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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 $

• 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.
  • sroussey 4y ago
    For perspective, the staff in 2018 was 3700. Now maybe 2700. Of course, if you were vital to Twitter, then you likely left before he took over. Because you could. Plenty of people would rather have severance. I base this on experience. I was a consultant so I did what all good consultants do when holding together a sinking ship: I doubled my rates. Twice.
    • jmspring 4y ago
      Staffing count != properly staffed
      • sroussey 4y ago
        Absolutely. Also even if the staffing count is good, the mix between departments may be bad.
    • dilyevsky 4y ago
      They had ~2900 before the ultimatum with severance. I'd guess they have less than 2k now if not 1k
  • dspillett 4y ago
    > The initial argument was that twitter would not be able to function without much of the staff that were fired, You are missing out some important nuance there: no one said it would fall off the earth immediately, that it would cease to function right now. Many, myself included, have said we think it can't function long term, or even medium term, like this. Day to day running of the main app is all automated when things are OK so it will keep ticking over as long as someone says the infrastructure invoices. The real test comes when there is next an infrastructure issue or some other fault: are the right sort of people there to resolve it quickly? Also do they have a good combination of people around to work on those bugs those advertisers are concerned about and other maintainence & improvement (of both the app and the other infrastructure it and the company relys upon)? If we get rid of all car mechanics your car won't break down immediately, but good look getting it sorted easily when it eventually does develop a fault. Twitter was somewhat bloated, I agree there. But what has happened to it in recent weeks is far more damaging than that could ever have been. It needs to turn around very quickly to survive financially and technically, and I think the chances of that happening are small.
    • oaktrout 4y ago
      "no one said it would fall off the earth immediately, that it would cease to function right now" Quite a few people said that it would crash essentially immediately.
      • stouset 4y ago
        You can find “quite a few people” to say literally anything.
        • wyclif 4y ago
          But the point is that enough people were saying it that it quickly became something to be mocked and pushed back on.
          • stouset 4y ago
  • JacobThreeThree 4y ago
    And suddenly everyone is extremely concerned about the state of Twitter's finances. Hating on Twitter has become just another political in-group signal. Yawn.
    • matthewmacleod 4y ago
      I hope the outrageous irony of this comment is not lost on you.
  • RC_ITR 4y ago
    > 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. Again, what does this even look like? Twitter.com returns 404 and everyone gives up? At least make straw man arguments that are reasonable.
• coolbreezetft22 4y ago
  Yep, it's pretty hilarious to me that after all the grand promises made about improvements Elon and his cult have been reduced to boasting hysterically about Twitter just merely still being up and running.
  • mgamache 4y ago
    Well they didn't boast about it being up until Twitter failing became a popular prediction on the left.
    • enkid 4y ago
      "on the left?" Why is everything politicized? It's not like the Democratic party is pushing for the collapse of Twitter. How is saying the moves Elon is making are risky a "left" position? Why does everything need to turn into politics? Why can't people just be criticizing the way Elon executed the acquisition? Is the "right" so obsessed with billionaires that any criticism has to come from "the left?"
      • mgamache 4y ago
        • enkid 4y ago
          But no one was talking about "the left" or "the right" until you brought it up. The predictions from "the left" is something you feel adds to the conversation. Why? Why do you feel criticisms of the way Elon is running the company are associated to the "left," when plenty of neutral and non-partisan sources have called into question the way he is running the company?
          • mgamache 4y ago
            "no one was talking about "the left" or "the right" until you brought it up", really? https://nypost.com/2022/04/29/elon-musks-right-the-left-has-gone-insane/ https://nypost.com/2022/04/29/elon-musks-right-the-left-has-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/28/twitter-elon-musk-politics/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/28/twitter-e... https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/31/musk-twitter-paul-pelosi-00064329 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/31/musk-twitter-paul-p... https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/congress-will-want-hear-elon-musk-twitter-whichever-party-wins-midterm-rcna55032\ https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/congress-will-want... The fact is some of the criticism of him is legit and I personally don't like the way Elon has promoted Tesla (bordering on fraud). But it's obvious the outrage is mostly selective. So Elon firing his well paid staff is worse than Apples hordes of child labor for years? Compare the reaction. https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-knowingly-used-child-labor-supplier-3-years-cut-costs-2020-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-knowingly-used-child-l...
• tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  I will openly admit that I did believe that he managed to do enough damage with his firings that the remaining engineers won't be able to keep it running because some critical teams and their institutional knowledge have been completely lost. I'm still surprised it's running so smoothly.
  • the_cat_kittles 4y ago
    i get a million crypto dms now, thats pretty annoying
  • czx4f4bd 4y ago
    Based on what I've heard from former engineers there, there are still plenty of opportunities for things to go very wrong. Maybe not this week or this year, but the sheer amount of lost knowledge means they're really skating on thin ice right now. If they were to have a seriously catastrophic incident, it's conceivable that they might not have anyone left who knows how to get things back online. It's not inconceivable that they could eventually figure it out, but without that essential knowledge, who knows how long that could take? I imagine it would be pretty bad for Twitter's future if the site were unavailable for days or weeks on end.
    • wyclif 4y ago
      I'd put all my chips on George Hotz, but he's got a lot of work to do because he'll only be there for 12 weeks.
      • piva00 4y ago
        George Hotz is an amazing technical person but you are putting him in a pedestal of Saviour that... Isn't really how technical stuff works. Twitter is a quite complex distributed system, as good as geohot is he's just a guy, with one brain, capable of holding a limited amount of information and context at a time. There's no way that one guy, no matter how good, can actually completely reason about all aspects of a complex system. Even less in 12 weeks, that's actually absurdly preposterous.
• jefftk 4y ago
  > 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. I do think Twitter is likely to crash. A machine can continue for a while if you stop maintenance, but at some point you'll run into a problem that needs intervention, and Twitter has lost enough of the people who know how things work that there's a good chance they'll have a serious outage.
  • timmytokyo 4y ago
    I don't remember if I read it here or somewhere else, but someone noted that if you remove all the fire extinguishers from a building, the building will keep standing, but watch out when a fire starts.
    • moistly 4y ago
      Twitter in shambles is a very attractive target for firestarters. The conflagration would be epic.
• tbrownaw 4y ago
  > moving the goalposts The Internet is big and full of people. Is it actually the same people changing their predictions as time and evidence accumulate, or is it just a change in who gets attention?
  • nwiswell 4y ago
    ... yes? The Internet is big and full of people, both things are happening.
• tshaddox 4y ago
  It seems bizarre to call this moving the goalposts. You don’t have to list every single goalpost any time you mention one. Especially when these are extremely obvious goalposts like “the site should be working” and “the ads sales tools should be working.”
• JohnTHaller 4y ago
  I think it's more likely Twitter gets hacked. The turnover, loss of organizational knowledge, lack of compliance department, lack of proper onboarding for new hires, etc all make a social engineering attack far more likely. Plus a plain old security vulnerability gets more likely as they try to add anything to Twitter without the knowledge they used to have of how it all works. This is likely one of the reasons the blue check has now been delayed indefinitely.