The IT Nerd

A reader pointed me towards a Platformer story that really shows you what’s going on inside Twitter and how Twitter is being destroyed from the inside. I strongly encourage you to read the story which you can find here. But let me cover two things that made my jaw hit the ground.

#1 – Elon Musk fired engineers at Twitter because engagement counts are dropping:

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.  

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well. 

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)

That’s a sure sign that Elon’s ego rather than his head is running Twitter at the moment. No to be clear, I am not shocked by that. What I am shocked about his behaviour when he doesn’t get the answer that fits his world view. Or when someone speaks truth to power. That’s just abysmal leadership.

#2 -Twitter’s outage from earlier this week is part of a larger problem.

An even more obvious reason for the decline in engagement is Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product, which has baffled users with its disappearing mentions, shifting algorithmic priorities, and tweets inserted seemingly at random from accounts they don’t follow. On Wednesday, the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, with users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”

It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. The team that worked on that service left the company in November.

“As the adage goes, ‘you ship your org chart,’” said one current employee. “It’s chaos here right now, so we’re shipping chaos.”

Interviews with current Twitter employees paint a picture of a deeply troubled workplace, where Musk’s whim-based approach to product management leaves workers scrambling to implement new features even as the core service falls apart. The disarray makes it less likely that Musk will ever recoup the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter, and may hasten its decline into insolvency. 

“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”

That further explains this email from Elon trying to focus the team on making the platform stable ahead of the Super Bowl. And it highlights that the stability of Twitter is heading downhill fast. And part of this is driven by Elon’s rush to ship new features at any cost to drive revenue. Which of course has not worked. What surprises me is that not even in my wildest dreams did I think that the situation was as bad as it’s being described here.

Now you’re likely wondering why I am highlighting this report. The team at Platformer has been 100% accurate about what has been going on inside of Twitter since Elon took over. So it is beyond a safe bet that everything that you read in this article is fact. Which means that if you still have a Twitter account, you might want to make plans to be someplace else on social media as it’s crystal clear that Twitter with Elon Musk at the helm is living on borrowed time.

This entry was posted on February 10, 2023 at 8:31 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.