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Everyone acts as if Twitter pre-Musk was a well oiled machine that shit the bed overnight after he took over; it wasn't. The truth slowly emerged, their infrast

Everyone acts as if Twitter pre-Musk was a well oiled machine that shit the bed overnight after he took over; it wasn't. The truth slowly emerged, their infrastructure was built on a cavalcade of cruft held together with duct tape. How everyone conveniently forgot the fail whale and memory holed it for all time. I remember they failed their security audit so badly didn't the CISO quit? I give the guy credit for at least trying new things and fixing long standing bugs and absent features.

rsynnott 3y ago
I've been on Twitter for 16 years (though since the ascension of Naughty Old Mr Car, it's been a placeholder account; I'd quite like to hold onto the username in case he gets bored and divests, but I don't actively use it anymore). Granted, for the first few years, say until the early tens, it was extremely unreliable, but since then it was mostly fairly solid, and any prolonged Twitter downtime was big news. Over the last year, well, it's had... more downtime.
smoldesu 3y ago
For sure. For the first decade of Twitter's operation, it was truly mind-boggling how clueless Dorsey was. Towards the end of his tenure, he was funding so many batshit ideas that he may have surpassed Elon's trajectory if given the chance. Elon deserves credit for trying to fix stuff. Then he deserves to watch that credit get chastised away for his consummate failure as CEO of Twitter. Preeminent technical failures be damned, his involvement in Twitter at all is a mistake and his continued involvement is only making things worse. As a non-Twitter user I don't have much emotionally invested in the platform, but it's obvious that he's (somehow) a worse steward than Dorsey was. If only for the simple fact that Musk thought Twitter could survive without a ground-up rewrite and Dorsey disagreed.
Zigurd 3y ago
Re: "Everyone acts as if Twitter pre-Musk was a well oiled machine that shit the bed overnight after he took over" I'm one of those "everyones" and I and everyone else I've read on the topic have been pointing out that hardly any web scale platform would fail suddenly. It's been only 6 months. Without the repeated flailing at Musk's insistence, Twitter's remaining engineers probably would not have broken anything important for another 6 months. Blaming the "cruft" is silly after you fire almost all the people who understood the "cruft."
- housemusicfan 3y ago
  > Blaming the "cruft" is silly after you fire almost all the people who understood the "cruft." Funny because the Venn diagram of people who say this and those that have been boasting that Threads was built by 10 engineers because "that's all you need" is roughly a circle. Twitter's code was a precarious mess that required an army of people to keep it stable (while making no changes). It had to go.
  - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
    Let's see, one way to interpret this is to detect contradiction and mock people for contradicting themselves. But another, wiser approach is to realize maybe the contradiction happens in your mind as you're ignoring important variables. Namely, Threads is a brand new app, built from the group up itself, but also relying on Meta's massive Instagram & Facebook infrastructure, manned by tens of thousands of engineers. So it's to be expected the app and backend themselves will require a small team to build a new effort on top of this existing infrastructure. While Twitter is a legacy app, and their infrastructure was entirely in-house. And most of those people are gone now. Do you think it's a contradiction that a legacy app and a new app require a different management strategy and it gets effort, knowledge and time to trim down a company? Or do you think you come in with the hatcher and just fire 80% of them like Elon did, and then expect everything just works? Meta has 90,000 employees by the way. That's the support this team of ten people get, when they need something.
    - Zigurd 3y ago
      Twitter also hasn't got a code base, a performance tweaked runtime, a test engineering group, or an operations group like Instagram has to borrow from. Even with all that, Threads was launched conservatively. Not in Europe at all. Threads got 10 times the expected sign-ups. It scaled up faster than anything ever has. That's pretty remarkable.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Twitter also hasn't got a code base, a performance tweaked runtime, a test engineering group, or an operations group like Instagram has to borrow from. Unless you count Tesla and SpaceX, which Musk apparently did, as places to borrow from, despite the rather different application domains.
3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
"trying new things and fixing long standing bugs and absent features" I'm struggling to parse what those might refer to.

rsynnott 3y ago

I've been on Twitter for 16 years (though since the ascension of Naughty Old Mr Car, it's been a placeholder account; I'd quite like to hold onto the username in case he gets bored and divests, but I don't actively use it anymore). Granted, for the first few years, say until the early tens, it was extremely unreliable, but since then it was mostly fairly solid, and any prolonged Twitter downtime was big news. Over the last year, well, it's had... more downtime.

smoldesu 3y ago

For sure. For the first decade of Twitter's operation, it was truly mind-boggling how clueless Dorsey was. Towards the end of his tenure, he was funding so many batshit ideas that he may have surpassed Elon's trajectory if given the chance. Elon deserves credit for trying to fix stuff. Then he deserves to watch that credit get chastised away for his consummate failure as CEO of Twitter. Preeminent technical failures be damned, his involvement in Twitter at all is a mistake and his continued involvement is only making things worse. As a non-Twitter user I don't have much emotionally invested in the platform, but it's obvious that he's (somehow) a worse steward than Dorsey was. If only for the simple fact that Musk thought Twitter could survive without a ground-up rewrite and Dorsey disagreed.

Zigurd 3y ago

Re: "Everyone acts as if Twitter pre-Musk was a well oiled machine that shit the bed overnight after he took over" I'm one of those "everyones" and I and everyone else I've read on the topic have been pointing out that hardly any web scale platform would fail suddenly. It's been only 6 months. Without the repeated flailing at Musk's insistence, Twitter's remaining engineers probably would not have broken anything important for another 6 months. Blaming the "cruft" is silly after you fire almost all the people who understood the "cruft."

housemusicfan 3y ago
> Blaming the "cruft" is silly after you fire almost all the people who understood the "cruft." Funny because the Venn diagram of people who say this and those that have been boasting that Threads was built by 10 engineers because "that's all you need" is roughly a circle. Twitter's code was a precarious mess that required an army of people to keep it stable (while making no changes). It had to go.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  Let's see, one way to interpret this is to detect contradiction and mock people for contradicting themselves. But another, wiser approach is to realize maybe the contradiction happens in your mind as you're ignoring important variables. Namely, Threads is a brand new app, built from the group up itself, but also relying on Meta's massive Instagram & Facebook infrastructure, manned by tens of thousands of engineers. So it's to be expected the app and backend themselves will require a small team to build a new effort on top of this existing infrastructure. While Twitter is a legacy app, and their infrastructure was entirely in-house. And most of those people are gone now. Do you think it's a contradiction that a legacy app and a new app require a different management strategy and it gets effort, knowledge and time to trim down a company? Or do you think you come in with the hatcher and just fire 80% of them like Elon did, and then expect everything just works? Meta has 90,000 employees by the way. That's the support this team of ten people get, when they need something.
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    Twitter also hasn't got a code base, a performance tweaked runtime, a test engineering group, or an operations group like Instagram has to borrow from. Even with all that, Threads was launched conservatively. Not in Europe at all. Threads got 10 times the expected sign-ups. It scaled up faster than anything ever has. That's pretty remarkable.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Twitter also hasn't got a code base, a performance tweaked runtime, a test engineering group, or an operations group like Instagram has to borrow from. Unless you count Tesla and SpaceX, which Musk apparently did, as places to borrow from, despite the rather different application domains.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago

"trying new things and fixing long standing bugs and absent features" I'm struggling to parse what those might refer to.