Regardless of your opinion on Elon, it's simply too early to conclude that this is "likely" to happen, or that all those people will stop using it.

For those old enough to remember, major social media platform changes have happened and users have sworn that it was (effectively) the end. Sometimes they are right: see new Digg causing a mass Reddit migration, or banning adult content on Tumblr, turning a dying platform into a dead one. Sometimes they are incredibly wrong: see new Reddit[0], or, amusingly, people who claimed that Facebook switching to an algorithmic news feed instead of chronological was the end of the platform. I can't remember how long ago that was, but I imagine Facebook has increased in userbase and value 3 or 4 orders of magnitudes since that change.

[0] Yes, I'm aware old reddit is still accessible, but the vast majority of the userbase is on the mobile website or app.

Do I feel sorry for the people who got layed off? Of course I do! I wouldn't want to be them right now. I feel for them. But the consequences mentioned in this post is completely unreasonable. These are the kinds of points you hear from a depressed person who thinks the world is going to end because all the toilet rolls are suddenly out of stock.

The amount of doomsaying I see everywhere regarding the Musk takeover is baffling. I am no Musk fanboy but this is completely irrational. The fact of the matter is, people don't like change. That's all there is to it. Change automatically makes people cry out.

Here's a scenario for you:

What if the new Twitter is better? What if it isn't the toxic place you expect it to become? What if you are completely wrong? Have you considered that? Here's how I see this situation:

Musk is not an idiot. He must know exactly what he needs to do. This isn't his first rodeo and comments like "running a service of this scale and size is incredibly complex with downtime and uptime and blah blah" is incredibly naive. Musk runs at least 2 companies that require a huge network & availability guarantees. He knows what's needed there.

Twitter is going no where and if you think it'll go down in the coming years, you have a surprise coming your way. I am optimistic because of Musk isn't known to give up. This can fail for sure but I don't think that'll be the end of it.

The next step in my opinion is cutting down on the Twitter codebase. Trimming features. Shutting down unnecessary stuff. They laid off 25% of the workforce so at least 25% of Twitter will be affected. Let's see which parts though. There's a lot of unnecessary junk in there (communities, spaces etc.) that I'll be happy to say goodbye to.

It’s a toxic pit where people with boosted self-importance exchange silly reactions and replies, with no meaningful conversation whatsoever.

> Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop.

Is this true?

Shouldn't giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?

And then there's this idea that Twitter was some great, happy place until the last week. That's simply not true and Twitter hasn't changed in any way whatsoever yet.

What we know so far:

- Twitter will rollout a paid account system where if you pay $8/month your tweets will actually be visible to people and you'll see less ad's. This will ensure bots/scammers have difficulty posting to Twitter because their non-paid posts won't be seen by many people. People are more likely to casually browse Twitter now and people who profit from writing on Twitter will have better engagements.

- Twitter is working on ideas to let users seta threshold for what they want to read/see. If you want a G-rated stream, then you'll be able to do that. For people that get triggered or don't want their ideas challenged then they can mute that much like you can avoid music and movies/media you don't want to be exposed to.

- Twitter fired a lot of staff. Unsure how this pans out. Some people think it was ridiculous to have that many people. Others think it will cause the entire thing to break. No one really knows anything here. I have to assume Elon's team has spent months analyzing what they believe is lean muscle and what is the fat they can cut.

How can people draw these impossibly detailed predictions on its future from these actions? Musk has a history of being bet against and proving the doubters wrong. Anyone there in 2013 when TSLA shipped the first Model S batch knows how much he was hated and bet against then. He has also failed to deliver on some promises. We'll see.

If you don't like twitter stop using it and stop taking "news" about tweets seriously, because they are not serious.

Not saying any of what I spelled out above is what happened. But it is entirely plausible that thousands of jobs across the organization could be cut, and stability and uptime could improve.

One can only hope!

If you don’t have a thick skin like Musk, you must self-censor yourself pretty heavily to avoid backlash and sometimes humiliation. Just liking a controversial tweet or following a problematic account can get you on the bad side of people.

I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving.

For verification it will no longer be a status symbol for anyone and will let Twitter get higher ad rates as they will be pushing to self verified real people. Say pay a higher ad rate for advertising only to verified users.

Elon is taking a big risk here, and I doubt that he truly knows what he is doing.

None of what he is doing with Twitter seems to be rational. The rational thing for him would have been to stay away from Twitter as this is clearly a harmful distraction for his mental health and his other endeavors.

But that does not mean the outcome will be as catastrophic as some are predicting.

One of my hobby horses is pointing out people that bend themselves in knots predicting that Uber will fail tomorrow (still waiting!) because they, personally, _don't_ _like_ Uber. There's a similar phenomenon with Elon Musk. Behold, Elon Musk, the guy who runs a car company and a space rocket company, will be completely stymied by keeping high availability on a website? THAT's the bridge too far that he just won't be able to build a team to solve? This is either extreme self-delusion based on an emotional need OR just an example of a classic web engineer who is too wrapped up in their own world to understand that other hard problems exist.

elon is playing you, everything is fine, he just wants free attention to spread platform news to people without spending $

all the complainers are his new marketing network and it's glorious

How is that different from Stripe layoffs from yesterday? I believe Stripe employees also didn't know that they will be laid off, and they got similar compensation to what Twitter employees got.

Slightly ironic that they're employed by social networks. Said tongue in cheek because these are people with livelihoods and looking after families.

There are others that are concerned with big tech in general and its role that have been marginalised in mainstream news. Is there actually any pioneer in these companies that thinks social media on a global scale can work for good, apart from Elon Musk, apparently?

The whole centralisation of the net was a problem in the first place.

Elon has owned Twiter for less than a week. How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure? How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?

Nail on the head for what really bothers me. None of this (or the Trump/Freedom/Truth Social) opinions comprehend the fundamental concepts behind free speech. At best, they're ignorant, at worst, they've co-opted the concept to wield it against those whose speech they don't like.

Musk’s initial Twitter takeover talk was met with general opprobrium, to put it mildly. I must have read more than one take that it was a threat to democracy itself.

Then, after a stock market downturn, and when the Twitter acquisition looked more like an impulsive decision that Musk might regret, the prevailing mood was gleeful. He was stuck with a white elephant. Schadenfreude. And since he clearly no longer wanted it, the consensus now he was legally and morally obligated to buy. Twitter itself demanded it. They weren’t going to let him weasel out of that one.

Now that he seems to have accepted his obligation and the sale has gone through, we’re back to opprobrium.

It’s callous to laugh when so many people have lost their livelihoods (although I’m confident any former Twitter employee has plenty of employment options). But the commentariat consistently outdoes what a satirist could invent.

Twitter wasn't profitable and probably was never going to be. Those tweeting will probably lead healthier and more productive lives doing other things. Those consuming content may have to actually read substacks, blog posts, reddit posts and other means of delivering content that are less a knife fight, and more a reasoned argument.

Twitter was rarely the Budapest cafe. It was more the favala rival gang war. If it dies at Elon's hands then its another boon to society, along with electric vehicles and comparatively cheap and reuseable space flight.

Giant tech companies do obsess about reducing the need for human intervention. Teams in my org at AWS kept track of failures/intervention rates per thousand instances. If it gets too high, it means you're spending too much engineering effort resolving on-call issues and need to fix it.

PagerDuty is a multi billion dollar company for a reason, and they're not even the only company doing what they do.

I don't think it's relevant if one has worked in a giant company to understand how bad on call can be, every engineer knows that. I personally assume on-call is much worse/harder/nerve wracking in bigger companies

They do. You automate recovery for all the failure modes your system has encountered. Then the system promptly fails in a new way you've never seen before.

Often because some totally different part of the system fails when scaling to new levels.

For example, one day SRE got alerted that a bunch of expensive accelerators were unexpectedly shutting down and not restarting production. SRE has to reach out in this case to the SWEs who build/designed the system to ask some clarifying questions. Together, the SREs and SWEs form a series of hypotheses about the cause, ultimately discovering an entirely unanticipated failure mode.

I think I'm one of the few people in the world who has attached a $100K oscilloscope to the voltage regulator on a machine learning accelerator to debug why a specific training job that did a series of convolutions at a highly specific rate would cause a DC-DC regulator to act like an AC source. It took far, far longer to write and deploy the rule that detected this problem in prod than it took us to identify the problem and stop the killer job.

The general philosophy at these orgs is that the same failures should never happen _again_. So you build automation and safeguards protecting the system from the failure modes you know.

However, any complex system will have failure modes you don't know. There might be new software, new features, new APIs etc. going out that interact in complex ways. So complex systems will fail in very interesting ways. So the general philosophy in operating these systems is:

1. First get the system back into a state in which the problem is mitigated. 2. Apply some short term hacks, rollback any suspicious recent changes. 3. Have someone go a bit deeper and try to root cause what caused the failure, have a discussion about it with impacted teams (often called a postmortem) and come up with long term fixes that reduces or eliminates the root cause from happening again.

The companies where it was not true, was a pleasure to work in. The management, from C-suits downwards knew what they were doing. In the others, it was a total chaos.

Of course, if everything is fixed with duct tape, you need firemen ready to act. If everything is solid and robust, there can be small outages, but nothing too critical.

That's bad for him and so far it seems bad for Twitter, but it was good for the shareholders, and it's good generally that contracts get enforced.

Could be part of a pump of the stock. Something he's done in the past, see FSD,coast to coast trip with no driver, battery swaps, the Cybertruck roadster and Semi, whatever that robot was,4680 batteries..........

In the end, he bought Twitter without being forced to, because he probably saw he was going to lose in court if he kept up with trying to get out of his binding agreement.

This is why a person needs to understand the contracts they sign. If you don't have an out, you can't change your mind. If you can just change your mind to get out of a binding contract, then it's not a binding contract.

Separately, I'm not making any comments about Twitter employees and their claims against the business, that's a completely separate topic.

And he does own Twitter, yes. Everyone is just laughing at him spending billions of dollars to destroy something due to a problem he created. It just also sucks for the people involved being hurt by a billionaires tantrum.

The employees do have power, they could refuse to work en-masse and he can find out how hard or easy it is to hire a completely new crew. But I'm guessing there's too much internal strife and disagreement for that to happen.

Plus I have to agree with his assessment - there's not that much to twitter really, it's hardly a massively complicated and sprawling software product. They have too many people. Some of those complaining about being let go have... titles that don't make that much sense for the kind of businsess twitter is. I hate seeing people lose their job. Companies should be a bit more circumspect in their hiring.

Who do you think signed the contract in the first place?

He was only "forced" by the courts once he tried to go back on his contract. Nobody forced him to buy twitter.

The complication here is that his offer was so outlandishly high that he essentially tied Twitter management's hands. If they had not sued him, they would almost certainly be subject to litigation from their own shareholders, because not doing everything to sell at this price would have amounted to corporate mismanagement (In practice, top management gets a lot of leeway from the courts when it comes to maximizing shareholder value, but I can't imagine leaving a 30%+ markup over the current stock price on the table would have passed muster).