None of that means Musk is making a profit on this. “Sure we lose money on every unit we make. But we make it up in volume!”
I may be completely wrong here, but I think there’s a nonzero chance we are reminded of one thing, and discover another:
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Twitter is not the real world, and reports of its imminent demise may have been at least somewhat overstated, and
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The state of tech journalism when it comes to social media is about as sharp as the state of gaming journalism, as least when it’s super-big macro occurrences. Which is to say: it’s as siloed as message boards and forums.
Then again, Twitter could die overnight, too. :D
Just fascinating to watch…
ShivaX
3099
He’s going full on Trump with his crowd-size obsession.
Alstein
3100
I agree with this take, but I’m just saying the best time to have some insurance in case this is real was a week ago, and the second best time is now. These things do tend to make their own momentum.
I saw a ton of my feed sign up for other services and prepare for the site to break tonight.
Lot depends on what you use it for, and whether you use it to keep up with friends as a community or just a news feed.
A whole lot of this feels at least a bit like Louise Mensch-ish “Marshal of the Supreme Court will arrest Donald Trump” levels of people eager to believe things that confirm their priors.
Maybe it’s all very much as presented, and Twitter collapses in on itself like a dying star as I type this. But Twitter is also a great place to have your priors confirmed and find your silo, and once we get into our respective silos, well, I know I often find myself more credulous than I’d like.
Yes truly karma is a bitch.
It’s not so much that people are fleeing Twitter as a platform, but the people responsible for keeping it up and running are gone. If(/when) it goes down, will they be able to bring it back?
And yet…who’s saying that? People who have just resigned? I mean, they might very well be right. They’d know better than I would. But I will also say that it has been my experience that recently dismissed under duress employees tend to have inflated assessments that an enterprise will collapse immediately upon their departure, too.
In this case, they may well be 100% correct! But it is probably wise to have at least a tiny bit of skepticism too.
Quaro
3105
Bringing back the fail whale will simply be celebrated as brilliant 4D marketing stunt by the Elon congregation.
In all seriousness Twitter used to go down every day and it survived. There is a lot room for Twitter to become worse before it collapses, even when the CEO seems to be in some kind of Brewster’s Millions scenario.
I hate this situation myself. I love parts of Twitter and I’m increasingly so repulsed by Elon that I’m starting to feel gross just using it.
CraigM
3106
As someone whose job is part of maintaining data integrity and enterprise product management systems for a major company, knowing how the sausage is made and what it takes to keep the lights on, the current state of tech teams is a legitimate concern.
We had an incident I worked where someone uploaded a UTC-16 Japanese character into a product translation portal on one of our products creation systems. One that was a valid input, and human looking reasonable.
However our Japan retail systems had one component that was UTC-8 exclusive and when it received this data caused the entire Japan retail network to go down for 48 hours. Like that kind of small thing happens all the time, and there is a bunch of smart people in the background keeping the house of cards from collapsing at every slight breeze.
Musk is an F5 tornado. To think that tech debt and institutional knowledge and disaster recovery and major incident management could suffer to the point it collapses the service is not only plausible, but I’d say even likely.
ShivaX
3107
The people who used to work there last week.
nKoan
3108
The failures will be inconsistent and ultimately boring. It won’t be cathartic explosion.
It’ll limp along. Someone will fix it. Until it runs out of money.
Yes, that was a rhetorical question. Followed by me noting that employees who have left a job by termination or a resignation under duress may be somewhat emotional and could be overstating an issue. And again: maybe not. But I guess I’d sure like to see some of the folks reporting this from the tech journalism side at least ask some follow-ups to question the veracity of those assessments a bit.
CraigM
3110
Oh sure, it’ll get fixed. But it’ll take longer, be done less reliably, and the possibility of something going wrong during the restore period goes up.
Even if the various service maintenance, upgrade schedules, major incident playbooks, etc. are all extensively and clearlly documented, there is a qualitative difference between a fully staffed and experienced team following the procedure, versus an understaffed, demoralized, and much reduced level of knowledge and experience one. First hand experience! Even experienced players sometimes need extra hands and eyes, even if just means having one person run point on internal comms and team coordination, it makes a huge difference! I certainly know that when I was in the middle of running the service restoration steps that breaking into the middle of that to send team comms, or pull in someone from a dependency team, would break the flow and slow down the recovery. So we would always split duties based on who was running the primary contact for the incident, and who was going to be support.
nKoan
3111
Oh for sure. It’ll limp hard. And people will leave. But we won’t get the Death Star implosion we all want.
Lurb
3112
Those Elon tweets read to me like someone that just crashed his car and is proudly counting the rubberneckers…
ShivaX
3113
Well Elon might make the implosion, but odds are it will be like an old car dying. Things stop working or work much worse, then one day it doesn’t start.
Tim_N
3114
This will only be example #1344523 of twitter posters drumming up incessant hype for some Good Thing to imminently happen that then never does.
This, little features will break, sometimes a tweet won’t load because some infrastructure or routing issue route or load balancer somewhere is broken, some tweets will go missing, a bunch of integrations and data collection/analysis services might break, but I don’t think we are just gong to start getting 404’s everywhere.
