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Comment by superchroma | Hacker News Reader

Ok great, that's all very cool, but do you know what the consumer experience is? It's sluggish as heck in the browser, it consumed way too much space in cookies (max I've seen is 85mb, the majority of which are loaded upfront) in the browser, and the app feels kind of jittery and constantly snatches posts I'm looking at away from me in my timeline mid-scroll.

The corporate side is also problematic as the company wasn't profitable. Not to say Elon is going to help, here, but fundamentally the economics of Twitter didn't seem to be working out, and they had had enough time by now to try and make it work.

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Except Twitter appears to have been profitable until 2019. They would have been profitable in 2021 as well if it wasn’t for a one time legal charge of over 700mm.

The idea that Twitter was fundamentally unprofitable appears to be false.

I encourage you to read more of Dan Luu's posts, because he talks about things like what you mention, and consistently makes insightful points about them, e.g.

https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109332405719026619

https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109339567207009389

The point here isn't just that the features are cool, but that they provide a good return on investment. At Twitter's scale, a 1% improvement in CPU usage or user retention is massive, and could be worth having a team around for in the hypothetical case that's all they ever did.

  If, in the lifetime of the specialist team like the kernel team, a single person found something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would pay for the team in perpetuity, and Twitter’s kernel team has found many such changes. [1]

The "number of calls" metrics that Elon Musk have been throwing around without much understanding are probably themselves a product of Twitter's investment into performance - someone showed him that you can get a call graph of all services involved in producing the front page, and what he got out of it was "1000 is a big number". Presumably it will get rewritten until performance visibility is sufficiently reduced that he can't be bothered to micromanage it any more.

[1] https://danluu.com/in-house/

Elon removing the stupid sign in prompt has already been the best consumer experience upgrade for me personally as a sporadic twitter user.

> and constantly snatches posts I'm looking at away from me in my timeline mid-scroll

Instagram and Reddit do this too, it's the most annoying thing in the world. And making the feed crap is actively harder than just leaving it as it is.

It seems to be a common thing in IT to be completely unaware of business requirements, customer experience etc and instead think it's your job to do cool nerd shit instead

Look, I sympathize, cool nerd shit rocks and in the right places can be great. Often management doesn't make good choices about tech debt and optimization, too. That said, if engineers are lost in the weeds gold plating far more than is necessary or fighting unsuited tooling, either case is a management failure.

I just don't think twitter from inception to elon, as a now complete product story, is the great success that this thread is trying to paint it as. In the race, you don't get prizes for all the cool shit you do, you win or you fail, and twitter didn't win as it didn't make money and now maybe never will. Worse still, all this cool shit is cool proprietary shit so the best all these cool twitter engineers can do is tell me about it, so, fuck that.

> but fundamentally the economics of Twitter didn't seem to be working out

And $1billion a year in added interest payments is gonna help there?

No I specifically said it wouldn't. It's gone from a money fire to a money inferno, but that is a political choice as distinct from an engineering one.

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