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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a Musk fan. But all these mistakes and twitter still running?

So is Myspace as far as that goes. So just that fact that the lights are still on isn't saying a whole lot. And considering how much trouble Twitter seem to be having just paying their bills, I wouldn't be surprised if the lights literally do go out before much longer. shrug

"Still running" is a pretty low bar. Is that really how success should be measured? Yahoo! and AOL are also "still running".

Considering the Musk haters were frothing at the mouth shouting Twitter would come crashing down, yes: "Still running" shuts down their frothing pretty hard.

Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

> "Still running" is a pretty low bar. Is that really how success should be measured? Yahoo! and AOL are also "still running".

I'm no Musk fan, quite the opposite (check my old comment history), but "still running" is exactly the opposite of what I (and many other naysayers) thought would happen if a tech company laid off over 50% of their staff.

Whether you like it or not, "still running" is the bar for success for every business.

If just still running was the goal, any company that raised money would just take it and keep a mailbox open in perpetuity, and do nothing else, thus achieving the bar for success.

However, in reality, growth is the bar for success in nearly every business.

Don't move the goal posts.

The naysayers claimed everything from the site crashing due to lack of maintenance to the business going under due to fleeing advertisers.

As it turns out, and whether you like it or not, Twitter is still doing business ("still running") as usual.

> If just still running was the goal, any company that raised money would just take it and keep a mailbox open in perpetuity, and do nothing else, thus achieving the bar for success.

Firstly, that's not what "a running business" is generally understood to mean. I apologise if english is not your first language and the phrase was misunderstood by yourself.

Secondly, twitter is operating, they are not simply keeping the address alive. They have far surpassed that "bar" of merely keeping an address alive.

Thirdly, growth is not the bar for success in any business, nevermind "nearly every business". For shareholders, sure, they'd love to see growth (which you have left undefined), but any business that can meet it's monthly expenses is considered a successful business.

English isn't my first language, I'll defer to folks who are better able to contribute to the conversation then.

Thank you for your candor. Also it is 80%.

And the absolutely embarrassing doomsaying in those threads is up for all to see. People were seriously claiming it will crash forever in a matter of weeks or even days. Later they revised it to some sort of "slowly will fall apart as the secret lore is now gone with the amazing engineers who left and the certs will expire and nobody will be able to fix it eventually". One does not simply walk into Mordor bla bla..

It was just dumb and simply wishful thinking because of a personal animosity towards Elon. Like sheesh, I get not liking the guy, but why oh why throw shade like middle school girls?

Eventually you will just get a tantrum induced aneurism. And no, I am not an Elon fanboy, don't care what happens to Twitter personally.

I'm anti-tantrums is all. Criticize him rationally without losing face by all means.

Takes a while to eat an elephant one bite at a time.

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