New York’s MTA is abandoning bus and train alerts on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

New York’s MTA is abandoning bus and train alerts on Twitter

theverge.com

15 pointsrntn7 comments

> "Our access to publish service alerts was suspended last week and again this week,”

This is the real headline. It seems like Twitter is actually starting to fail to maintain proper functioning of legitimate accounts. It's actually crazy that this could happen, because Twitter had a massive advantage of being a primary access point for government information about transit; you essentially had the most captive audience in that situation, even if they published updates on their own website it wouldn't have a consistent interface for users (the way every Twitter account looks the same)

“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. “There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”

—Twitter employee, fall 2022 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/17/twitter...

Well the site is still there after 6 months.

This is a major loss for Twitter. When I lived in NYC the majority of my Twitter usage was to check the MTA. I might browse around but otherwise this was the department store that brought me to the mall.

I wonder how many NYC residents—- especially Gen Z—- only use Twitter to check the MTA? How many new users will be lost? Given its notorious unreliability, it must account for a large share of page views.

Twitter should probably be paying the MTA to stay.

Musk has done a lot of stupid things, but I think the absolute stupidest was regarding Twitter users as freeloaders to be milked, mocked, or both.

I doubt anybody would argue against finding ways to make Twitter profitable, but Twitter is one of these companies where the users really defined the culture, service, stature, and even their most iconic features (@replies, hashtags). Musk's attitude towards them from the beginning has been one of hostility and resentment, so it's hardly surprising that the company is crumbling.

There's certainly discussion to be had about his personality flaws, but from a basic business perspective, he didn't understand the first thing about the company he spent $44 billion on, went in there with no plan to speak of, and has been managing it ever since by trial and error, with a particular focus on the "error" part.

Never mind the fact that he's an asshole; that's just bad, lazy business.

I think so, too. I wonder how many other organizations will also soon stop using Twitter.

The MTA now has free access again and has resumed posting https://twitter.com/MTA/status/1654213735567835138?s=20

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