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Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

Can the drop in revenue be offset by the ~80% drop in payroll? None of the prognostications about Twitter’s total and utter technical collapse after such a dramatic headcount reduction came true [0]. It still may be a bit premature even after a few months to say that the company is perfectly fine with so few engineers (e.g. can it survive a disaster recovery situation [1]?), but the platform is definitely performing far better than almost anyone predicted.

[0] https://daringfireball.net/2022/12/twitter_still_up

[1] https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/15919392829479526...

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The site has been pretty unstable recently. The headcount cost reduction is worth much less than the additional cost of lost ad revenue + interest payments. Twitter was break even pre-Elon and is now down billions per year.

The collapse won't be technical, as I'm sure the engineers which remain can keep the systems running.

The collapse will happen due to the lack of remaining moderators. Twitter will become completely toxic to advertisers, politicians and influencers, who won't want to remain on the platform. Hate, antisemitism, and unmanaged CSE and SE material are growing.

There was an interesting BBC story about this today: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-64804007

>The collapse will happen due to the lack of remaining moderators.

Orwellian garbage. The internet was just fine and companies insanely profitable before the the censorship tyrants showed up and demanded everything be their way.

I swear sometimes it feels like the 90’s Christian fundamentalists won, they just rebranded.

> The internet was just fine and companies insanely profitable before the the censorship tyrants showed up and demanded everything be their way.

What strange way to conflate profits and censorship.

Also, you are forgetting just how different the internet was a couple of decades ago. Social media really did change the game in terms of idea (bad ideas too) dissemination. Good ideas, bad ideas, lies are shoved down everyone's throat constantly, and not everyone is rational and can tell the difference between those three things.

So no, this isn't fundamentalism winning. This is culture changing, and the rules and regulations changing slower.

This just isn't true. Popular sites have had censors from the very beginning. No one is using sites that are full of spam and child porn.

I use Twitter for multiple hours every day (I'm addicted) and have never seen child porn.

That is the effect of all those moderators working.

I thought they were all fired? Are you saying they are working for free (like reddit mods lol)?

> definitely performing far better than almost anyone predicted.

Everytime I log in to the twitter app, the notification icon lights up, then turns off, and sometimes it lights up again with some delay. Some other times it stays lit up and doesn't turn off, even though I have no new notifications. It's gotten to the point where I no longer check the notifications because the indicator is wrong almost all the time.

The timing on this post is pretty funny considering Twitter is experiencing a major outage right now: https://twitter.com/twittersupport/status/163279294226274713... (probably wont load because twitter is experiencing an outage, here's what it says:

"Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We're working on this now and will share an update when it's fixed.")

Twitter's web app has been grotesquely slow for me the last two weeks or so. It takes literally five seconds from the moment of navigating to it to showing just the background color.

Decay is not a binary thing. It happens gradually. One data point: I saw reporting that the rate of significant outages through February of this year is almost 5x what it was last year.

> Can the drop in revenue be offset by the ~80% drop in payroll?

So, I suspect it does offset some of it but still remember that twitter is spending ~1.5 Quarters of payroll in order to get this offset.

For 2022Q2, twitter had a revenue of about 1.2B and stock based compensation of .28B [1]. So assuming, stock compensation is 2x cash compensation would imply that saving 80% in payroll saves < 0.7B per quarter which is 3/4 of their lost revenue [2]. I suspect it's really going to be like 3-5x though as employees with high compensation skew heavily towards stock.

Note: I did round numbers often.

[1]: https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q2... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041019

> Can the drop in revenue be offset by the ~80% drop in payroll? None of the prognostications about Twitter’s total and utter technical collapse after such a dramatic headcount reduction came true [0].

I think there's a famous Hemingway quote that goes something like "change happens slowly, then all at once." Twitter still may be able to coast for awhile, even if 100% of the technical staff were fired, but they've certainly lost a lot of knowledge and likely put those that remain in a situation where burnout is likely [1]. If there's going to be a technical collapse, I think it will be over a longer term.

[1] Especially since I see little in Twitter to keep an engineer passionate. There's no story here about saving humanity from climate change or colonizing Mars. It's just "keep the boss happy" and "keep prior achievements from being ruined," but those aren't very motivating and Musk seems to have a talent to undermine them.

Why can’t we get past this?

Some people, probably that didn’t know what they were talking about, expected that everything would fall over right away. I think most of us knew that this wouldn’t happen.

This doesn’t mean that there wasn’t merit in the view that reducing Twitter’s headcount so drastically and suddenly would result in platform instability.

My understanding is that Twitter has been unstable. I’m not using Twitter anymore, but I’ve heard it from a bunch of people, including people who aren’t politically motivated to make that claim.

> None of the prognostications about Twitter’s total and utter technical collapse after such a dramatic headcount reduction came true [0].

There are a lot of annoying bugs that cropped up over the last months, and most of these involve features rarely used.

My pet peeve is search: You have to do a search using the from-keyword like ten times or more until it actually shows results. When you scroll down for older results, you have to scroll to top and then to the bottom again because it doesn't have an "Older" button, just infinite scroll. There is no way to make the search remember you prefer recent results instead of "top" with a completely intransparent ranking.

On top of that comes general instability - the app and website keeps randomly forgetting you're in the "I follow" timeline, the "for me" algorithmic timeline has sometimes hours worth of lag and is filled with crap - no I don't want to see porn someone else liked, or endless pages of replies against some random Nazi or TERF. DM groups take ages to load or stay in a weird half rendered state in the app.

The seams are falling apart.

No, because Elon funded the acquisition with loan money and yearly debt payments alone jumped to 1.5B.

Interestingly, within a few hours of this post, they seem to have deployed or changed something that has broken most of the site for most users.

This used to happen a long time ago, once in a while with pre-musk twitter, but I don't recall it happening in the past few years.

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