to my grave before paying a dime.
samweb3 4y ago
This is likely temporary and advertisers have a short memory. If the platform starts targeting people more effectively and CPMs / CPCs are decent, they will be back. Most of this should be self-serve with third-party marketing agencies helping clients anyway.
- mhoad 4y ago
  You don’t seem to understand WHY they are leaving. This isn’t some moral solidarity thing that they are doing for PR reasons.

kristintynski 4y ago

This is so damning. Twitter always had mediocre ROI as an ad platform in my experience. Now it is literally becoming dangerous for your business. Imagine a 10-100k per day ad campaign from years ago being made live by buggy software and not realizing it...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bathtub365 4y ago
Wouldn’t you have standing to sue them if they did this? I guess it depends on the legal agreement you have and how it stipulates they can bill you
- thwayunion 4y ago
  There was definitely a bug and everyone knows. No one is going to pay for the accidentally reactivated campaigns, and if Twitter tries to force the matter it'll turn into a bunch of expensive individual suits plus at least one expensive class action for them.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  suing them only helps if you think they'll still be running in a year or two.

kelseyfrog 4y ago

That's the engineering bias at play. While I agree that can still be "up" with a skeleton crew of DevOps and SREs, being "up" doesn't mean making money. It completely ignores the fact that Twitter makes their money on B2B with advertisers and even in 2022, those are human social relations. Firing the people on the Twitter side of that equation destroys those relations and ultimately the dollars they represent. It's perfectly natural for an engineer to de-value B2B relations - I expect it, but at the same time that's the grain of salt we should take when we read an engineer's hot takes.

autotune 4y ago
> with a skeleton crew of DevOps and SREs Except didn't he fire them too?
- FranzFerdiNaN 4y ago
  He still has a few hundred people who couldnt afford to lose their job due to H1B status, and probably a couple dozen people who are members of the cult of Musk.
RC_ITR 4y ago
It's also what Musk's fans often refer to as 'moving the goalposts.' Keeping Twitter up is not success for Elon He needs to make it worth well more than the $44bn he paid for it in order to achieve anything resembling success; the Twitter is going to crash thing was just a dumb hashtag, no one believed that he's just let it go down and stay down. what would that even look like? Yet, not achieving that insane failure is now what people cite as success.
- throwntoday 4y ago
  But Twitter/Musk's detractors are moving the goalpost. The initial argument was that twitter would not be able to function without much of the staff that were fired, that they were somehow imperative to the site staying up. Now that it's been over a week, and the site is taking on more traffic than it has in a while, the goalpost is being moved to "this will never be profitable". I understand people hope it will fail, because they don't want to admit how useless much of the staff these big tech companies have accumulated over the years are to the core products. But, you will only be setting yourself up for disappointment. Elon has done much more impressive things with a small team of "hardcore" engineers (as he puts it). I think many sticking around are the type not to shy away from a challenge, though again I understand many are not in a position to be playing competing in the workplace.

goalieca 4y ago

> Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. The rest of Twitter is pretty solid. Why this? This is the money maker. Is it because product wanted the human touch of sales instead of self-serve?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fragmede 4y ago
Customers like Coke or Nike don't want self service though.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Coke and Nike don't directly deal with twitter tho. Agencies deal with all the delivery of adverts to the different advertising platforms. The agencies use what ever is available. They would sit and make dozens of different sized video files to fit different adverters specifications to upload into Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc.
  - nemothekid 4y ago
    That's only when the budgets are small that they pawn off the execution to some operations intern. For large budgets you have every chef in the kitchen on calls with the Twitter's Ad Sales manager who in turn will make sure all the assets work in the system.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
DisjointedHunt 4y ago
Because the author seems to have a bone to pick.
orange_joe 4y ago
I’ve been noticing bugs, particularly around not having tweets load, and for a few days it seemed that iMessage previews were quite broken.

throwaway0x7E6 4y ago

>Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken if all of those have somehow deteriorated in 1-2 weeks, this is further justification for axing the people who made them.

shagie 4y ago
If I've got something that needs an hour of care every week by a sales person, https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ puts it at about 10 days (two weeks) of work to make it more efficient. However, if shaving that 1h a week off takes more than 10 days of work, it is probably better to leave it as it is. https://www.fincher.org/tips/General/SoftwareDevelopment/BugTracking.shtml https://www.fincher.org/tips/General/SoftwareDevelopment/Bug... This bug tracking works on Pain / Effort / Frequency and Risk / Effort / Verifiability Realizing that I'm making up numbers here (and you can make them up too for the story we're telling each other): Pain : 2 (low pain) Effort : 2 (low effort) Freq. : 4 (fairly often) We've got a PEF of 8 there. Note that this is the pain for the hypothetical sales person - not the pain for the end advertiser who the sales person works with. So, what's the risk of making the change to make it so that the sales person doesn't have to do that 1h/week task? How much effort does it take? How easy is it to verify that its actually working? And so now we've got bugs where we can put them on a grid and say "these fixes are the low hanging fruit" while "these other ones are risky and don't get us much." Its quite possible that that this issue would never get into the "this is painful and so we need to do the analysis for it" or "this is low hanging fruit that can be fixed and have a big impact on 'stuff'". Nonetheless, you've got something that takes 1h/week from someone who knows what they're doing with their accounts... and they're not working there anymore. Even in a perfect org, this could fall apart rather quickly.
mjmsmith 4y ago
If Twitter goes down, it just shows that all those people were incompetent, and he should have fired them. If Twitter stays up, it just shows that all those people were unnecessary, and he should have fired them.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago

DisjointedHunt 4y ago

Large accounts >$1mm spend routinely get zero support on platforms such as Facebook. That side of the business also goes through ridiculous re-orgs. This quote makes it sound as though they had an AE/AM visit them every week ? Most advertisers count themselves lucky to hear from the ads teams once a quarter outside regular scripted emails.

snowwrestler 4y ago
That’s not my experience at all. My employer is way below $1m annual spend on FB and our in-house ad manager has regular check-in calls with a FB rep who is local to our city. Same with Google and LinkedIn.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kristintynski 4y ago
Those teams help grow revenue. The more help they give, the more the advertiser is likely to increase their spend. They do a lot of heavy lifting to help educate ad teams about about new ad products and software changes.

KennyBlanken 4y ago

> One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money. That....can't be coincidental, and smells an awful lot like fraud.

nailer 4y ago

Twitter advertiser here. Even before the takeover Twitter advertising was broken and unreliable - starting a new campaign on a desktop would fail as the payment UI loaded a bunch of internal DNS names and failed. Note again: this is a few weeks BEFORE Elon took over. So yes its broken, I think they generally weren’t working particularly hard on it before either.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
WTAF? At the end of the day, advertisers are the real customers. How is their experience not a priority?!
- nailer 4y ago
  IDK from what I hear many Twitter employees basically worked on anything they felt like. At Google advertising rules the roost and everyone knows it.

thwayunion 4y ago

>> One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. This happened to me as well. Absolutely wild and will go to my grave before paying a dime.

samweb3 4y ago

This is likely temporary and advertisers have a short memory. If the platform starts targeting people more effectively and CPMs / CPCs are decent, they will be back. Most of this should be self-serve with third-party marketing agencies helping clients anyway.

mhoad 4y ago
You don’t seem to understand WHY they are leaving. This isn’t some moral solidarity thing that they are doing for PR reasons.