alt Hacker NewsIn 2022, Twitter / X was supposed to have completely shut down according to many doomsters at the time. It is clear that many in [0], [1] and [2] also would like to ask the same question why Twitter / X still hasn't shut down.
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823
Replies
The site has become a right-wing echo chamber and Musk's personal soapbox: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...
About 90% of the interesting people I ever followed on Twitter are now on Bluesky or Mastodon. They're never coming back.
Assertions that Twitter/X was surely going to shut down after the Elon Musk acquisition were wishful thinking on the part of two groups of people:
1) political progressives who liked the way the pre-Elon-Musk management of Twitter engaged in political censorship on the platform (i.e. anyone using the term "nazi" with respect to Twitter or Musk)
2) software engineers who saw a bloated software company summarily fire a bunch of software engineers who the new leadership thought were mostly doing unimportant work, and really wanted it to be true that this was going to tank the company, because it was bad for their job security if it turned out that Twitter didn't actually need that many software engineers after all.
The HN discussions you linked to:
1. 10 points, 15 comments
2. 9 points, 17 comments
3. 44 points, 84 comments
That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.
I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699
(471 points, 512 comments)
Plenty of discussion about the negative impacts in the long term. But it didn’t involve Elon Musk so people didn’t get weirdly defensive about it all.
It has collapsed. It is just bots and racism that have collapsed it, not a technical failure.
It has also collapsed on a business front. There are rumors that it has 1/10th the revenue that it did before.
He had the good fortune to cut just as AI was beginning to mean you needed fewer software engineers for the same level of output. And yes, software companies across the industry had accumulated in many instances people whose business was not, and was sometimes orthogonal to, building software.