Why X (Twitter) is still not breaking years after firing people? | Hacker News Reader

Why X (Twitter) is still not breaking years after firing people?

6 pointsanon1919286 comments

Seriously, prediction was that firing most of the working people there would lead to collapse of the website but it's still working. How is it possible and what were they actually working on? which other SV company are at similar level with thousands of people not doing much?

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I remember that WhatsApp and Instagram were very small teams and served millions of users.

Much of the functionality has been disabled or degraded. This includes things the typical user won't be able to readily distinguish as broken, such as suggestions on who to follow or the content of their feed, or whether or not advertisers are getting the visibility expected. It also includes things like what an unauthenticated user can view.

In the sense that it's still serving up tweets, sure it's up. Revenue was down 13.7% in 2024, users are being force-fed Musk's ketamine dreams while content moderation is non-existent.

Is that broken? I suppose it depends on whether or not a person prefers their own alternative facts.

Isn't X dead? If it's not growing, they could use some more engineers so what's the success about firing people and stagnating?

There's dead and there's dead. The business may be basically bankrupt and hiding this with corporate shenanigans, but the website itself is still (mostly) functioning, at least from a tweeter's POV.

On the one hand: It's definitely not working anything like as well as it used to*.

But as you say: I was expecting much worse.

At a certain point, a website or an app has all the features it needs, and everything else is cruft. You don't need to hire devs to work on new features when you reach that point, just lots and lots of QA and SREs. I won't say when or where, but more than once I have been witness to a feature being added… then taken away and added again by a different team.

I guess he has enough SREs.

* when someone links me to x.com content, I manually edit the URL to xcancel.com because even on a phone keyboard this is faster than 50% of random x.com page loads*

If people predict "things will end horribly for X", when they obviously hate X, you shouldn't take their prediction seriously.

Doesn't matter whether X is the company formerly known as Twitter, or a political leader, or their former spouse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning#Goal-orien...

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