It sounds like Twitter’s infrastructure may need a bit of help:
I guess they were taking Musk’s philosophy to heart back then.
No they won’t. For example Musk has basically decided to eliminate content moderation. I am not talking here about the policies for which changes are not yet clear, but rather that he has fired the vast bulk of the people (both regular staff and contract moderators) who actually do the moderation. 85% of revenue is advertising; and this is resulting in a truly massive decline in brand advertising by the big corporate advertisers. And the massive amount of hate posts, etc will cause a very large number of users to leave.
Twitter’s infrastructure was already a mess before Elon bought it. Peter Zatko aka mudge provided Senate testimony over just how messed up Twitter’s engineering practices were as of 2020. There was no staging environment, half the servers weren’t getting security updates and there were known state sponsored spies working inside of the company.
Incorrect — they will argue that any such transparently stupid actions are in fact secretly brilliant.
Why do I have a mental image of him looking for help from the people who benefited from his generosity, getting blown off, and becoming a misanthropic hermit a la Timon of Athens?
Oo! Oo! Mistah Kottah!
You try removing pieces on a testbed, not the public-facing operational system.
You realize people were buying at that prize because it was close to certain they’d then profit from Musk’s buyout at $54.20, and that the, presumably rather few towards the end, people selling were locking in their profit just in case the buyout ran into an iceberg?
This may be true. However, that is all about the technical platform and not how Twitter runs as a business. Streamlining the tech is, at best, going to reduce some costs. Nothing can make up for your advertisers walking out the door.
But if you let all of the advertisers leave then you can figure out which ones were really the important ones. This is Engineering 101.
Now that is just inane hyperbole.
I wonder if there really is a full-fidelity copy of the entire range of Twitter infrastructure for testing?
Once you get a big enough rat’s nest of dependencies (whether of microservices or any other architectural approach) the only way to know for 100% certain what effect a change in production will actually have is to actually try it in production.
But as argued earlier today by some other posters, it’s smarter to do these sorts of radical tests in production the week before you lay off half your staff, not the week after. Your time-to-repair will be a LOT better that way.
I thought the same thing.
Look, I only use Twitter to get info about local wildfires that may get too close, so I am by no means a big time user.
But altho people have decried doom and gloom, is it not better to wait and see? I realize Musk is the dude many “love to hate”, but …
When you see an avalanche coming down the slope in your direction…
I feel for the people who are going to be affected in terms of livelihood as a result of this takeover, but as a non-user of Twitter I don’t think I’ve had a moment of schadenfreude as pure as the feeling I have watching Musk fuck this up so spectacularly.
“The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote." - Kosh
…hyperbole? Really?
Ya mean, Musk is not literally the stupidest, most arrogant man on the planet? He’s just really really stupid, and also really really arrogant?
Musk isn’t stupid. Everyone makes mistakes. I also wonder if people look at the business of Twitter from too much of a US centric point of view. Is there value in owning a platform like that with the data it holds that can be exploited globally?
Let’s say that Twitter’s value dropped to zero. Musk would still be worth over 100 billion dollars. That’s not doing too bad.
I think one of the things that magnifies the apparent smartness or stupidity of the decisions is just the sheer scope of the number of dollars.
…disagree.
Based on the Twitter purchase? What were your opinions before that?
It’s doubtful he has an IQ sub 80.
…based on everything he has said and done since I first ever heard of him.