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You're not going to know that impact, because most of the technical problems that Twitter as a company can have aren't even visible to us. Sure, images and hyp
by vkou 4y ago
You're not going to know that impact, because most of the technical problems that Twitter as a company can have aren't even visible to us.
Sure, images and hyperlinks breaking and not paying the Slack bill and Musk having another mental break makes the front page of hacker news, but will a spam and abuse detection pipeline being silently busted for 3 months do that? A reporting backend that was providing advertisers with incorrect data on their ad spend? Some customer-relations workflow that ruined the week of a group of TAMs, and had revenue impact?
Twitter is a big ship. There are more places things can break than anyone, inside or outside it can imagine. But as an outside observer, the only signal that we can act on is 'Has the ship sunk? Or is it floating?'
Observing that binary state answers a question, but not the question of 'Is the ship working well?'
- mattkrause 4y agoAnd that's what might eventually kill it. It seems really unlikely to die from a single spectacular failure, where a key bit of infrastructure dies and just cannot be brought back online for any amount of love or money. A steady drip of annoying but individually minor issues will gradually chase people away: more spam and less relevant recommendations discourage users; bad spend data and fewer account reps make it a lower priority for advertisers. Twitter's main value prop is its network effect, and if a few people leave (or even engage less) every issue, that value will wither away....