Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the twas-the-night-before dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is rinzewind (shout out for the Discworld reference!) with a simple comment about the Twitter Files:
The most disappointing thing of this whole Twitter Files fiasco, for me, has been Taibbi. He had made some questionable editorial decisions as of late, but this has already gone off the rails entirely.
In second place, it’s PaulT with a comment about the claim that Musk’s mass firings at Twitter haven’t hurt the site:
I assume he means that since Musk fired a bunch of people who were in the middle of performing maintenance, updates and general operations and things didn’t explode on day one, things are fine.
The fun thing about such things is that you often don’t know what’s needed until they’re needed, and what you don’t know until you need to know. Musk already had a problem randomly shutting down microservices then needing to re-enable it because 2FA no longer worked. I wonder how many other issues that nobody understood were there apart from the guys who were fired are waiting.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Thad about the prospects of reversing Twitter’s decline:
There are people with the technical and business knowhow. The problem is that even if they were willing to work for him (and keep in mind that he just fired most of the people who would fit the bill), it would take a lot more than just competent management to undo the damage he’s done to Twitter’s, and his own, reputation among advertisers, employees, users, and the general public.
I don’t think Twitter can earn back the trust it’s lost unless Musk sells the company. And maybe not even then.
Next, it’s a comment from Cat_Daddy about the whole situation:
I think this is the first case of a genuine Digitator. Musk somehow speed ran Twitter from a semi-respectable site and into the equivalent of a literal third-world country. And to think that people actually wanted him to run as a candidate for the American Presidency prior to whatever meltdown we could call this. Because if Twitter was the best showcase of what he could do as a leader, then I would put him on the same list as Donald Trump and DeSantis on the tier of “O GOD NO.”
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Stephen T. Stone throwing a bone to the vaccine conspiracy crowd:
You know what else is fucked up? No one who’s ever gotten any of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines has lived longer than three years after doing so.
In second place, it’s glenn with a comment about Musk’s mom weighing in on Twitter:
Musk excuse when he was 10: “I have this note from my mom.”
Musk excuse now: “I have this note from my mom.”
Hmmm…
For editor’s choice, we’ve got a one-two punch about Musk’s actions. First, it’s Madistan trying to sum it up:
Elon’s Implementation Plan for Twitter
Fire!!! Ready. Aim.
Next, it’s Darkness Of Course going a step further:
You give him too much credit.
Fire. Fire. Fire. Ready. Fire. Fire. Oops. Fire. Ready for real this time. Fire. Aim? Really. Just Fire harder, hardcore firing that’s the Elon way. Everybody else gets Fire(d).
That’s all for this week, folks!
Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”
In the spirit of the season, I have to say that when it comes to Twitter, I’m thankful that I only looked at it, but I didn’t inhale!
Re:
Keep holding your breath, it won’t be long now.
To PaulT’s point:
Arguing that Twitter hasn’t collapsed yet and therefore it’s not going to is the equivalent of deciding you’re going to stop taking your car in for maintenance and then, when the wheels don’t fall off on the first day, insisting that that’s proof it’ll be fine forever.
Re:
“The entire internet didn’t implode in the first week, therefore we didn’t need those Net Neutrality rules anyway!”
Re: Re:
Or “It’s cold outside, therefore global warming is a hoax.”
Re:
Indeed, or the analogy I’ve used before is that it’s like watching the pilots bail out of a plane and assuming everything’s going to be OK because it didn’t immediately go in to a nosedive.
I’ve had enough experience with such things to know that it’s not always obvious what’s needed and what’s not in a large company, especially in situations where the institutional knowledge has left. Something that seems to be nonsense might be running important scripts to account for a known bug that gradually brings a site down, important data for investor reports, compatibility with older functions that are rarely called but vital in some circumstances.
It could be the case that there was a lot of waste, but if you randomly shut things down, you don’t know what you’ve lost and the procedures to recover from the problems if they do arise can be very… messy if they weren’t documented and the staff who knows why they’re there have left.
Given that Musk had a very public argument with one of the senior staff who tried telling him that he was completely wrong about fundamental operation of the site, which ended with him being fired, I suspect there’s some things that will go wrong in the next few months. They might not be as public as the 2FA thing, but I think there’s probably some people already panicking about unusual error messages behind the scenes. Assuming that the services turned off didn’t include the monitoring for those systems.
It’s the holiday season, so I feel it’s appropriate to express my gratitude that I didn’t do more than happy wheels glance at Twitter.
Twitter hasn’t yet crashed, so there’s no reason to believe it will do so. To make this claim is analogous to deciding to stop having your car serviced, then claiming that because the backrooms didn’t fall off the first day, everything will be great forever.