Twitter, Threads, and the misunderstood nature of engineering
Twitter, Threads, and the misunderstood nature of engineering
Complex internet services fail in interesting ways as they grow in size and complexity. Twitter's recent issues show how failures emerge slowly over time as relationships between components degrade. Meta's quick launch of Threads demonstrates how platform investments can compound over time, allowing them to quickly build on existing infrastructure and expertise. While layoffs may be needed, companies must be strategic to maintain what matters most - the ability to navigate complex systems and deliver value. Twitter's inability to ship new features shows they have lost this expertise, while Threads may out-execute them due to Meta's platform advantages. The case of Twitter and Threads provides a lesson for companies on who they want to be during times of optimization.
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This is a shitty take. Twitter ran perfectly fine before Musk took it over.
Turns out if you don't pay your hosting bills, or your office building bills, fire most of your engineers (after annoying them with bullshit) and making rash decisions without consulting people with technical know-how your service goes to shit.
Musk was stupid enough to DDOS his own service because he doesn't understand it. Blocking public access to tweets while having tweets embedded in millions of websites turned out to be a really bad idea. Simply because Twitter engineers always expected Tweets to be publicly available, so they kept retrying to fetch the data. There's probably a hundred+ developers at Twitter who could have told Musk that little tidbit.
This is 100% on the egomaniacal billionaire and has nothing to do with the technology.
Jesus, be more antagonistic. OP puts the blame on Elon too: "while layoffs may be necessary...", "twitter has lost this expertise."
Pretty clueless to start with "this is a shitty take" then proceed to express the same general idea in simpler terms.
It's also a shitty take because it hypes up Meta. Which basically took Instagram (handling billions of users posting text, images and videos) and creating Threads by turning images and video off. It's the same user accounts too.
That's like Google creating YouTweet by taking their YouTube platform and reducing it to video comments only. Then praising them that they managed to launch a text based service in 2023.
Why not actually talk about Mastodon instead?
Because OP posted about a business lesson.
It only "hypes up" Meta by using it as a contrast to demonstrate how Elon shat the bed.
Maybe stop calling it a shitty take? You clearly don't understand it.
I don't want to fight though, I won't be responding here again.
Twitter was mostly fine before, because it was before Elon added tons of debt to it through buying it. Now they have much more pressure to generate profit just to pay off interest on those loans.