Twitter wasn’t healthy before Musk bought it. It wasn’t a thriving business, it was a very old, very large startup still struggling to find market fit and loosing a lot of money.
Also, it wasn’t a thriving product. It was stagnant.
Since Twitter was purchased, the amount of features they have shipped has been impressive. They’ve shipped a lot of features and extended the platform a lot. To your point they have also done this with far less engineers than before.
Regarding any downtime, everyone has downtime. Google, Amazon, Meta… the best of the best still have it regardless of money or manpower.
Considering what that team has done with less resources, I think the achievement still pretty good. What do you think?
Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019.
https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...
Can we start to call companies with almost 18 years old just "companies" and not startup anymore?
I mean, I would expect Microsoft to do a much better job than Twitter to keep GitHub from going down every single month after acquiring it. The frequency of GitHub going down with 100M+ users using it is much worse than Twitter.
It turns out that GitHub's constant downtime for years is all fine (especially tech folks) here despite the monthly complaints anyway. The latest one here [0] But only with Twitter, the speed-bumps are exaggerated and magnified.
[0] >>36523843
I'm not going to spend a lot of time researching this.
This 2019 article says they cut costs/Vine and jumped to video ads which boosted revenue 24% which might explain why they were profitable in 2019.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/07/tech/twitter-earnings-q4/inde...
In 2018 there is mention of a "one-time release of deferred tax asset valuation allowance,” which accounted for $683 million [of income]".
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/25/18018046/twitter-q3-2018-earn...
OP's point stands in my opinion. Twitter was/is a flagging centralized service that may not survive if it doesn't pivot.
As opposed to something like Amazon which grew and grew for nearly 20 years, always burning more cash than it made to fuel growth, but they understood the business really well and when they decided to optimize for profitability rather than growth, never never gone back.
Yeah, it is going great.
I see HackerNews is counterintuitively up its own ass again.
It’s hilarious to think it is at all acceptable to kill public access, and drastically limit authenticated access, because of a few scrapers. There is no way Twitter prior to Musk’s acquisition would have had to do so.
> What do you think?
I think you are not looking at the situation objectively.
I don’t pretend to know all of the motivations behind the policy moves.
That said, I’ve got some experience with scraping; got sued by LinkedIn in 2014. We were using AWS Spot Instances to hit it hard for very little money. It was not uncommon to accidentally take large services down.
Scrapers can and do add very significant load. We also scraped Twitter back in the day as well.
Companies that behave that way and have good returns on capital employed and have large growth in earnings, free cash flow, etc are good investments. Doesn't matter if they're not showing profits.
Twitter was very good at this, and their new-found inability is a glaring sign that their engineering is slipping.
You simply setup API deals with those who you want to have your data, those that benefit your business, aka Google etc…
Then you close everything else up. This saves cost and complexity and real users, the target of your advertisers, don’t even notice.
This isn’t a sign that engineering is slipping.
It’s a sign that a in a company which struggles to make money, someone is paying attention and trying new things to fix the money problem.
What I said is that they must handle the problem transparently to their valuable users. That includes (requires, usually) targeted techniques to block high-volume scraping.