Twitter… what happens next

[Kalnestk Oblast]

In case you were curious - leaked docs for the checkmark indicate that it will only require an account, no verification, and will be available in the US, Canada and nz.

https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1588304086792667136?t=z_Nnov1V4HrSfx--ejHLnA&s=19

 

Edited November 4, 2022 by Kalnestk Oblast

[Derfel Cadarn]

I’d miss Twitter. Where else can you see West Wing’s Bradley Whitford slap Piers Morgan around?

 

Edited November 4, 2022 by Derfel Cadarn

[Ran]

Probably his Instagram.

[Varysblackfyre321]

4 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

In case you were curious - leaked docs for the checkmark indicate that it will only require an account, no verification, and will be available in the US, Canada and nz.

https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1588304086792667136?t=z_Nnov1V4HrSfx--ejHLnA&s=19

 

Yeah Elon’s response to those concerned about being impersonated has been to just say that sort of thing already happens.

This can  to a lot of people getting scammed and a lot of people having their reputations threatened.

 

 

Edited November 4, 2022 by Varysblackfyre321

[DMC]

1 hour ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

I’d miss Twitter. Where else can you see West Wing’s Bradley Whitford slap Piers Morgan around?

LemonLyman.com?

[Werthead]

13 hours ago, LongRider said:

Wiser minds like Putin?   Good grief is this for real?

It is a very stupid philosophy. One of the key weaknesses of autocratic systems is that, once they are fully in place and internal dissent is reduced to a low ebb, the political energy normally spent on internal politics and winning the next election is instead directed outwards at other countries, and as discontent inside your country rises (as inevitably is the case in most autocratic systems, even robust-looking ones like China and Iran) the appeal of some sort of overseas military exercise to rally people behind your flag rises. So in such systems, wars and now the risk of nuclear conflict rises significantly over a world of democracies.

[Week]

 

This is literally impossible. Another fire for cause gambit?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

13 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

The recent culture war hysteria around furries started on Facebook.

Is this the stupid lies about litter boxes in schools?

[Ran]

29 minutes ago, Week said:

This is literally impossible. Another fire for cause gambit?

Without being someone on the inside of Twitter who knows exactly what they use and how they use it and how much they pay for it, it's impossible to say whether it is, in fact, literally impossible or not. An anonymous insider saying so is not persuasive.

My guess is that there probably is fat that can be trimmed, that they've built in more redundancy than they've ever actually needed to date but perhaps did so with optimistic projections of continuing growth plus the possible of the "black swan" event that would push usage beyond all previous records. But instead we've stagntion.

But I'm also sure it is not as much as Musk wants, or at least not as much as he says he wants.  I'd also guess some cost savings could result,  from trying to renegotiate cloud services with Google (current provider) and hunt around at alternatives like AWS or Azure to see if they're willing to be cheaper to get Twitter's business. Perhaps that's all he's looking for, or perhaps he really is prepared to risk Twitter's availability and stability to plug the holes in its finances right now.

 

[Week]

14 minutes ago, Ran said:

Without being someone on the inside of Twitter who knows exactly what they use and how they use it and how much they pay for it, it's impossible to say whether it is, in fact, literally impossible or not. An anonymous insider saying so is not persuasive.

I work exactly in this space. Unless their cloud infrastructure is completely moronically mismanaged -- it is not possible. Or if they plan to drastically reduce services, end video embed, etc.

[Ran]

4 minutes ago, Week said:

I work exactly in this space. Unless their cloud infrastructure is completely moronically mismanaged -- it is not possible. Or if they plan to drastically reduce services, end video embed, etc.

It's entirely possible that they are indeed completely moronically mismanaged. We don't really know. Everything is talking about scaling and load balancing, but I wonder just how much storage for the permanent archives of Twitter are taking.

 Speaking of the cloud, we're starting to think more and more of trying to move the whole Westeros.org domain to cloud servers. The wiki still gets hammered during shows and we need some good way to load balance... Or maybe something hybrid, maintain the present dedicated servers but have a cloud layer that can help deal with the rush. 

Any sites or guides you'd recommend looking at discussing that sort of thing? Every time I look, so much is focused on web apps and the like and seems far removed from the basics of a blog+forum+wiki website like ours.

[Week]

@Ran, I'll take a look -- I would think there would be a company that would offer a reasonable PaaS solution depending on how bespoke the service is. Managing your own infrastructure can be a tiresome and expensive task (as asking for $1bn in cuts can attest to ...) I've also seen that the deadline for plans is next Monday. If true, sounds like a fun weekend for a bunch of engineers that just saw half their company get cut remotely (9AM PST today!). 

[Proudfeet]

Quote

Cost of revenue includes infrastructure costs, revenue share expenses, amortization of acquired intangible assets, amortization of capitalized laborcosts for internally developed software, allocated facilities costs, as well as traffic acquisition costs (TAC). Infrastructure costs consist primarily of data centercosts related to our co-located facilities, which include lease and hosting costs, related support and maintenance costs and energy and bandwidth costs, publiccloud hosting costs, as well as depreciation of servers and networking equipment; and personnel-related costs, including salaries, benefits and stock-basedcompensation, for our operations teams. TAC consists of costs we incur with third parties in connection with the sale to advertisers of our advertising productsthat we place on third-party publishers’ websites, and applications or other offerings collectively resulting from acquisitions. Certain elements of our cost ofrevenue are fixed and cannot be quickly reduced in the near term in response to market conditions

A quick browse of their financial statements for 2021 says that cost of revenue is $1.8 billion, which consists of the above quoted.

I'm not sure what the breakdown is, but he's looking for a greater than 50% cost savings before factoring in depreciation, maintenance, related personnel costs (separate from others such as R&D and Admin) and TAC. Even if their costs ballooned in 2022, that's still a massive ask. It was $1.4 billion in 2020 for reference.

[Tywin et al.]

What confuses me about the current situation is Idk how you square slashing your labor costs while at the same time inviting an influx of people that will require a serious upscaling in moderation. If you do nothing to combat the latter you're at serious risk of doing permanent damage to the brand.

 

[Larry of the Lake]

They're also getting sued over the mass layoffs for not giving 60 days notice to employees and the labor board, lol

[JGP]

lol

Spinning all the time has got to be exhausting.

[Kalnestk Oblast]

We (microsoft) just did a lot of infrastructure fat trimming, and it's remarkable what you can save depending on what you're doing. Reducing redundancy is one thing, but also simply changing what virtual machines you're using to cheaper, more modern skus, getting rid of old subscriptions and random spinups for dev work, more on demand compute power, removal of customers assets who aren't using the service any more...with the cloud it is very easy to just have a bunch of expensive resources sitting around.

That said our aim was to reduce costs by roughly 5-10%. Reducing costs by 60%+ would be absolutely insane by engineering staff alone and would likely require significant negotiations with cloud partners and architects. 

[Week]

4 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

That said our aim was to reduce costs by roughly 5-10%. Reducing costs by 60%+ would be absolutely insane by engineering staff alone and would likely require significant negotiations with cloud partners and architects. 

Should be an easy plan to whip together by Monday. Immediately after 50% of the company is unceremoniously riffed.

[mormont]

On the plus side, one of the big fears about Musk taking over Twitter was that he'd reinstate Trump's account. For the record I was never as worried about this as some were. But if Musk wrecks Twitter, hey, the problem solves itself! 

[Secretary of Eumenes]

8 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Yeah Elon’s response to those concerned about being impersonated has been to just say that sort of thing already happens.

This can  to a lot of people getting scammed and a lot of people having their reputations threatened.

 

 

Good

OK? It's VERY GOOD ok, maybe the MOst good. I don't know, I don't know, but people are saying you know they say to me they say "MR. preshehent" I admire you so much. SO MUCH. That i JUST wanna bE youh.  I want it so bad, that I have to get on Twitter (we love twitter don't we precious) BeCaUsE it's where I feel close TO being YOU 

1 hour ago, mormont said:

On the plus side, one of the big fears about Musk taking over Twitter was that he'd reinstate Trump's account. For the record I was never as worried about this as some were. But if Musk wrecks Twitter, hey, the problem solves itself! 

The most popular politician in the world should not be banned from Twitter. 

He should be hanged by the neck until dead for his exhaustive list of crimes, but until the moment the rope snaps taught he is entitled his free speech. 

And before someone points out that twittering is not actually the town square, I would then demand to know why the whole fucking town is losing its mind at transfer of ownership.