zlacker

>>ZacnyL+(OP)
Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement.

Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof.

I can of course not say whether the people currently working at Twitter did warn that the recent measures could have such major side effects, but I would not be surprised in the slightest, considering their leadership's mode of operation.

Even as someone who very much detests what Twitter has become over the last few months and in fact did not like Twitter before the acquisition, partly due to short format making nuance impossible, but mostly for the effect Tweets easy embeddability had on reporting (3 Tweets from random people should not serve as the main basis for an article in my opinion), I must say, I feel very sorry for the people forced to work at that company under that management.

>>Topfi+Ew
The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!" Engineers noticed that the home feed request was slow. They didn't understand how it worked, had no tools to profile it, and were given an unrealistic deadline to fix it. So about the only thing they could do was issue multiple, parallel requests and hope that at least one of them was fast.

I worked in the games industry for a while, and came to understand how they could spend so much money and so much time, and yet release a game where even basic functionality was broken. It's exactly this sort of extreme schedule pressure that, ironically, makes a huge morass where changing one thing breaks 10 other things, so progress grinds to a halt.

>>martin+oN
Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels.

The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO.

The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side. Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions.

>>uncone+dR
There's definitely a strong element of people here rooting for Twitter to fail because they dislike Elon's politics.

>>beaned+eS
It is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- entirely OK to root for the failure of a company that is owned, directed and dominated by an odious person with abhorrent politics.

Compare:

- hoping Ballmer-era Microsoft would fail in their attempts to snuff out Linux

- hoping that USSR would fail in their attempts to snuff out large numbers of their own citizens

- hoping that the Confederates would fail at snuffing out resistance to literal slavery

- (in fiction,) hoping that the Death Star would fail at snuffing out various planets, etc

and so forth.

There is not some weird list of permissible root-reasons. You have no gotcha; you are just gotten.

>>1attic+JW
I like Michael Hobbes's succinct gripe regarding the "debate RFK" nonsense about a week ago (alas, on Twitter, hence no link to the thread):

> The problem with this asinine debate over debating is that everyone is trying to come up with a content-neutral principle.

>>0xcde4+LY
I think the bigger problem there is that RFK could win the debate but that still wouldn't make vaccines cause autism.