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Comment by adlpz | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed at how blind (we) tech people can be.

I don't see how the events up to today doesn't tell us that Twitter can indeed survive on a reduced workforce.

There may be growing and adapting pains but, overall, the service is working and not degrading.

The company may very well not survive much longer but I don't think it'll have anything to do with having fired all those devs.

The problematic side was the business side, so if laying of a few thousand people extended the runway to figure things out, it made all the sense. And if it ends crashing and burning regardless, then, who cares?

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> if laying of a few thousand people extended the runway to figure things out

That’s a big if. They took out huge loans for the acquisition, which means big interest payments added on.

Their finances were never that dire; they were profitable in 2018 and 2019.

The fact of Musk talking about taking over was enough to scare off a bunch of advertisers.

And the acquisition itself is the source of the massive new debt.

So, then, once the acquisition went through, the situation was definitely dire.

Was it because of Musks leadership or was it because we're going into recession so companies are cutting costs and saw a cheap way to get free advertising while getting on the good side with media? Companies have no issue running under dictatorship, paying bribes, breaking environmental laws, hiding women/hbtq in ads, but Twitter under Musk, thats the limit.

I don't think it was a morals issue. The rumours were that Musk wanted to turn Twitter into an (even more) unmoderated hate speech cesspool and drive off most of the (wealthy) userbase. Under that possibility advertisers were wise to wait and see instead of buying slots early (even if then they lost the usual discount).

That didn't happen, and Twitter is now about as terrible as it's ever been, so they're coming back.

> they were profitable in 2018 and 2019.

Technically also profitable in 2021 - without the $800M lawsuit settlement, they'd have made $580M profit instead of $220M loss.

it's a huge if, but this still doesn't make a case avout whether Twitter needed to be the size it was. the two are wholly unconnected.

> Their finances were never that dire; they were profitable in 2018 and 2019.

The finances of a succesful/healthy company aren't usually decribed as 'not being that dire' to be fair.

Ten years of operation and still unprofitable isn't great.

They lost 2019s profits in 2020, and had a mildly unprofitable 2021. That isn’t unusual.

It’s likely more dire now, not less. From all accounts, the savings from staff cuts have been met with lost advertising revenue, Twitter Blue hasn’t made a dent, and they’ve got big interest payments to meet.

It seems like they are on a better track to profitability if their revenue rebounds a bit - i.e. if they get up to 80% of their previous revenue they will be operating that level of revenue with underlying profitably rather than operating unprofitably at their previously larger revenue figure.

IMO Twitter Blue wasn't as much about making a load of money, as it was Musk sticking a stake in the ground and saying 'We are going to change things fast and experiment with things - and I don't want sacred cows'.

> It seems like they are on a better track to profitability if their revenue rebounds a bit - i.e. if they get up to 80% of their previous revenue they will be operating that level of revenue with underlying profitably rather than operating unprofitably at their previously larger revenue figure.

No they won't, because there are an additional ~1.5 billion the company has to pay in interest, as a result of the takeover. Twitter has fluctuated around profitability the last few years, now they have an albatross in interest payments around their neck. The only way Musk can lead them to a "better track to profitability" is if he unlocks significantly more revenue. He's been going in the opposite direction so far.

> if they get up to 80% of their previous revenue

Again with the giant ifs.

To be fair the lost ad revenue came before the layoffs. The rumours of the Musk takeover were enough to scare off many of the early ad space buyers.

My twitter service degraded in functionality.

> The problematic side was the business side, so if laying of a few thousand people extended the runway to figure things out, it made all the sense.

They fired people selling ads and people caring about customers (meaning ad buyers). Which directly caused loss of income.

I'm sure they severely messed up in a bunch of things during the layoffs. And things broke in the process.

But the catastrophic scenario that some people painted, where Twitter was basically walking dead timebomb ready to crash irreparably at any second, wasn't true, clearly.

“The engineers did a better job building a resilient system than we expected” speaks well for the fired folks, but doesn’t preclude it eventually hitting a point where that resiliency runs out.

It rather speaks well for the original engineers who laid out the foundation. It might be a totally different set of people than these in 2022, fired or not TLDR: Twitter is old.

I would interpret that part as "original twitter architecture was actually well done and resilient" then anything else. It just means that many of those systems were better done originally then legend had it.

The severe and immediate loss of advertising however was not just a minor messed up part of the takeover. The money making parts of business is something that does matter.

For various definitions of working and not degrading, I guess. A ton of tweets in threads are not loading, replies to tweets are counted but never actually displayed, blocklists no longer working reliably, many tweets from people I’m following are not being displayed in my “following” feed. For me, this now feels like a beta product that is slowly regressing.

It can die for multiple reasons.

"Only the Engineers" vs "only the Business" is unnecessarily specific.

Agreed, however the acquisition scared off many advertisers and put the company in massive debt.

So the business side is very much in a bad spot, objectively.

Therefore I judge it the probable main culprit if the company fails.

Indeed - mostly twitter has survived.

The user exodus to Mastodon seems to have stopped. The service is still mostly up and working. Most of the big advertisers seem to be there again.

> The user exodus to Mastodon seems to have stopped. The service is still mostly up and working. Most of the big advertisers seem to be there again.

Has it? I'm now seeing relatively mainstream youtubers (e.g. stand up maths as the latest example) plugging their mastodon in videos, and I think most FOSDEM presentations I saw linked a mastodon.

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