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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability

By now you know that Elon gave staff a deadline of today (Thursday) to either commit to being "extremely hardcore" or leave (source). Unsurprisingly, most people - roughly 75%, according to some Internet rando - didn't take him up on this. Elon blinked and apparently people still have access.

That won't do much (WaPo):

“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”

But that's not even what I was going to write about, just what happened while I was composing the post. (Also let's put aside that he said "microservices are bloat" and then they killed the microservice serving SMS 2-factor login.)

To me, the biggest news is that he axed 80% of the 5500 contractors (source, Casey Newton, or someone with a premium account impersonating him I guess).

The contractors were responsible for things like moderation (source: what are they gonna do, use salaried employees?). If you don't have moderation for basic things like CSAM, you're boned. I know a thing or two about moderation, and if you let the Internet type into a text field, you get some dank shit. And crucially, you can't automate it away, because there's a human on the other side working to defeat whatever you're doing. I mean, the YouTube comment section probably has some of the most expensive automation on the planet working on it and the spam still gets worse every day, and I'm talking the obvious stuff like "HIT ME UP ON TELEGRAM <number>". The only thing that saves you is humans clicking buttons (and getting PTSD, but let's skip that for now). Google had 101k employees but 121k contractors as of March 2019, and that's what the contractors do, click buttons.

If you don't have moderation, you don't get the YouTube comments section, because they at least have contractors backed up by code (at the cost of many expensive engineer-years). You don't even get 4chan, because they at least have Those Who Do It For Free. You get some ungodly shithole most younger Internet users have never experienced. You're getting... the virtual equivalent of your local Greyhound terminal. Whatever happens to someone's chat room side project that gets posted to /b/. Sludge.

Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.

Remember when Elon was just going to clean up the bots on Twitter?

(Reason for posting: I saw some takes elsewhere on this site that apparently Musk would lead Twitter to success or at least improve it or something, and disagreed.)

Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.

Do you even use twitter ?

It has sentiment analysis. Has had for the last year at least.

Write anything with slurs or even a small bit of profanity and it won't even notify someone about the reply. They'd have to search it out manually under their tweet, and then click "show additional replies".

Next time, please write about something you know, perhaps ?

“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”

Just wanted to push against messages like this, because this sounds like something from "revenge of the nerds."

Big systems like Twitter's have accumulated multiple layers of redundancy in case of failure over the years. There's probably quite a bit of automation to take care of the steady stream of problems like faulty hard drives or network cards. It can probably keep on going for quite some time this way.

Also, the biggest source of incidents? Change.

If so many Twitter engineers have left/been fired, then I imagine the rate of changes introduced into the system is approaching the level of a code freeze--basically a ban on introducing changes to the system around the holidays because they want to minimize risk even though it carrier a very high cost.

In this state, I would expect a skeleton would be able to keep things running for months. Especially if you can get some really good ones to tackle the 'black swan' type incidents that actually do require some clever thinking to fix--but again, this is all about pushing the systems back into a stable state (less risky) rather than "fixing forward" (more risky).

What I would be worried about is sabotage that can fall under plausible denial. Stuff like setting a primary key on a database column to an int32, which will hit the limit in weeks/months and is annoyingly hard to fix. But maybe by then Musk will have a larger set of solid engineers working at Twitter.

(1) Yes, there are a steady stream of problems addressable by automation, but those have never been a problem. SREs exist for the other problems.

Shit just falls over and you won't know why. That's just how these systems are. You can make a system that doesn't do that, but then you pay thousands of dollars per line written, which they're obviously not gonna do.

To put meat on the bones, see this list of common things SREs deal with, or this log of the SRE chatroom for Wikipedia & friends.

(2) Change is unavoidable and constant. There are security patches for your dependencies released continuously and you will update your system or face the consequences. Often times your dependency is an underfunded open-source thingy, despite your best efforts to avoid those, and thus the only way to get the new code is to use the newest version of the thingy, which means you might have to upgrade all of your code that uses the thingy.

(3) Regarding "pushing the systems back into a stable state" - then you're gonna have the same problem again unless you fix the root cause, which, again, requires code changes.

SRE is my day job :). Worked at one of these behemoths at some point, specifically deep on the infrastructure side of things.

You can make a system that doesn't do that, but then you pay thousands of dollars per line written, which they're obviously not gonna do.

None of these companies ever even dreamed of it. It's all about cheap hardware, multiple replicas, and the ability to reroute traffic between failure domains.

Change is unavoidable and constant.

That's the thing--it's not constant. Like I mentioned earlier, companies do holiday code freezes so the rate of change decrease to a very small amount. Even security patches can be split into critical and non-critical, then those critical patches can be further split into "requires downtime" and "nothingburger."[1]

So if there's a feature freeze at twitter, then the rate of change is drastically reduced. And if people leave/get fired, that reduces the rate even further. And if you ignore all but the critical patches, then the rate begins approaching zero. That's a lot of "ifs", but all of them seem like good decisions with positive impact, also based in an accepted industry norm (code freezes), so I'm betting that management at Twitter will go down this path.

But let's wait and see! We're trying to infer what's happening inside of a black box. If my reality leans toward my bet, what I'm expecting to see is, over the course of the next year:

  • multiple instances of graceful degradation: users missing avatars for a few hours; intermittent general slowness; a few instances of data loss for a small group of users.

  • multiple instances of planned downtime.

  • a few instances of unplanned downtime, but no longer than 1-2 days.

Now, and correct if I'm wrong please, if reality leans toward your bet, what I would expect to see is:

  • multiple instances of unplanned downtime, ranging anywhere between a few hours to days, maybe even 1-2 weeks.

  • at least one prolonged outage (>4 weeks)

  • almost constant degradation of service: twitter being noticeably slower; multiple days when users can't log in; multiple instances of data loss for large (single digit %) group of users.

Let's see what happens!

[1]: Also, you reminded me about an oft overlooked source of change: shit expiring. Certificates, but also licenses, generators, and whatnot. These are silent killers, because they're hard to track and require manual work. I'm still counting them into my "low or no change" bet--that's where I would expect to see unplanned downtime that's fixed in a couple of hours.

Adjacent but sounds like Musks will let Trump get his twitter back. I think even red tribe people want Trump to die and Desantis is far superior. So I assume by mentioning it Musks has made a view that Trump loses primary. In free speech grounds Trump shouldn’t be banned but as a maga adjacent I want him banned.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673844996288512?s=46&t=o4yJPOOQnQoAxYXvJuPdlQ

The thing is, where are all these people quitting because they don't like the new boss and the new rules going to get jobs? Comparable jobs, at least.

I'm reading stories all the time recently about Amazon/Meta/Google are cutting jobs, shutting down projects and the like. So if you decide you are going to give up your decent-paying job at Twitter because ugh, Musk - where are you going to go?

I see arguments that the big dogs putting in hiring freezes is good for the industry as a whole, since it means smaller firms will now have access to a pool of talent that they couldn't get previously. But part of that "couldn't get previously" is "couldn't match the pay and conditions". If the Twitter people expect to walk into the same or better job elsewhere, (1) are those jobs still out there? (2) how will they feel about "have to move to Michigan for a job with a medium-sized company or bank"?

Musk may be running Twitter into the ground, but amongst all the glee and jeering I see online, nobody seems to be addressing that (a) Twitter is not the only place laying off or cutting costs (b) maybe Twitter needed the fat trimming and if Musk wasn't the one who bought it but somebody the Tumblr and others love, that guy or gal would still be making swingeing cuts to bring costs down.

maybe Twitter needed the fat trimming and if Musk wasn't the one who bought it but somebody the Tumblr and others love, that guy or gal would still be making swingeing cuts to bring costs down.

I've seen this pointed out, and I think it's quite correct. Twitter was losing money in a boom market; they weren't prepared for a bust. But:

The seemingly-intended implication of "Musk is making wise decisions now" isn't supported. Even when cuts are necessary there can be better ways and worse ways to make them and there's at least circumstantial evidence he's deep into "worse ways".

The seemingly-intended implication of "Musk was making a wise decision to buy Twitter to fix it" is almost outright contradicted. Imagine if he'd had the patience to wait a little longer, until Twitter was already running low on operating funds and making drastic cuts internally. First, the cuts probably would have come out better, since without an ownership change acting as a Schelling point for layoff timings, there wouldn't be a conflict between "need to make a lot of cuts at once to avoid losing the best people to preemptive job changes" and "need to deliberate over who to cut to avoid losing the best people to poor firing choices". Second, he could have been seen as the hero (coming in to save the failing Twitter! outside funding bringing an end to the layoffs!) rather than the villain (coming in to destroy Twitter! laying off people who were totes going to have 20 year careers here otherwise!). Finally, he could have bought it at fire sale prices, rather than "peak of a bubble right before a crash" prices.

Don’t forget the time pressure on him to buy it. It was getting bottier, leftier, and tankier by the week, and had he waited long enough to make it a viable business, he might have himself been banned.

If this is true, why does non-English twitter not look like this even though it has next to no human moderation (or really attention from the company at all)?

If anything, the bot situation was the worst part about twitter and in the non-English part and it's already better.

A good chunk of twitter's moderation is automated. Even as recently as a year ago the spam use to be way worse for certain categories.

Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.

This will likely not happen. The evidence suggests engagement has only gone up. Tweets by important and or controversial people are getting 2-10x the engagement compared to a year ago. Elon's own tweets are easily getting 300k-1.5 million replies, a 5x increase from 6 months ago. The people who spend time on twitter are disinclined to leave to leave because of slurs in the replies. Otherwise, they would have quit long ago. Also, most twitter users do not read replies or do not care much about them.

I think twitter will succeed and Elon will be able to to resell Twitter for a decent profit. Elon is a savvy businessman with a good intuitive business sense . For example, he after dipping his foot in crypto early 2021 he correctly saw it for the overhyped garbage it was and bailed, only losing a little money. VCs and others rode it all the way down.

Moderation: I agree that twitter has a lot of automated moderation. Unfortunately, a good chunk of incoming Bad Shit escapes it because of the endless creativity of our great species, so that on the front lines you generally forget about the automation (until you have to fix some false positives, or do maintenance). This implies, but I want to explicitly say, that the percentage that escapes does not go to zero over time, even though you're constantly upgrading your systems. They vastly outnumber you and are always trying to post their crap, because often there's a financial incentive to do so.

Engagement: Yeah, people are saying the site may die; that's entertaining and will bring people back, but is more importantly a temporary trend. I don't think we can say how many people are coming back due to the new moderation policies, although a lower bound on that is the number of people talking about them, which is certainly a fair number (but niche in the grand scheme of things, a fact I can appreciate as someone knowledgeable about Mastodon administration).

People seem to forget that the world is larger than the US. Users across the world don't care as much about this drama as americans. I doubt Indian, Saudi, Japanese or German users care as much about the Musk situation. Twitter tends to be less censored in smaller languages than english as the censors can't understand the content and the AIs aren't as trained.

There may be an increase in spam but most likely a lot of the censors weren't handling pure spambots but more difficult to parse content than "milfs in your area, click here to meet"

The biggest reason for twitter surviving is the user base, unless all the important users migrate at once people will still have a reason to visit twitter.

Japanese users

Well, see this.

On the colony bit. Some times I believe foreigners deserve a right to vote in American elections because America influences to them a great extent. Actually made a comment questioning womens right to vote has been bad the other day. So I think thru nuances.

You all should apply to be Puerto Rico and a territory so atleast you get a house rep.

I am genuinely appalled at the extent to which America, my country, has colonized the cultural landscape of our supposed allies. I would apologize but that seems a trifle in the face of what is in some ways a cultural genocide. It seems as though in many countries, there are no genuine foreigners, just Americans who speak a different language.

Decolonization doesn’t make sense. Economies of scale and trade are good at boosting living standards.

I am conservative but don’t believe in America first. As a global hegemon which I think is good for our living standards we still have debts to our colonies.

Brexxit didn’t work because of geopolitical realities. But America has a broad umbrella some times more important than local politics and you might deserve a say in our view.

Honestly an interesting subject that might be worth a top level posts.

I hate wef and a lot of your politics so don’t even think of 2 senate seats.

Oh I thought you meant decolonize as an American colony.

There is, i feel, a degree to which cancel culture is just... Twitter culture. Where do mobs find stuff to hate? Twitter. Where do they organize? Twitter. Where are the employers nice and easy to contact via, essentially, short form open letter? Twitter again.

Don't get me wrong, cancel culture can still exist without twitter, but i expect it to be far more of a minor and localized phenomenon.

Anyway, this is a silver lining if shit all goes south and Twitter dies. Though for my part i still gain value from Twitter and i'd be bummed out.

And on reflection, cancel culture is just the dark mirror of legitimate accountability-- MeToo would not have gotten off the ground without twitter, nor would protests over various police abuses of power.

A failed Twitter would have lots of cultural consequences.

but twitter is also a force against cancel culture. Some of the most popular accounts are individuals who are critical of the left.

I feel like one core insight of cancel culture is that if you have 1000 detractors and 20000 supporters the detractors can still make your life shit in ways your supporters can't really help with (phoning your boss, doxxing you, sending rape threats, harassing organizations that have the capacity to inconvenience you, etc.)

Or in other words, it's the same old Heckler's Veto, just at international scale this time.

At Tesla and SpaceX, he’s had great teams behind him that have been with him for many years. That isn’t necessarily the case here.

Tesla and SpaceX were also his companies from the beginning. He was well positioned to demand extreme commitment and tell people who wanted work life balance to look elsewhere. Twitter is just a company he bought and has its own culture. It seems fairly obvious to me that Musk has grossly overestimated his ability to impose his will on reality, probably because he's used to working in environments where it was genuinely easier to do so.

All Musk had to do was take control of Twitter, say “there will be no changes to product or policy until I’ve completed a six-month review period”, then in a month say “like the rest of the tech sector, we’re facing a downturn, need to make tough decisions blah blah blah”, lay off 1/3 of the Twitter team, see who struggles from the survivors, give top performers big raises to stay, then do another big round of layoffs in three months when he’s sure he can run the company on 1/3 of the previous team while adjusting for which teams need the most or least culling, then rest and slowly implement the new product.

That would require him not being a psychopath. Musk might be a brilliant entrepreneur, but he has a gaping deficit of empathy.

That said, it’s hard for some fans to reconcile the fact that Musk is a great businessman with the fact that he’s also often impulsive and reckless and perfectly capable of really fucking things up for himself. At Tesla and SpaceX, he’s had great teams behind him that have been with him for many years. That isn’t necessarily the case here.

Look at the results though. Space-x want from being a prototype to a thriving space company. Same for Tesla. Odds are he will succeed with Twitter if history is any guide . Steve jobs and Bill Gates were famously hotheaded but delivered results too.

But Elon never mismanaged his other companies to this degree, for whatever reason. I don't recall ever seeing him publicly squabbling with Tesla employees, issuing ultimatums, recklessly making huge changes, micromanaging things he doesn't understand, etc. It seems to me like either he is intentionally tanking twitter, or has suffered some kind of head injury recently causing him to lose all executive function.

You could run Twitter with 1500 people instead of 7000 (as I’ve argued many times, tech hiring sprees have bloated every big tech business), but you want those 1500 people to be the good ones, you want them to be able to take over for their fired coworkers, and you want them to be distributed so that at least some of the survivors are in all the critical teams you need with the accumulated knowledge to keep the ship moving.

The problem is that in the rocket and electric car businesses, you can 'exploit' highly motivated talent because some huge proportion of aerospace engineers was raised on a steady diet of science fiction and October Sky. People are willing to do the crushing work weeks if they believe that their work is lifting humanity to the stars and enabling the first interplanetary colony in ways that they just won't to make sure MAGA/progressives can snipe at each other with meaningless, puerile gotchas. People at twitter are there for the paycheck, people at SpaceX are there for the dream.

Pretty ironic to hear someone arguing a truly free speech platform—which Musk explicitly says is his most important goal with Twitter—is not that meaningful...on a website that had to be created because of fears of free speech limitations on the social media website from whence it escaped.

A "truly free speech platform" is one of the most-tried ideas on the Internet and it ends the same way every time. To pull it off, you'd need to know at least a little bit about social dynamics and moderation, which Elon isn't doing a good job of demonstrating.

Yeah, he's better at rockets than NASA, but he'll fail at being a Reddit mod. Sure.

It's not that meaningful to the people currently working at Twitter. There might be some silent majority of anarchist/libertarian/hacker-ethos programmers out there who'll jump to do twice the work as their peers in the name of free speech, but any "can't stop the signal" programmers probably weren't already working in the How To Stop The Signal department at Twitter when Musk bought it.

Yes! Don't underestimate the culture and how attracts/rejects people, especially in a company that's been around for years.

Anecdotally, big darling companies like Twitter employ very few hacker-ethos-type people. If they do, they're mostly siloed into doing expert work that's quite disconnected from the rest of the organization. Again, anecdotally, the silent majority seem to be folks who enjoy the high income and the upper-middle class life it affords them: raising kids, walking their dog, soldering expensive custom keyboards, etc. The loud minority are very often strong left of center folks, especially in a place like CA, who are always advocating for eg. renaming the "master" branch to "main" because of how offensive the former is.

(Again) Anecdotally, at one of my jobs, the number of people who identified them as lightly hacker-ethos-aligned (eg. pgp keysigning party, linux user, 2600 reader, etc.) number at most two dozen in a trendy, CA-based place that, at the time, boasted 12000 engineers. I suspect more strongly aligned folk just avoid Big Co. altogether.

It's not that meaningful to the people currently working at Twitter.

He was able to rid himself of 90% of them, so it's sort of immaterial.

Somewhat related...

What's interesting to me is all the flack he's getting about giving people the option to either (A) "get hardcore" and work a lot to make Twitter awesome or (B) quit and get severance.

We've gotten a bit nutty about "work-life" balance. Some people don't want that. They like to work a lot. It's not like Musk is enslaving people and forcing them to do manual labor for god's sake. They get to choose to work at a sweet ass campus doing shit they love for great pay.

I'm very certain Musk, literally one of the most recognizable people in the world, can find the people he needs to run a lean & mean ship at Twitter, and make it awesome. Because plenty of people would LOVE to work 60-80 hours a week on a free speech challenge like Twitter, when it is well-positioned to be The Center of the Internet (to the extent is isn't already).

Call me a cynic, but I'm familiar with enough people who do essentially nothing while getting paid (well) for it that I can empathize a lot with Musk here. In my career, I've seen departments with 20 people handling the workload of 2 or 3, and departments that were 90% automated years ago...but the fog of bureaucracy allowed 10 people to just draw a paycheck for standing around and watching a system.

Musk doesn't want dead weight, as no business owner does.

'Meaningful' in this context is subjective. There are plenty of occupations and causes that are critical to humanity that still don't inspire enough fervor in their adherents to make them work 60 work weeks for below-market wages (i.e. graduate school, or at least it was once upon a time), regardless of how many websites are created due to fears of free speech limitations.

I'd be willing to bet that the current workforce isn't willing to work 60 hour weeks in the name of free speech. Whether there's enough people out there that care who will fill the gap after they leave remains to be seen, in addition to whether those people can keep the faith when their ideals collide with the reality of running a social media platform.

I'll bet he'll find people without much problem.

And I'll bet he can run a better Twitter with 10% of the staff.

I have to disagree. A lot of people also care about the information environment. Just as much as people care about going to mars. I don’t want 1984 America with a fb-twitter-Liz Cheney aligned informational environment. I would work extremely hard to prevent that.

Not my core talent but I dropped a resume to twitter a few weeks after he took over. This is a big issue to me. And there are probably others here with more specific talents that care about free speech who should also consider working for twitter.

Perhaps I should have specified that the current workforce is there for the paycheck, not the dream. Good luck if you end up there.

People at twitter are there for the paycheck,

Or worse, they're there for the kind of activism musk distinctly opposes.

All of the skilled twitter programmers I knew of online (from before elon) rom their public accomplishments/projects/writing/social media have left, as of now. And their posts indicate most of the skilled people they knew within twitter have left too. Ofc anecdote, idk anything internally, easily could be wrong, etc

How many unskilled Twitter programmers do you know?

If you don't know any, this may just be a base rate fallacy; if some percentage of programmers have left, and you only know skilled ones, of course all the ones you know who left have been skilled.

I mean skilled as in 'significantly above the average faang programmer'. I'm not claiming he's firing skilled people more than unskilled people, but you'd want to keep most of them.

At the time of the original offer I remember there being lots of thinking that this is a brilliant masterplan on the part of Musk on /r/themotte (for the record I was skeptical). That we're into what very much looks like an implosion of Twitter's operations and people are still convinced this is some 1000 iq maneuvering makes me think Musk's cult of personality has a stronger grip around here than I figured. Previously I figured from experience that the typical "Musk-bro" was more a finance type.

Of course there remains an outside shot it gets all turned around, and that the problems with Twitter here are very minor and being blown out of proportion by people who are hostile to Musk and the takeover. But I think there's a good amount of fire behind this smoke.

The man waived his right to due diligence, then started publicly griping about stuff a prospective buy-side would review… during due diligence. Dog that caught the car, on this one.

and then fired the c-suite on the first day for cause

these sorts of things are common in acquisitions

this is all part of the dance, just like his bucking in the chancery court to get Twitter to make statements in response

I used to work M&A. No, waiving due diligence is the opposite of common. There are multiple SaaS providers that offer VDRs for due diligence because exceedingly rare is the transaction that exempts it.

Waiving due diligence then stating conditions within a target company pose enough of a concern you might not want to complete your transaction doesn’t work. The target can hammer you in court. Musk completed the purchase, predictably, just before the judge’s imposed deadline of heading to trial.

Twitter’s board had a responsibility to maximize shareholder value, not make blue checks happy after the sale. Musk was on the hook to (1) pay over the market share price to take Twitter private, or (2) pay Twitter a huge sum in penalties for not completing the deal. At that point, Musk had no leverage over Twitter’s board because either outcome was a win for shareholders.

Yeah, which firm?

I didn't write waiving due diligence is common, I wrote "these sorts of things," i.e., publicly whining, threatening to go to court, going to court, and all other such things because each of them can have a benefit/cost to either party.

edit: wow you made a bunch of edits after I responded

which actions?

public comments? legal threats? court?

More comments

Yeah, which firm?

Ah, yes, I’ll just post my CV to this forum where anonymous accounts debate whether or not there are cabals of Jews that have disproportionate power in American society.

And yes, that sort of brinksmanship can have benefits. But given Musk signed away DD, assumed responsibility for mollifying any federal regulators and agreed to sizable penalties for backing out in his offer to purchase, I’m all ears as to what you think those were for Musk. Because in this case there was no incentive for concessions from Twitter’s board.

wow, you made a bunch of edits to your previous comment after I responded

Ah, yes, I’ll just post my CV

oh yes, saying you worked at CBRE is basically you posting your full name and home address to the internet

this is why I typically just roll my eyes when someone tries to capture some sort of authority with a claim about life experience which isn't immediately obvious from their comments; if you don't want to post a CV, don't attempt to use it to get some sort of air of authority

it's downright goofy someone who claims to have experience in M&A would write your comments because it has no recognition that public comments, legal threats, refusals, lawsuits, etc., are common in M&A, no demonstration of the terminology normally used in these agreements, and no discussions whatsoever in the costs or benefits of any of these tactics

all of these tactics can and are part of the dance and each of them has costs and benefits to accomplish some purpose, even as simple as stalling for time

instead you simply assume Musk is the dog who caught the bumper and "predictably" would close the deal which is why you bought Twitter stock at $36 knowing it would be bought for $55 a couple months later, right?

At that point, Musk had no leverage over Twitter’s board because either outcome was a win for shareholders.

Why start the story in the middle of the chancery case? Everyone seems to gloss over the timeline in favor of "current thing" hottakes.

Musk semi-secretly buys large stake in twitter over the period of a month. Twitter board freaks out and tells him no way and then engages in a bunch of anti-shareholder behavior in order to stave off Musk. Musk then makes a proposal. Twitter refuses the offer. Corporate lawyers start scrambling to put together a shareholder lawsuit. Twitter agrees to proposal. Musk claims he doesn't want to buy the company anymore due to fraud. Twitter sues him in Chancery Court to force the deal. Musk completes the deal.

We went from Twitter willing to fuck over shareholders to stop takeover to Twitter suing Musk to force him to take the company over and then Musk buying the company he made a no due diligence buyout agreement with and your hot take is he's just been bumbling along? Huh, okay.

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Previously I figured from experience that the typical "Musk-bro" was more a finance type.

It's more the "I fucking love science!" type.

I tend to agree Musk is hardly a good manager, but when it comes to people commenting on how he runs Twitter, we're in a "unstoppable force meets an immovable object" situation. The Cult of Musk really isn't any more clueless than an average journalist.

People trust Musk because he has been instrumental in creating three huge businesses (and another that would be impressive for most people). There is a track record here. Either musk is the luckiest man in the history of the world or he has business chops in the top 1

% of the 1%.

I'm not sure why it can't be a mixture of skill and chops, or why chops in rocket building would necessarily transfer to social media, or why a talented person can't make big mistakes. It's equally plausible to me that Elon Musk's ego has swollen to the point where he thinks he can run Twitter with him +50 people, as it is that he really can run Twitter with him +50 people.

Past performance doesn’t guarantee future success but it does provide some degree of confidence. Ego could be a problem. Mistakes could be a problem. But Musk has helped build…online payment platform, telecommunication network, rocket company, a car company, and a tunneling company.

These are rather disparate things suggesting his skill isn’t domain limited.

I think I’ll trust him (when he has a lot of inside info we don’t) over a random internet poster.

From a technical standpoint is running Twitter on 50 people so implausible? I imagine new features would be released very slowly, but I think that's enough to maintain the site, so long as moderation is relaxed quite a bit and mostly delegated to AI.

They have their own datacenters, at least three of them, with hundreds of thousands of servers. 50 people would barely be enough to do the hands-on work of managing one datacenter.

Just swapping failed hard drives would probably take about two people datacenter. Assume 300k machines, 100k per datacenter, with ten percent of that footprint being machines with lots of disks, let's say thirty disks per machine. AFR for drives that are being constantly hammered as I would expect them to be is about 3%, especially if you try to stretch the lifetime of the drives.

10,000 machines * 30 drives per machine * 3% AFR = 9000 drives per year, or about 24 per day. Let's say each drive swap takes 30 minutes from the point of receiving the ticket, picking up the replacement, performing the swap, and some wiggle room for complications / ticket re-opens.

So an eight hour shift can do about 16 swaps per day. Typically datacenters don't staff drive swappers around the clock, so you need at least two people just for drive swaps.

Those people have no knowledge of how the replacement drives are stocked, someone else needs to do all the ordering of spare parts, and at least one person needs to receive and stock them. So at least three people per datacenter just for drive swaps.

Then someone needs to handle the relationships with Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, etc. If you don't want to be surprised as you roll out new drive models you'll need at least a couple of people whose job is to qualify new drives by abusing them for a few months and running real workloads on them.

And someone needs to handle the OS / software side of the drives. Handling firmware updates, drive settings, all the automation that goes into failure detection, handling replaced drives, investigating problems, etc. That's at least a couple of people.

Someone needs to write nad run the inventory system that cuts tickets and registers spare parts as well, let's say another two people.

We're up to 9 people at the datacenters and 7 people outside. 16 total. We haven't even written the software that's going to be using the drives yet. And this is just for hard disk-based storage, and I'm being extremely conservative. In reality two people is not sustainable for any team that needs to be oncall, you'll burn out quickly if you're oncall half of the time.

I would be pretty surprised if these jobs weren't handled by contractors. I haven't read about any ex Twitter employees talking about how difficult it will be to replace their invaluable hard drive swapping experience.

Drive swappers almost certainly are contractors, but they're still people. The claim I was responding to was about people, and most claims of this sort are also about people.

The distinction between contractors and employees is pretty arbitrary, and makes for impossible to disprove claims. If I can sneak in contractors I could plausibly say that Twitter could be run by one employee (and 10,000 contractors).

I think it's totally plausible from a technical standpoint if those 50 people are talented and hardworking. All the hard stuff for a basic scaled social media platform is a cloud API or open source library these days, and Twitter is past its startup design sprint anyway. A low cost structure would give him a lot of headroom to ignore the problems that his employee bloat is aimed at addressing right now.

The issue is that a 50-person giant social media empire isn't a stable equilibrium. It's similar to why you rarely see charities that spend ~100% of their funds on the cause: if spending a dollar on marketing gets you more than a dollar in increased contributions, then why wouldn't you do that? Likewise if you had a scaled 50-person giant social media empire, then the return of hiring a marginal employee is much greater than the cost.

The issue for Musk specifically is that he needs to pay a billion dollars a year in interest payments for the leverage that he took on in order to acquire Twitter. So he doesn't have the luxury of running the shop at low cost and telling advertisers to take it or leave it.

Since he needs advertisers to pay his interest, he needs to solve a lot of the messy social problems that drove a lot of that employee bloat in the first place. He needs good sales teams. He needs good marketing. He needs good moderation to keep the tone of Twitter consistent with advertisers' brand expectations. He needs giant compliance teams to keep up with the onerous, schizophrenic, internally inconsistent and offensive regulations imposed by the likes of Europe and India. None of those are purely technical problems; they require giant teams of people, and (pre-AGI) they always will. Why? Because they aren't static goals; they're adversarial goals with elements of competition. They're basically a policy market, in the sense that if it could all be automated, advertisers and regulators would have more headroom to increase the onerousness and contradiction of their demands until it couldn't. The only check on advertisers' demands of Twitter is how they compare with other social media platforms in terms of brand safety, and the only check on regulators' demands of Twitter is how onerous their regulations can be before Twitter will go dark in their country (or before the US government initiates WTO actions against them, and no one is betting on Biden's willingness to bail out Elon Musk in the international policy market).

I dunno if he'll pull it off. I suspect he will, but no outcome here will surprise me.

One outcome that particularly wouldn't surprise me is if Musk capitalizes on the chaos to threaten his lenders with bankruptcy, and uses that threat to buy out his debt for 20-50 cents on the dollar. Good luck marketing this debt, guys: no one has ever demonstrated that Twitter can have positive economic value, and a high-profile failure by Elon Musk isn't going to increase anyone's estimation of those odds. Then his cost structure becomes much simpler and he can tell advertisers and foreign regulators to get fucked, the prospect of which at this point I am sure provides him with near-sexual arousal.

Reddit had 30 employees in 2012 and it was a far more complicated application then than twitter is today.

When Instagram was acquired for $1 billion in 2012 it had 13 employees.

Twitter by this point has a lot of technical debt and cruft, so 50 does seems like too few. But less than 1000 seems very doable. One reason that so many people want this to fail is that they're afraid that Musk is right about these workers being worthless.

I didn't say it was implausible. I'm 50/50 on whether running Twitter with 50 people is possible or not. But I don't think it's convincing to appeal to Elon's genius to argue that it proves that it's possible.

Very implausible. Sure, a single person can build a Twitter clone (timeline of Tweets from people you follow) in a weekend, but there's a whole lot more to it than that. Realistically something like Twitter might be doable with 500 engineers (hard to say; not sure of the entire set of features), but you need a whole lot of moderation, marketing, business associates, etc. on top of that if you actually want to make money.

To elaborate, you need people handling identity, authorization, infrastructure, payments, internal tools for CSRs and moderators, customer/business facing tools, third party integrations, APIs, auditability, security, ad placement strategies, site reliability, data stores, build/test/deployment systems. Take any of those away, and you don't really have a viable business. And that doesn't even touch on new feature development (which to be fair hasn't been that important once Twitter found its niche).

There have been a lot of lay offs in the tech space. I’m sure Elon can hire some people. But the truth is Twitter had too much staff for the value it was getting. You need to cut costs make it through a few months and the ad boycott will end.

Unfortunately the ad boycott is likely both ideological and personal (in that a lot of people Elon got rid of were buddies to the ad buyers) and thus is unlikely to end. GroupM's shakedown letter (see bulleted list) demonstrates that.

Meh, it's easy for advertising consortia to dunk on him now, in an economic downturn, when his product relies on brand advertising (i.e. ads that can't measure conversions) and brand advertising is the highest beta of all of the marketing categories. The truth is that their threats are downstream of their extrinsic need to pull back on that category of spending. It's mostly just a demand failure masquerading as a boycott.

Remember all those companies boycotting Facebook? Me neither. Take a look at their latest revenue and you can see it didn't matter.

If Twitter advertising is effective, then there will be plenty of demand from people who like money. The boycott will only matter if it turns out that Twitter advertising didn't work and companies were throwing money at it anyway. Which I accept is possible.

Assuming ads actually generate revenue (who knows) companies ultimate log will pay for ads where there is a large user base.

Not if they have a more important reason than revenue not to.

And the staff it had were entrenched within a culture of censorship and narrative control. The better move would have been to fire most of them except the most essential while building a new Twitter HQ somewhere in rural Texas or something, and then move the whole HQ out of the compromised bay area. I bet that would be a lot cheaper of a building to run than the current one as well. Then you could also make sure the (hopefully minimal) moderation team was staffed by normal people as well, instead of the types that tend to gravitate to SF.

The better move would have been to fire most of them except the most essential while building a new Twitter HQ somewhere in rural Texas or something

Even better move would be do it all before you acquire Twitter, to have ready new management and new staff from day one.

Instead, it looks that Elon learned from Bush's success in Iraq.

1/Take over

2/Fire all management and personnel

3/???

4/Profit!

Elon's actions will lead directly to profits in a way that is easy to understand.

Twitter was bleeding money, losing $1.1 billion in 2020 alone.

They had a $13M meals program that was feeding less than 10% of the staff because no one showed up to HQ. It was costing hundreds of dollars per meal, with more people preparing food than eating it. It's laughably stupid.

My sense is Twitter was hyper-bloated, with ~10x more employees than they needed, so 90% layoffs seem about right. It's a microblogging website that grew to have a bunch of completely superfluous positions with people who literally contributed nothing.

Right-sizing the staff, cutting needless expenses, adding a revenue stream with a re-imagined Twitter Blue, reducing trolls/bots—these are all common sense. The advertisers will come back, as the only metric that matters is user engagement, and it's at an all time high & will continue to grow through 2024 with what will be the most "entertaining" election in U.S. history.

Elon will turn Twitter into the profitable Center of the Internet, and a certain tribe will be pretending the sky is falling the whole time.

#RIPTwitter & #Twitterisdown was trending during the highest engagement period in Twitter's existence. It's the fakest news that's ever been.

As far as I am concerned this is all positve and Elon Musk is a hero. Twitter, as it existed before the acquisition, was a blight on humanity, Musk owning it means it either changes, which given the starting point will likely mean improve. Or it dies, which given the starting point is also an improvement. The gnashing of the teeth from journalists and ex-employees just makes my dick harder.

I used to be neutral on ol' Elon before this, now I like him.

Twitter, as it existed before the acquisition, was a blight on humanity

What was different about twitter than other social media or pre-internet TV/news/radio that makes it such a blight? It does suck, but it's not obvious that the unwashed masses will suddenly become enlightened when given >280 characters

The character limit is actually a big problem because it excludes the possibility of expressing any nuanced thought: twitter consists solely of hot takes because that's pretty much the only thing that can be communicated through twitter. Tweetlongs/twitter threads don't really ameliorate this, the content still needs to be structured into short sentences peppersprayed with hot takes that can be retweeted individually.

And then there's the fact that it trains your attention span to hold only for microscopic amounts of time, it is also uniquely bad in this, no other medium in history trained as short an attention span as twitter.

I think being exposed to that for a sufficiently long enough time will make you retarded, so yes more than 280 characters wouldn't make the masses enlightened but it would at least not cause brain damage to them.

And then there's the likes. You can only like a tweet, you can't downvote. If you don't like something you can either ignore it or respond/retweet, which, because of the response limit is going to be a hot take. So when you are on twitter all you perceive is either the hugbox of likes, anyone that disagrees with you is either invisible to you or a troglodite that responds with a short (and from your point of view stupid) "sick burn".

And then there's the fact that celebrities are on it. People who would normally have curated their public persona to a select few manicured communications (think authors, screenwriters, etc) are now absentmindedly putting all of their imbecillity on display, in fact they are using a medium that amplifies it by forcing all nuance in their thought to be expunged. I think the world is substantially worse because of this.

And then there's the moderation, by applying politically biased moderation twitter has created a false consensus on its platform, which skews the perception of what is common knowledge on anyone that interacts with it.

And finally there's the fact that journalists are on it, which means that journalists are now subjected to the mentally retarding effects of twitter, to the false perception of what is common knowledge. They also come to believe that reporting about tweets from politicians and artists is a valid form of journalism therefore amplifying the damaging effects of twitter to the entire population. And because of this they think that sitting at the computer reading twitter is a valid form of work which means they are exposed to more of twitter and more of its deletereous effects.

No other media that existed before or after twitter is as bad as twitter, 4chan is better, reddit is better, instagram is better, tiktok is better, microfilm is better, vellum is better. Literally the worst possible way to communicate ever made.

The character limit is actually a big problem because it excludes the possibility of expressing any nuanced thought

You can link articles/other long-form content though, and a solid fifth of the articles I read come from twitter links. This gets to my claim that it's more the quality of people - smart people just link stuff & read the links, and dumb people, when they read, do shitty fiction/motivational books/etc.

Attention span doesn't really make sense as a concept tbh, I argued this on reddit but twitter's "attention span" effects aren't at all different than that of casual social conversations, which happen constantly.

I think being exposed to that for a sufficiently long enough time will make you retarded

There are many, many, many competent professionals who perform at their job better than 99.9% of humanity has for all of history, and use twitter very frequently, and have for years or a decade. Programmers are one of those, but many non-programmers do too. This is just plainly and obviously false.

So when you are on twitter all you perceive is either the hugbox of likes, anyone that disagrees with you is either invisible to you or a troglodite that responds with a short (and from your point of view stupid) "sick burn".

I constantly see disagreement on twitter though. Quote tweets, replies, just general posts of the form 'this other guy said X which is bad bc Y'. It's usually not useful disagreement, but it's not like the comments sections of major newspapers, or random peoples' long-form writing, are better.

And then there's the fact that celebrities are on it.

celebrities have always been dumb and said dumb things, that's just not new at all, read a tabloid from the 19xxes or something

And then there's the moderation, by applying politically biased moderation twitter has created a false consensus on its platform

False consensus? Mainstream center-right accounts exist and get tons of engagement though? Even if those were downweighted 50%, hypothetically, there's still not a 'consensus'

They also come to believe that reporting about tweets from politicians and artists is a valid form of journalism

how is this any different than reporting on random out of context statements from long political speeches or conversations, a mainstay of journalism historically?

No other media that existed before or after twitter is as bad as twitter, 4chan is better, reddit is better, instagram is better, tiktok is better, microfilm is better, vellum is better. Literally the worst possible way to communicate ever made.

at least twitter has some complex and intelligent people, tiktok has none of those. what's a single tiktok account comparable to professional discussion among scientists on twitter, or just @thezvi, or even @rapegroyper14?

Twitter is what you get when someone goes "You know the most addictive, para-social, skinner-box elements of Myspace, Facebook, Et Al? what if we made something that optimized for that"

Can you elaborate / post a link that fleshes this out? This is a very widespread claim but I'm not sure how true it is. The 'addictive/parasocial' elements of twitter are - as far as I can tell - tweets having likes, people having follower counts, and tweets being recommended based on likes. Aren't those basic social media features that are legitimately useful?

Other criticisms of twitter are 'the short tweet form means anything subtle can't happen' (sort of true but its not like long-form platform with the same userbase is better), and 'the ui is awful' (kinda true)

Wouldn't they do that on any other social media platform though? And offline? It's not like the NYT newsroom or universities in 1950 were less 'elite sens-makers and narrative crafters jerking themselves in a circle'

I used to be neutral on ol' Elon before this, now I like him.

I'm in the very same boat. Before this whole Twitter fiasco I thought he was a bit of a kook, and now he's a kook I find myself actively cheering on.

What ultimately matters to me is that Twitter ceases to be a propaganda tool for progressives. The worst case scenario here is that Twitter neither changes nor collapses and continues down the very same path it was on before Musk's takeover.

I'm torn. I'm no fan of Musk, and I think he may well run Twitter into the ground, but the combination of handwringing about 'he's destroying Twitter which is so important for fighting fake news and those fascist conservative types' and gloating about 'nobody likes or respects him, he's a fascist idiot who is pro-Putin' from people who are declaring they are going to quit their Hugely Important Twitter Jobs and supporters and followers of same, have made me cheer him on.

I honestly don't think the world would be a worse place if Twitter went the way of MySpace or Vine. If Musk tears it down but can't put it back together again, well so it goes.

If Twitter dies, it will simply leave a Twitter-shaped hole in the world, which will be quickly filled in by something else.

It's not like getting rid of Twitter will get rid of progressives that want to proselytize their values on the rest of the world, any more than getting rid of 4Chan or KiwiFarms magically causes edgy right-wingers to evaporate.

Twitter wasn't a tool for progressives to evangelize to others - it was a tool for them to evangelize to themselves, which is just as dangerous.

And also a place for hate mobs to gather and cancel people who fell under their gaze. Unequal enforcement meant that progressive mobs were tolerated much more than conservative ones. This unequal enforcement seems unlikely to continue under Musk.

If Twitter dies then it is because TPTB want it to die. There's an ADL-sponsored advertiser boycott going on right now, for one.

The fact of the matter is that Twitter doesn't need as many people as it had. Many of those employees had "narrative control" functions. Some of the Japanese users noted that when the mass firings began, suddenly all the trending topics were things like manga or video games rather than politics which is what it was before. Thereby suggesting that Twitter employees had a "steering function".

That's the crux of this entire affair. Twitter wasn't a free platform, it was used as a propaganda vehicle by powerful establishment interests. A mass firing of these "narrative control" workers is potentially dangerous to the regimes, because free speech is now seen as a threat to their power. It is the same reason why Julian Assange had to be taken down.

It is absolutely possible that Elon kills Twitter. He's moving fast and breaking things. He's thinking different. He's remembering to not be evil. Et cetera. I think most of the posts like this are praying on his downfall. You're hating. You're not just sitting back and seeing what happens. You don't like Elon and you hope he fails. I think this energy is distorting the picture of what is actually going on at Twitter.

Now, I'm not a fan of Elon, but I'm not praying on his downfall. I'm interested to see how lean he can make Twitter. It might be too much too fast, he might fuck it up in any number of ways. He's already fucked up his Blue rollout. But you have to admit, he has a way of turning Ls into Ws or Ts (ties). Someone like him who's been in the game for this long doing what he's been doing doesn't survive on luck alone. He's got skills, just not the one he advertises or would like people to think he has.

All in all, I'd be happy if he were to prove the haters, the libs, and Silicon Valley wrong, and make them eat their words, because I think they're scared he might make them. It's really reminiscent of 2015.

You don't like Elon and you hope he fails

"outgroup is entirely motivated by their personal hatred of all that is good" is, even if kinda true, never entirely true, nor a useful contribution if not well explained!

A while ago I was arguing here that the blue checkmark plan, as stated then, made no sense and would fail. I got some pushback, most of which was argued for as opposed to 'its bc u hate beauty and greatness', but ... it was implemented, it failed, it increased impersonation and didn't stop spam, and the feature was removed because it failed. (an internal twitter doc prepared before the launch, that elon didn't listen to, made similar claims) That's evidence that it's not useful to claim "I don't like elon and hope that he fails" applies to my posts, and likely others arguing against him here!

Is OP your alt or something? I'm not talking about you, or anyone, specifically. If you want to say Elon has no haters, you're wrong. People DO want him to fail because he's the outgroup. Even though they LOVE Twitter, they'd rather see it burn to the ground if they can blame it on someone they don't like. This is a REAL and currently RELEVANT part of human nature that is playing out before our eyes as the Twitter situation unfolds.

I didn't see your post about Blue. I would have agreed with you. When I say I'm not a fan of Elon, I mean it. I don't think he represents all that is Beautiful And Great. I think he's kind an idiot (-savant). But the commentary I'm seeing around this happening is hilariously biased! It's funny how much hatred the man inspires, and the people hating seem to be completely unaware that they're hating. This isn't a recipe for good prediction making. They're not giving him the respect he's due for wheeling and dealing, scamming and ramming his way through the business, media, and legal systems of America.

you're kinda right, and I think it's happening on both sides. And not in a 'hurr both side r the same and bad' sense, but a - wow, almost everyone on social media who has an opinion on this can be perfectly divided into "previously liked musk/right wing-ish/thinks twitter is fine and musk is doing good" and "previously disliked musk/left wing-ish/thinks twitter is crashing hard and musk is doing awful". I'm actually surprised at how much that's true.

Even then though, just saying 'it's because u hate musk' isn't enough, there are more complex causes even in cases of obvious and blatant bias.

I think there are three sides. Anti-Musk, Anti-Anti-Musk (me), and Pro-Musk. The third one is virtually silent compared to the other two. And I disagree about this being a complex issue. It's really just friend/enemy.

Honestly, I see this as a win-win situation. Whether Musk succeeds in turning Twitter into something useful or burns it to the ground, a cultural blight will have been nullified.

I like Twitter and think something worse would take its place if it collapsed.

Counterpoint about the bleakness of it. It's probably not the end.

And I'd contend that Twitter is already rather sludge-y, and trying to keep it remotely sane-ish is probably not worth subjecting hundreds of thousands of low-paid people to the worst that humanity has to offer.

So what I'm getting from you and other replies is "trolls/Bad Content never impacted the average user's twitter experience because they're there to read what specific famous people post". I buy that. I guess it's not a big deal until people start posting CSAM and shit, which I guess you might be able to do with a skeleton crew.

Still, then you get people using the site to run harassment campaigns or whatever. Arguably that's what the site is already used for, some people just don't call it that, so whatever.

  1. Musks is the luckiest guy in the world. Heavily benefited from esg etc to give silly valuations to Tesla and can access that cash.

  2. The asshole boss thing actually works when done well. I’ve had them who do nothing. But put pressure on you to figure something out. Actually works to motivate people to do good work.

  3. He’s a winner. He’s always figured things out. While Tesla may be overvalued he’s still made it profitable. Rocket inventiveness was dead before he came along.

  4. He has loyal engineers in Tesla and SpaceX he can use in the situation of mass quitting.

  5. Rockets are not that profitable. He found starlink and what cheap rockets can do for that industry. You just have to trust he will find a profitable business model. Telecommunications are super profitable.

  6. He’s been too red tribe with some bad tweets but a bare bones mode isn’t going to lose red tribe

  7. Social networks are sticky. People won’t want to give up their networks. So even if you lose half people are still going to maintain their other half on twitter for a while

  8. If it seems like twitter is failing then he can buy the debt for Pennie’s on the dollar to maintain control. Then rebuild.

  9. So worst case is he takes the loss on current equity and buys the debt for 3-6 billion. Then rebuilds on red tribe twitter. But that’s worst case. I think stickiness is fairly high in social media so blue tribe probably doesn’t leave.

Social networks are sticky. People won’t want to give up their networks. So even if you lose half people are still going to maintain their other half on twitter for a while

Yeah, people are underestimating this. There's a lot more that goes on Twitter besides political shit-posting. Lots of people have built careers and small fortunes on the backs of their Twitter followings. I was just listening to a podcast about "threadbois" who did just that. Are they going to turn their backs on their 100k followers they've spent years building just because Elon isn't praying to the right gods?

What can he get sued for? Losing money and making a bad investment isn’t illegal.

On going funding is an issue but I’m going to make an assumption at a minimum he can figure out cash flow positive.

But say it’s not super profitable but he wants to maintain control he can lose face with his investors and buy the bank debt cheap. So he would have to put like 6 billion in on the bank debt. For relationship reasons throw the Saudis and Ellison etc some options around a 15 billion valuation.

It’s already a zero. Current financing has 1.4 billion a year in interest costs. There investments are worthless unless he does big things which mitigates the he blew it up.

to the point that Twitter is a mostly worthless husk with a domain name and a low-moat technical product.

Twitter is already a low-moat product, network effects are what keep competitors from replacing it. If the left can come up with a left-wing version of Gab/Truth Social/whatever and actually get people to use it (unlike the right-wing examples I just gave) then Twitter might be in trouble. Otherwise I think it's going to stick around.

If the left can come up with a left-wing version of Gab/Truth Social/whatever

It's probably worth noting that most of them have attempted to migrate to literally that exact thing (various Mastodon instances). I don't think they'll be particularly successful for the same reason that Gab/TS/etc. haven't been successful: there's simply no value-add in reactionary construction. They don't do anything better than Twitter does anyway.

Which is the same problem this place has, but even worse, since at least you can find this place with a Google search- you can't even do that with Mastodon instances at all. Lefty Mastodon even has the purity spiral thing built in because of how vulnerable users are to admin catfights and a de facto globally-enforced blocklist, where Twitter curbed most of the excesses of that approach- so people can't expect the stability they need to build anything good on top.

The future is not federation, it's confederation, and by its inherently freeing nature it thus can neither come from Left nor Right.

Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability

Buy down to 15%,

Still possible but I don't trust most of these claims or believe much in the importance of these roles.

Buy down to 5%, but I think true odds are less than 1%. MySpace still exists. The base rate of a corporate failure of this size in less than 6 months is practically zero. The only way Twitter goes away in 6 months is if there is some massive financial fraud discovered like Enron or FTX. Even then, somebody will buy the IP and run it.

At the risk of nutpicking, there are a large number of users in my personal circles who are exchanging off-site contact information (uh, and nudes) under the assumption that the site or their account won't be accessible in days. Guys with SRE experience are talking about the site falling over in ways that can't be brought up. Other people have been encouraging everyone to grab data dumps of their account.

I'm exceptionally skeptical of these arguments, but I also haven't worked anywhere near those scale of systems.

Exchanging off-site contact information is entirely reasonable even if there's a 2% chance of it going down, because they have a large number of many-year-long friendships/acquaintances they don't want to lose contact with, and sharing contacts is a low-cost way to avoid a low-chance, high-cost outcome.

Obviously some of them are claiming it's >50% gonna die forever, which is premature, as well as probably claiming the sorts of glitches that've happened for the past five years as evidence twitter is decaying.

But the people who work in twitter SRE that I've followed say there's a decent chance bad things happen, but that twitter >80% won't die permanently

While it is certainly possible for distributed systems to be fragile in the way he describes -- the most famous example is not software but the US power grid pre-1965 -- it is not necessary. I know of large distributed systems which are not.

Yeah, 80% is way too high. You could definitely run Twitter with less than 1000 people, but that doesn’t mean you can walk in, cut 6000/7000 jobs in the first month, and expect things to work.

I do fully expect some things to break, but in the way that one would expect things to break from Y2K. Musk doesn't need to be some kind of super CEO to triage engineers to the critical infrastructure and even something catastrophic like the whole site going down for 24 hours wouldn't kill the thing.

Cato the Elder, famous for the saying "Carthago delenda est," actually ended up a bitter rival of Scipio Africanus, who actually accomplished it.

I have said "Twitter delenda est" and I won't be as picky as Cato about how it is done. Now, I know that Twitter fills a niche, and I have no expectation that what fills it next will be better, but for now, I will take it.

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Yep, Twitter delenda est. This is great news as far as I'm concerned. It won't last, as you noted - but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

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This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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