> I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea
I don't know how you're relating those two things, but it's funny you should say that. At the time he was firing people, throngs of self-proclaimed "experts" started pontificating about how Twitter was going to implode and crash and burn. There was about two weeks of non-stop posts from various acquaintances on social media about it. They've all been very quiet lately.
Yes, I remember these self-proclaimed experts' timeline for failure being continually pushed out. First it was currently imploding, then a few days, then weeks, then some vague unfalsifiable time in the future, and then they just gave up talking about it.
Makes you wonder if maybe they're the dead weight in their organizations, and therefore are unable to see how much of it is around.
No you've misunderstood. What I actually said was essentially that a lot of experts, aren't. Even ones who really believe they are.
Whether Twitter is doing better or worse really has nothing to do with these predictions that were made. The issue is that you obviously don't need literally hundreds or thousands of engineers to keep Twitter generally running and providing a similar kind of service. It might see a down tick in quality or outages, new features might take longer to be implemented. But that's not the service exploding and grinding to a halt.
I was just musing -- maybe some of the people making these kind of predictions are people who think meetings and work groups and committees and powerpoint slides constitutes useful work as opposed to a (sometimes unavoidable) drag that is to be minimized at all costs.
I understood what you meant, it's not a complex point, and it's not novel or interesting. That you can find people who are wrong about the future is not exciting.
> The issue is that you obviously don't need literally hundreds or thousands of engineers to keep Twitter generally running and providing a similar kind of service. [...] It might see a down tick in quality or outages, new features might take longer to be implemented. But that's not the service exploding and grinding to a halt.
1. That is not a "similar kind of service", it's worse service.
2. Those aren't the only things that are happening. Normal people are finding out that "the service" is more than 240 character text values (even if HN engineers disagree).
Spaces "coincidentally" shut off while Elon was in one and getting grilled with questions about banning journalists. Also, about 7 hours ago he tweeted "Spaces is back"
To me that's convincing circumstantial evidence that Spaces didn't break, he turned it off.
I don't know how you're relating those two things, but it's funny you should say that. At the time he was firing people, throngs of self-proclaimed "experts" started pontificating about how Twitter was going to implode and crash and burn. There was about two weeks of non-stop posts from various acquaintances on social media about it. They've all been very quiet lately.