Pretending the current iteration of twitter is anything remotely comparable to what existed before is pretty ridiculous. Other than grok, which is by far the worst of all the flavors of models out there (and very technically, made by one of musk's other companies), there haven't been any new features in years, even down to the terrible UI/UX has barely changed at all, and the particular "slant" the site takes in addition to the swarms of boosted bots out there rendered the site practically unusable for me in a very short period of time. I honestly don't understand people that still use it or what they could possibly get out of it. If there was any honest reporting about DAU/MAU I'd bet a large part of my paycheck it's way down from pre-musk levels.

Grok is a separate product created by xAI. It is integrated into Twitter yes but they hired a ton of engineers at xAI to make it happen.

Those are due to deliberate policy changes from Musk to boost engagement of his right-wing sycophants, not due to any technical failings. From a strictly technological point-of-view, Twitter works just as well as it did pre-takeover, and certainly did not catastrophically collapse as many predicted.

I would categorize what happened to the site and it being rendered unusable by anyone even halfway serious as catastrophic - but perhaps my bar is a little higher for the "smartest man in the world" than "I can still get a 200 response from the site" (which actually is also down, in terms of outages).

I agree that the site is barely usable, but that's entirely due to a shift in Twitter's userbase caused by top-down policy changes (e.g. boosting right-wing spam), not any engineering shortcomings.

If Musk had never purchased Twitter and Jack Dorsey performed the same reduction in engineering staff, I doubt the site would be materially different from how it was pre-Musk.

That's because software is immortal. It will continue to run even if you do nothing. What happens, though, is that stuff around it moves.

Of course twitter still works. Even with 0 engineers, it would still work. That's never been the goal of a software company. I can compile Mario 64 right here, right now, decades later. Should Nintendo just go home? Call it quits? Of course not.

It’s rhetoric like this that has created the market we have today.

The perceived success is not the same as actual success. Remember it is a private company and you don’t actually have any idea how bad the balance sheets were after the layoffs. Before the financial engineering that Musk did by using his other companies to invest in Twitter to preserve its valuation, the company was down almost 80%. [1] If public companies go down that route, they’ll very quickly find out what the actual impact of that model is.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/29/fidelity-has-cut-xs-value-...

> Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took over

Just because it works on your phone doesn’t mean there are no engineering problems behind the scene. You’re just not aware of the problems that exist because it’s a private company and you’re not privy to the information.

> Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took it over.

Not true. The main reason I stopped clicking Twitter links in the first place was the abysmal chance of the tweet loading and not just displaying a generic "Failed to load. Try again?" after the takeover. I mean it occasionally happened before as well, but it became the default behavior.

It lasted long enough that by the time (over a year) they'd finally fixed it, the platform had deteriorated to a right-wing cesspool anyway.

To be fair a lot of the fired people were moderators and it shows today.