Very clearly Twitter has not been able to run fine since firing so much of their workforce. The confusion here is because of 2 things: 1. Many people who were

Very clearly Twitter has not been able to run fine since firing so much of their workforce. The confusion here is because of 2 things: 1. Many people who were commenting on how this would adversely affect Twitter were doing it solely because they didn’t like Musk, as opposed to an understanding of how software development works. So these people were basically predicting that Twitter would stop working entirely in 2 weeks. But that’s not how software is developed. If it was, engineers would never be able to take a vacation and major web apps would all start failing on Jan 1. Those who understood how software development worked recognized that what we would see instead is a slow decay in software quality where things would consistently become slightly worse. Also, we’d see a complete inability to change major functionality without causing problems. Finally, there might be a few big bang failures (eg the domain name expires, but no one with access to the domain is still hired by Twitter anymore) but those would be few and far in between and would take time to uncover (although it does appear Twitter has faced at least one such situation). Twitter is indeed facing these situations. 2. The real threat to Twitter was always competition. In a competitive environment staying still is a death trap since your competitors will outpace you. There are a few reasons why Twitter has largely escaped this so far. (a) Twitter’s business is a fundamentally bad business model with a lot of hassles most businesses simply don’t want to deal with. (b) a misconception by many competitors that there was something fundamentally wrong with Twitter that needed to be addressed. (b) is why Bluesky and Threads have been the most successful Twitter alternatives. They’ve basically been Twitter clones and are not trying to fundamentally change the model. Of course, Bluesky is now basically getting crushed by Meta’s resources and existing user base, but they were fundamentally ok the right track and could have been competitive if they were able to reach technical parity earlier.