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
> My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!"

Seems more like a thinly disguised attempt to force people to purchase subscriptions. Blue checkmarks and all.

>>hvis+Dd1
That's the first thing that came to mind. It's a pay-to-play move, which is not at all surprising. People seem to forget that fully-featured social media-centric corporations are run for profit, and if they can't get enough advertising to balance the books, then what's left but subscriptions?

Sometimes people buy media corporations because they're interesting in using them to promote their other more lucrative operations (think Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post) so they don't really care about profitability, but I don't think Twitter fits that model, but who knows?

>>photoc+cg1
> then what's left but subscriptions?

The WeChat model is the obvious answer to that rhetorical question. Build paid services on top of your hellsite with millions of addicts using it daily. For example, Twitter could have easily been the gateway to OnlyFans, or to Patreon. Apple is another example of this kind of value-added ecosystem that leverages a foothold to sell other crap to people.

Or there's the TikTok model: gobble up all the data, sell data to governments, give MBS or Putin admin access to Twitter, build AI on top of the dataset.

Even a private equity chop-shop like Bain could do a better job of extracting value from Twitter than this mess.

This isn't a profit-seeking venture for Musk. This is about politics, about power, and primarily about revenge. Musk is giving Notch stiff competition for the title of most pathetic billionaire.