Elon Musk is a nice chap

[tom66]

I'm no expert in large software projects, but I agree - is there a need for thousands of software engineers now at Twitter? Isn't it basically working "OK"? As you said, it's basically simple messaging like this forum. Does this forum need many software engineers behind it? No. It works for the most part.

Sure a forum like this one (SMF) put out updates, but I've used forums (like SMF) that were many years old versions and they were still working OK. Again, yes they had security issues and tweaks that should have been updated by the administrators, but they were runnning OK. I mean - how many serious bugs are there in the Twitter code that need a staff of 1000s of engineers to keep the old crippled thing going?

Looking at the list linked in my prior post, there are lots of data scientists and ML engineers.  Presumably you want to improve search and moderation with such engineers, so even if there appears to be little material change to 'tweeting', the platform itself needs constant backend engineering.  Maybe Elon's opinion is, "who cares? I'm going to let everyone on the platform, no matter what."  The problem is, it might be abandoned by advertisers if he does that, and then there is no business at all.  It'll be a bit of a reckoning in tech if this happens I suspect, because Facebook/Meta,   YouTube,  and other platforms have spent a lot of money on copyright detection & moderation ... all of which is 'dead weight' if your advertisers don't care about it in the long run. 

[Bud]

Do they own or rent the server and network infrastructure? If it is their own servers they need people for hardware deployment, maintenance and support. Plus in any case people for network security, data security, backups, digital certificates, Regulatory compliance, data and security architects, internal Audit staff, etc.

[PlainName]

Does this forum need many software engineers behind it? No. It works for the most part.

A better comparison would be the SMF project, not a single forum using it. After all, it takes only one user to maintain a Windows setup but I bet Microsoft have more than a couple of developers behind that user. The scale of SMF isn't clear, but with a board of directors with seven members, I think it's probably not a one-man band.

SMF don't keep a large number of high-availability servers running 24/7/365. Ther Twitter front end (i.e. what the user sees) is only part of it. There will be internal applications behind the scenes looking after systems, monitoring them, providing resources to developers, etc. The front end is probably just the tip of an iceberg.

[coppice]

The front end is probably just the tip of an iceberg.

The front end doesn't serve the customers, so its obviously not where the bulk of the effort would be put. The needs of actual customers - advertisers and data buyers - will be where most effort was put.

[Stray Electron]

Going by that logic, if you would Not paid off your loan in time, or in extreme case you did not pay it off at all, say because you became bankrupt,  your credit score would improve.

Right?

   No, Wrong.  There is no completely linear relationship between making your payments on time, paying off your debts on time or anything else that I can see.  The credit scoring companies seem to rely on a lot of factors, including how much money you make, how long you've had your job, where you live and how much other debts you already have, and only GOD knows what else!  Having too little outstanding debt WILL hurt your credit score and not help it. 

    My credit score is high but not nearly a top score, simply because I don't borrow money. I have several CCs and they're paid in full every month and my home mortgage was paid in full years ahead of schedule and I pay cash for all of my cars and I have for years. The same when I need a new roof or other large expenses, they're always paid in full at the time.  I haven't financed anything since I bought a new truck in 1986.  In recent years I've made two good size home improvement projects, both in excess of $25,000 each and I paid for both in cash but my credit score still isn't prefect.   I used to not give a flip hat my credit score was since I wasn't going to borrow money but in the last few years, insurance companies and even potential employers have started looking at credit scores and using those as a basis for charging higher fees or deciding whether or not to hire someone.

   In today's world, understanding credit scores should be taught to everyone in high school. 

[bitwelder]

Do they own or rent the server and network infrastructure? If it is their own servers they need people for hardware deployment, maintenance and support. Plus in any case people for network security, data security, backups, digital certificates, Regulatory compliance, data and security architects, internal Audit staff, etc.

Just yesterday I was reading some Twitter threads by some of their (ex?) engineers saying that they need to have basically all the core equipment in-house, one of the reasons being... network latency, combined with the scale of messaging they need to handle every second.
 

 

[TimFox]

Going by that logic, if you would Not paid off your loan in time, or in extreme case you did not pay it off at all, say because you became bankrupt,  your credit score would improve.

Right?

   No, Wrong.  There is no completely linear relationship between making your payments on time, paying off your debts on time or anything else that I can see.  The credit scoring companies seem to rely on a lot of factors, including how much money you make, how long you've had your job, where you live and how much other debts you already have, and only GOD knows what else!  Having too little outstanding debt WILL hurt your credit score and not help it. 

    My credit score is high but not nearly a top score, simply because I don't borrow money. I have several CCs and they're paid in full every month and my home mortgage was paid in full years ahead of schedule and I pay cash for all of my cars and I have for years. The same when I need a new roof or other large expenses, they're always paid in full at the time.  I haven't financed anything since I bought a new truck in 1986.  In recent years I've made two good size home improvement projects, both in excess of $25,000 each and I paid for both in cash but my credit score still isn't prefect.   I used to not give a flip hat my credit score was since I wasn't going to borrow money but in the last few years, insurance companies and even potential employers have started looking at credit scores and using those as a basis for charging higher fees or deciding whether or not to hire someone.

   In today's world, understanding credit scores should be taught to everyone in high school.

Yes, my situation was similar, except that I took out a zero-interest loan from the car dealer on my last purchase.
There is a difference between algorithm and logic:  after paying off that car loan, I had less debt (like, zero) and more disposable income.
My only debt thereafter was credit card balances, which I payed immediately.

[AVGresponding]

and, sorry for it, Die Antwoord.

I like them!

[james_s]

Do they own or rent the server and network infrastructure? If it is their own servers they need people for hardware deployment, maintenance and support. Plus in any case people for network security, data security, backups, digital certificates, Regulatory compliance, data and security architects, internal Audit staff, etc.

As far as I can tell from what I've found, they have mostly in-house infrastructure. Whether they actually own that or lease it I don't know.

I think we are nearing a good time for somebody to start hitting them with cyberattacks, the chaos and short staffed state of things results in a much better chance for an attack to go unnoticed and take much longer to repair.

[PaulAm]

Saw a report that the copyright infringement monitoring service that automatically takes down copyrighted material is broken.  Somebody posted a Fast and Furious movie in 50 2 minute tweets.  They manually killed the user account after an hour or two but the material was still up, at least for a while.  Probably was in some of those microservice "bloatware" the twit was complaining about (just speculation on my part, I have no inside knowledge).  The cost of failing to prevent copyright infringement can be staggering.

Hard to say which is more entertaining, the twit continuously shooting himself in the foot with monumentally bad decisions, the rush of advertisers leaving, the continuing degradation of the systems or watching the lawyers and prosecutors starting to circle an almost dead corpse.

[Bud]

It is more entertaining to watch some people in this thread posting that the sky is falling.

[AVGresponding]

Don't look up.

[EEVblog]

Hard to say which is more entertaining, the twit continuously shooting himself in the foot with monumentally bad decisions, the rush of advertisers leaving, the continuing degradation of the systems or watching the lawyers and prosecutors starting to circle an almost dead corpse.

I've already taken Chris Gammell up on a public bet that Twitter won't fail. Happy to do that again. He's betting collapsed within two months. I think my money is very safe.

[JohanH]

It is more entertaining to watch some people in this thread posting that the sky is falling.

Well, it already did, for all those people that got fired. Now the app/platform itself probably lives on, in whatever shape if the owner wants to. It's just a messaging platform, it's not the end of the world. There are alternatives, lots of people already using Mastodon (e.g. the infosec community). But for the people that worked at Twitter, it's a tragedy.

[tom66]

Twitter won't collapse, after all, MySpace is *still* a thing.  But, will it prove worth $44 billion?  People say don't bet against Elon, he did manage to make both Tesla and SpaceX successful, but I'm not sure his talents extend to social media where PR and reputation are essential (look at RoboZuck's testimony to Congress).  It'll probably still be around in 10 years, but I have less faith it will be at least as popular as it is now.

[Psi]

My beat is that 1 year from now twitter will be quite different to pre-Elon times.
Its features will have changed quite a bit and people will use it a little differently to how its used now.
But in general it will still be just as popular. And it will be profitable.

[Black Phoenix]

I invise a Wechat kinda app, and as Dave says, if they add video a lá YouTube then it's done.

[coppice]

Twitter won't collapse, after all, MySpace is *still* a thing.  But, will it prove worth $44 billion?  People say don't bet against Elon, he did manage to make both Tesla and SpaceX successful, but I'm not sure his talents extend to social media where PR and reputation are essential (look at RoboZuck's testimony to Congress).  It'll probably still be around in 10 years, but I have less faith it will be at least as popular as it is now.

When making a bet like this its important to distinguish between collapse as in sink to irrelevancy and collapse as in actually wind up completely, never to return. A huge number of businesses you might think died years ago still exist as skeletons clinging on, often through a series of litigation activities that just won't go away.

[james_s]

I've already taken Chris Gammell up on a public bet that Twitter won't fail. Happy to do that again. He's betting collapsed within two months. I think my money is very safe.

I'm thinking it will be more like 2 years before the carcass is sold off for peanuts in much the same fashion as Myspace. I suspect rather than a total collapse it will be a series of smaller outages and overall flakiness. The biggest deciding factor is whether or not somebody launches a similar service, until now there has been little reason for the overwhelmingly left leaning tech industry to do that when they already had a very left leaning Twitter, now they have motivation. A lot will also hinge on what advertisers do, a large number of them pulled out which resulted in a shift from being profitable though barely to losing millions a day. Whether they come back or not depends on how much public drama keeps occurring, what sort of content ends up dominating the service and the overall state of the economy.

[james_s]

When making a bet like this its important to distinguish between collapse as in sink to irrelevancy and collapse as in actually wind up completely, never to return. A huge number of businesses you might think died years ago still exist as skeletons clinging on, often through a series of litigation activities that just won't go away.

I worked at a tech startup in 2004, I was one of the very last of the engineering staff to be laid off in early 2005, the company continued to exist as a CEO, a lawyer, a couple of executives and whatever else was the bare minimum to call it a corporate. The website remained up as though nothing had changed for at least 5 years after that, and the kept printing money by selling stock which even within a few months of me departing had dropped so far that scientific notation was useful to denote the price.

Myspace is still around apparently, I don't know how, I haven't known anyone that uses it in years. Yahoo is another tech zombie that has been on life support for a decade or so. I wonder how many others there are.

[SiliconWizard]

I invise a Wechat kinda app, and as Dave says, if they add video a lá YouTube then it's done.

That's what I said Musk was planning, a few days ago.
Anyone who thinks he invested $44 billion to just get rid of his money is a fool. That's the GDP of a small country.
You may not like him or what he does, but do you really think he is that much of an idiot?

Social networks are a goldmine these days and Facebook/Meta is dying. Twitter has a giant highway ahead.

And I still don't get the hystery about it all.

[wraper]

[james_s]

I invise a Wechat kinda app, and as Dave says, if they add video a lá YouTube then it's done.

That's what I said Musk was planning, a few days ago.
Anyone who thinks he invested $44 billion to just get rid of his money is a fool. That's the GDP of a small country.
You may not like him or what he does, but do you really think he is that much of an idiot?

Social networks are a goldmine these days and Facebook/Meta is dying. Twitter has a giant highway ahead.

And I still don't get the hystery about it all.

I don't think he deliberately spent $44b just to sink it, but I think it was an impulsive purchase after he got ticked off at the way they were censoring things. He tried to back out of buying it but was effectively forced to go through with it. I don't really think he thought things through or understands that particular industry or the customers they serve. The way he has been flailing with the blue check mark debacle suggests he doesn't really know what he's doing and is behaving impulsively.

Facebook is showing no signs of dying, although I kind of wish it would go away. The whole metaverse thing was a flop and is going nowhere but the core service they offer is alive and well.

[wraper]

I don't think he deliberately spent $44b just to sink it, but I think it was an impulsive purchase after he got ticked off at the way they were censoring things. He tried to back out of buying it but was effectively forced to go through with it. I don't really think he thought things through or understands that particular industry or the customers they serve. The way he has been flailing with the blue check mark debacle suggests he doesn't really know what he's doing and is behaving impulsively.

Whatever anyone may think, currently Twitter has more active users than ever before Elon.

[james_s]

Whatever anyone may think, currently Twitter has more active users than ever before Elon.

According to who? And how many of those are actual users rather than bots or trolls? The metric that matters of course is not really active users but revenue, and currently ad spend has fallen off a cliff. I suspect that will rebound to some degree once the outrage and hype wears off but I'm skeptical that it will ever fully recover, especially since the overall economy is cooling. The company I work for is involved in advertising and our revenue is way down.