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Why is Twitter such a Waterloo for all these obviously accomplished people? It seems like they've been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed

by pavlov 3y ago

Why is Twitter such a Waterloo for all these obviously accomplished people? It seems like they've been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed by technically incompetent leftists, and if only they could apply their own get-things-done attitude and "neutral" politics, then the problem would be trivially fixable. Where does this fallacy come from? Is it because of the illusory simplicity of the tweet format? Something like: "We just need to come up with the right algorithm and do an embarrassingly parallel run over these tiny 280-character chunks of text. How hard can that be. In my own Very Serious Day Job, I deal with oompabytes of very complex data. This tweet processing stuff should be child's play in comparison."

lordnacho 3y ago
It's because of scale. Very complicated algorithms and mathematical proofs can still be understood by a single person, and be explored by a small number of people who all know each other. Brain surgery is done by a small team of people. These are typical "smart people" occupations. Something as simple as Twitter still needs machinery that spans across technical skills, needs 24 hour monitoring, and needs lawyer and accountant support, so nobody can actually to it. People think they can do it, because it's easy to spin up a demo that sends messages to a few thousand people and then shut it down again. They don't think about how to scan for CSAM, or how to respond to foreign government censorship requests.
gettodachoppa 3y ago
Well, when Elon Musk took over and gutted half the staff, I distinctly remember HN full out of outrage and predicting (in hindsight, "impotently wishing" would be more accurate) doom and how Twitter will go down any day now. Then nothing happened. At least, nothing that I personally observed as a casual Twitter reader. The goalposts were moved to "it will go down with the New Year's Eve spike", and once again nothing happened. Then the narrative became "the cracks will only be noticeable in a few months", and here we are and yet again, nothing. So Musk and Geohot came out as the saner voices of that whole debacle. Of course Geohot said exaggerated things like "you only need 40 engineers to run Twitter", but if it turns out it takes 300 engineers, then I would consider this as Geohot being proven mostly right.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Did you see the news about DeSantis yesterday? Musk convinced him to announce his presidential candidacy on Twitter, and the live stream just didn’t work. I don’t think that qualifies as “nothing happened” when features used in high-profile events fail, with the CEO and a potential future president left on the line. Any other platform wouldn’t have struggled with a stream of this size. I guess you might say that’s just one thing, and other than the CEO’s live streams not working, everything is fine. But there are numerous other examples of accumulating paper cuts and failures at Twitter. I think this is close to what most of those doomsayers expected would happen.
  - ovi256 3y ago
    > the live stream just didn’t work Are you sure ? Others say 6.5 M listened to the livestream that was delayed 20 mins
    - anoonmoose 3y ago
      so was it no longer live, or did they encounter 20 minutes of technical issues that delayed the start? cuz either way it seems pretty obvious that at least for some amount of time it didn't work
    - m348e912 3y ago
      They had to switch to David Sack's account to do the livestream and I think there were about 700k listeners that were on at the time of announcment. The issues weren't just infrastructure related, Musk had challenges with his mute button and it was creating feedback because he and Sacks were next to each other on their phones. But yeah, it could have gone better for various reasons.
  - revelio 3y ago
    Google also recently had a total failure in a public event. It's not necessarily saying much about Twitter. https://mashable.com/article/google-ai-maps-search-event-bing-bard-inaccuracy https://mashable.com/article/google-ai-maps-search-event-bin... > the AI falsely said the James Webb Space Telescope took the first ever picture of an exoplanet > During the announcement about a new Lens feature, the demo phone was misplaced and the presenter wasn't able to show the demo > Google seemed to say, "let's pretend this never happened," and immediately made the livestream recording private after the event
rsynnott 3y ago
I think there's a certain type of person, particularly common in tech, who thinks this way about _everything_; "oh, that's way easier than what I do, how hard could it be". A kind of reverse impostor syndrome. See the cryptocurrency space; it's more or less been 15 years worth of crypto people accidentally repeating all the failures of conventional finance from the last couple of centuries, because, after all, how hard could it be?
- OOPMan 3y ago
  You hit the nail on the head. There are definitely these kinds of people and they are definitely highly concentrated in tech.
- herval 3y ago
  it's called dunning-kruger, the epidemic syndrome of silicon valley
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    It's definitely similar, but I think it's _subtly_ different (though it's often found in the same people). Dunning-Kruger is, approximately "I'm good at the thing I do" (by someone who is actually incompetent). What I'm talking about is "That thing that other people are doing is really easy; I'd be good at it" (the thing is not easy, and they would not be good at it). If the person in the latter case actually ends up doing the allegedly easy thing, they may realise that actually they are not good at it, in which case it's not Dunning-Kruger. This is pretty common, I think; person barges in, saying "this will be easy, because I've decided the thing I'm good at is more difficult than it", admits it's not easy, and either leaves or learns. Alternatively of course they may retreat into full Dunning-Kruger; see the Musk Twitter debacle, which is _both_, say.
    - herval 3y ago
      100 years from know, it'll be known as "the musk-trump complex"
htrp 3y ago
The wep app itself is easy.... it's everything around the tech that is hard (scaling, regulatory, moderation)
revelio 3y ago
> they've been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed by technically incompetent leftists I don't think anyone argued Twitter was run by technically incompetent people. Where was this, if so? By leftists, yes, and by far too many people, yes. Both were argued repeatedly. But those things are now proven objectively true. The Twitter files showed just how systematic their enforcement of left wing orthodoxy was, and Musk fired most of the staff yet the site kept trucking and even launching new changes which is more or less the definition of having been over-staffed.
koonsolo 3y ago
I'm a senior developer, and I have to admit I'm one of those guys ;). WhatsApp was 55 people big when they got acquired, and to me that sounds about right. Twitter employed 7,500 people. 7,500!!!! So please tell me where the complexity lies? Surely not in the front-end code I can tell you that. Let's compare it to something WAY-WAY-WAY more complex, like a game with multiplayer, awesome mod tools, etc.: ROBLOX: 2,200 employees. Do I need to mention they wrote their own physics simulation engine and keeping realtime multiplayer going? So please, explain this to me: how is Twitter more than 3 times more complex than Roblox??? Maybe I'm wrong, that's very possible, I've been wrong in the past. But just explain this 1 thing then: Twitter needs more than 3 times the manpower than Roblox?

by pavlov 3y ago

lordnacho 3y ago

It's because of scale. Very complicated algorithms and mathematical proofs can still be understood by a single person, and be explored by a small number of people who all know each other. Brain surgery is done by a small team of people. These are typical "smart people" occupations. Something as simple as Twitter still needs machinery that spans across technical skills, needs 24 hour monitoring, and needs lawyer and accountant support, so nobody can actually to it. People think they can do it, because it's easy to spin up a demo that sends messages to a few thousand people and then shut it down again. They don't think about how to scan for CSAM, or how to respond to foreign government censorship requests.

gettodachoppa 3y ago

Well, when Elon Musk took over and gutted half the staff, I distinctly remember HN full out of outrage and predicting (in hindsight, "impotently wishing" would be more accurate) doom and how Twitter will go down any day now. Then nothing happened. At least, nothing that I personally observed as a casual Twitter reader. The goalposts were moved to "it will go down with the New Year's Eve spike", and once again nothing happened. Then the narrative became "the cracks will only be noticeable in a few months", and here we are and yet again, nothing. So Musk and Geohot came out as the saner voices of that whole debacle. Of course Geohot said exaggerated things like "you only need 40 engineers to run Twitter", but if it turns out it takes 300 engineers, then I would consider this as Geohot being proven mostly right.

pavlov 3y ago
Did you see the news about DeSantis yesterday? Musk convinced him to announce his presidential candidacy on Twitter, and the live stream just didn’t work. I don’t think that qualifies as “nothing happened” when features used in high-profile events fail, with the CEO and a potential future president left on the line. Any other platform wouldn’t have struggled with a stream of this size. I guess you might say that’s just one thing, and other than the CEO’s live streams not working, everything is fine. But there are numerous other examples of accumulating paper cuts and failures at Twitter. I think this is close to what most of those doomsayers expected would happen.
- ovi256 3y ago
  > the live stream just didn’t work Are you sure ? Others say 6.5 M listened to the livestream that was delayed 20 mins
  - anoonmoose 3y ago
    so was it no longer live, or did they encounter 20 minutes of technical issues that delayed the start? cuz either way it seems pretty obvious that at least for some amount of time it didn't work
  - m348e912 3y ago
    They had to switch to David Sack's account to do the livestream and I think there were about 700k listeners that were on at the time of announcment. The issues weren't just infrastructure related, Musk had challenges with his mute button and it was creating feedback because he and Sacks were next to each other on their phones. But yeah, it could have gone better for various reasons.
- revelio 3y ago
  Google also recently had a total failure in a public event. It's not necessarily saying much about Twitter. https://mashable.com/article/google-ai-maps-search-event-bing-bard-inaccuracy https://mashable.com/article/google-ai-maps-search-event-bin... > the AI falsely said the James Webb Space Telescope took the first ever picture of an exoplanet > During the announcement about a new Lens feature, the demo phone was misplaced and the presenter wasn't able to show the demo > Google seemed to say, "let's pretend this never happened," and immediately made the livestream recording private after the event

rsynnott 3y ago

I think there's a certain type of person, particularly common in tech, who thinks this way about _everything_; "oh, that's way easier than what I do, how hard could it be". A kind of reverse impostor syndrome. See the cryptocurrency space; it's more or less been 15 years worth of crypto people accidentally repeating all the failures of conventional finance from the last couple of centuries, because, after all, how hard could it be?

OOPMan 3y ago
You hit the nail on the head. There are definitely these kinds of people and they are definitely highly concentrated in tech.
herval 3y ago
it's called dunning-kruger, the epidemic syndrome of silicon valley
- rsynnott 3y ago
  It's definitely similar, but I think it's _subtly_ different (though it's often found in the same people). Dunning-Kruger is, approximately "I'm good at the thing I do" (by someone who is actually incompetent). What I'm talking about is "That thing that other people are doing is really easy; I'd be good at it" (the thing is not easy, and they would not be good at it). If the person in the latter case actually ends up doing the allegedly easy thing, they may realise that actually they are not good at it, in which case it's not Dunning-Kruger. This is pretty common, I think; person barges in, saying "this will be easy, because I've decided the thing I'm good at is more difficult than it", admits it's not easy, and either leaves or learns. Alternatively of course they may retreat into full Dunning-Kruger; see the Musk Twitter debacle, which is _both_, say.
  - herval 3y ago
    100 years from know, it'll be known as "the musk-trump complex"

htrp 3y ago

The wep app itself is easy.... it's everything around the tech that is hard (scaling, regulatory, moderation)

revelio 3y ago

> they've been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed by technically incompetent leftists I don't think anyone argued Twitter was run by technically incompetent people. Where was this, if so? By leftists, yes, and by far too many people, yes. Both were argued repeatedly. But those things are now proven objectively true. The Twitter files showed just how systematic their enforcement of left wing orthodoxy was, and Musk fired most of the staff yet the site kept trucking and even launching new changes which is more or less the definition of having been over-staffed.

koonsolo 3y ago

I'm a senior developer, and I have to admit I'm one of those guys ;). WhatsApp was 55 people big when they got acquired, and to me that sounds about right. Twitter employed 7,500 people. 7,500!!!! So please tell me where the complexity lies? Surely not in the front-end code I can tell you that. Let's compare it to something WAY-WAY-WAY more complex, like a game with multiplayer, awesome mod tools, etc.: ROBLOX: 2,200 employees. Do I need to mention they wrote their own physics simulation engine and keeping realtime multiplayer going? So please, explain this to me: how is Twitter more than 3 times more complex than Roblox??? Maybe I'm wrong, that's very possible, I've been wrong in the past. But just explain this 1 thing then: Twitter needs more than 3 times the manpower than Roblox?