lol. I don't know if it's going to be ok or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did survive. Several tech companies/departments have nothing but bloat during boom times when they've got money to throw around. It's the best time to go for moonshots, do money-grabs, hire your buddies, get promoted, work about 4 hours (maybe), etc. I used to work at a company where the first thing I asked a buddy of mine who worked there was "seriously, why do y'all need 500 people to do this?" He just responded with a laugh. There was a legacy billing program/process there that, I kid you not, had been running for at least 2 years making a call to a non-existent server to acquire billing information/rates. It would receive no updates to the rate because the server didn't exist, but the error was consumed, so it would continue merrily along saying "no new rates". This despite the rates were changing at least monthly over that period. If that wasn't bad enough, nobody, and this is not an exaggeration, NOBODY in the company had a clue how the entire billing process worked from a technical standpoint. When something broke, people would go into whatever code broke and patch it or try to figure that part of the code out. There was code in there that made no sense or just swallowed up errors. All the people that knew how it worked had left the company long before and nobody thought it was worth the effort to re-write the code. So it just kept running. They just hoped all the legacy customers on that product would just go away, but in the meantime - make moneymoneymoney. I still laugh about that.
lol. every company is filled with tons of FTEs that do nothing other than "attend meetings". no actual work is being done to improve anything. tech companies are the worst at this. with manual labor jobs you will at least see that person standing around.. in tech, they can fake their work for a long time. twitter being fine after 50% reduction is not a surprise to me at all. same can be probably be said about uber...doordash...airbnb and all these other tech startups.
Another alternative from the creator of Waze. It's called Post. It's currently in a closed beta with over a 100K waitlist though. Sign up and get other's to do the same with your referral link and you can skip some in line. My referral link is below: https://post.news/?r=kWzuQ This is the gist of it...
Are people mis-conflating bloat with people that literally were not working on the core product? A lot of growth happens because companies tend to try to expand verticals or invest heavily in non-profitable R&D to chase new products when times are good. When layoffs happen they're typically scrapping teams or proportionally targeting layoffs from non core / non mission critical teams. Not all 7,500 employees at Twitter were critical to the core application. I.E. A lot of Amazon's layoffs did NOT impact their retail division or AWS and instead impacted devices and I think a large part of that was them scrapping their Luna team. Source: I know quite a few engineers at Amazon. Twitter's core application is probably rock solid, if Twitter is architecturally sound then one ancillary service going down shouldn't kill the entire application and they can likely isolate any issues. I was skeptical about the Thursday night twitter dying rumor that had no basis in any fact whatsoever. That being said, these systems tend to be complex. And I'm not even talking about Twitter scale. Also software engineers aren't generalists (typically). If you lose people that are more proficient on the devops/infra side of things it takes longer to fix issues arising from that area, for example. If they have flawless documentation, and a really good support / technical issues runbook then maybe they'll be fine outside of any major issues that might arise. Anyone posting, even those with tons of software experience that hasn't directly worked at Twitter; their opinions are purely speculation including myself. That includes the "Twitter is going to die" crowd and the "Everyone that got laid off is bloat" crowd.
Hotter take: Twitter’s lack of revenue model plus excess investment caused the workforce bloat. Elon appears to be right-sizing Twitter to make it profitable … but … Elon is being a giant ass about it.
This is why I hate following him sometimes. I love his work ethic and drive to conquer whatever he's going after and the maniacal approach to doing it through sheer brute force sometimes. I love that he doesn't really go for BS. I love the work he's done in electric vehicles, space, etc. But then there's that other part where he's just a trollish 12-year old ass about it. lol. Irritating.
I never "did" Facebook and have never wanted to. The thought of putting my personal life history in the hands of that bizarre creature that essentially owns and and runs it creeps me out. No thank you. We pretty much agree on Twitter.
Facebook can be a wonderful way to maintain contact with friends and family who live far away, or that you lost touch with after high school/college. We've moved a lot over the years, and have family/friends in Texas, Missouri, Tennessee, NYC, and the DMV, and work friends up and down the west coast. I assiduously avoid politics on FB (and twitter, for that matter).
OK, I'll offer my ramblings: Elon - I like what he did with Tesla and SpaceX, and maybe he can somehow revolutionize Twitter/Social Media. Can't say his actions over the last few weeks give me much confidence that he will though. It really seems like he wants people to think he's some genius/know-it-all, even when he's talking about stuff where he has no expertise (and in this case...I kinda do, so it is easy to see the problems). That doesn't seem good to me, and that just goes on top of him being an online jerk/troll. Things might go better when he gets bored in a few weeks and hands control over to someone else that is semi-competent. Twitter - Elon is right that Twitter wasn't exactly a great business before he bought it (though he did buy it for $44B, so not sure what that says about him). This was a company founded and run by Jack Dorsey after all. So yes, it probably did need some massive restructuring in order to become profitable. I'm not sure Elon's ideas are the ones to do that though, and IMO they might do more harm than good. As mentioned, the way he's laid off workers will likely lead to problems down the road. I don't think Twitter will suddenly explode or anything like that, but yeah it might take even more work to get someone else to take control of critical infrastructure & processes. Even with the restructuring, I'm not sure they'll really save *that* much in costs (even ignoring potential for lawsuits and whatnot), and it seems like they're bleeding advertisers to offset any potential gains they might make. They can get them back I guess, but if Twitter becomes associated with extreme right wing trolls, pron, etc., then you probably won't get much from advertising. I personally didn't really value Twitter that much, but in hindsight, I actually used it quite a bit. I'd probably rank Youtube, Reddit, etc. above Twitter, but I would put it above Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. for me. I primarily get my "news" from forums like this (my brain still prefers that model), but occasionally there are times when Twitter just has more/better information. Even for Rockets stuff. A lot of CF members are more active on Twitter, so inevitably, I just follow things directly there vs here (especially since not everything gets shared here). So while I like CF, it is not a great source for everything...unfortunately. Twitter Alternatives - I think most people will stick to using Twitter, barring some crazy scenarios. These Twitter alternatives are unlikely to become as mainstream as Twitter, and at best, you'd probably end up in a scenario where you end up going to different platforms for different things (unlike Twitter, which was the place for everything). That said, I like taking this opportunity to explore what a social media platform can provide me, and what exactly I value from such services (and what I don't value). Regardless of what you think about social media, they've had a huge impact on society. Some good, some bad....well a lot bad IMO. I don't know if it possible to create a platform that does most/all of the good stuff with less/none of the bad stuff, but I don't mind exploring the possibility. Kinda tired of Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, etc., which while different, are generally the same thing behind-the-scenes. I have tried Hive Social, which is interesting, but it seems way too incomplete (on the back-end) to be something I fully trust at this moment. Plus it feels more Instagram-y. But at least I could easily sign up and get started. Post seems interesting, but I'm too lazy to sign up for a waitlist. I'll check it out more when it is open to all. I'm not super in love with the look, but I think it is going more for a "news-only" experience, which I might be able to appreciate. Might be a great place to follow the Feigens, Wojs, Shams, etc. But I don't know yet. I really like the idea behind Mastodon (it *seems* impossible for any single person/entity to control Mastodon, unlike every other social media platform), but it has some issues with its usability/viability IMO. I don't think it is trying to be a full-on mainstream Twitter replacement, but more of something like a forum with a Twitter-style UX, which is still pretty cool and super appealing to me (guessing more forum-goers like myself prefer that model). But I think they need to work out some issues before I am more confident in the platform overall. I haven't had a chance to check out Cohost yet, so don't have much of an opinion there. Might be others I'm missing, and I'm sure new ones will come out as Twitter stays in the news (for the wrong reasons). This is all very reminiscent of the NeoGAF debacle, which led to the creation of ResetEra, where most NeoGAF users (including myself) ended up going. In that case though, it was relatively easy to create a viable alternative in a short amount of time. Not so easy to do that with a social media platform.
the thing that's unique about twitter is it's very easy to quickly spin up a diverse feed focused on a breaking news event, earthquake, hurricane, a shooting, or something like the war in Ukraine. no other platform that I'm aware of provides the diversity of viewpoints, many of them local to the event, that twitter does. plus, you can find some really wonderful follows for food, drink, sports, music...
Yes, I did quite a lot a some years back. Very creative people were posting all sorts of artistic content. I love that about it and still check it out from time to time. Add that back then it used to be "wide open," as in you could post literally anything if you were registered. There were some seriously talented people posting nude images or videos, sometimes mixing in very creative CGI (computer-generated imagery). Heck, from that to swingers posting "home movies." You could often download content, no problem. I didn't run into gross, disgusting, or the truly awful things I'm sure most of us can imagine if there are "no rules." Heck, there must have been, now that I think about it, or I would have stumbled into that stuff. Then one day all the creative content that included nudes went away. Perhaps some is still around, but a ton of artistic content of that nature I had bookmarked went away. Still a great place to check out.
