The IT Nerd

If the Platformer story that I posted earlier today isn’t enough to highlight the fact that Elon Musk and Twitter are in deep trouble, Fast Company piles on with this story that highlights how Twitter’s staffing issues are creating a death spiral for the company:

Twitter’s outage on Wednesday, which saw the site rendered unusable for most users by blocking people from tweeting within the app, accessing or sending direct messages, and following new users, shows that the social media giant is stuck in a Sisyphean nightmare.

The company needs to update its systems to enact the changes Elon Musk wants to make to the platform (things like extending the maximum tweet length and overhauling the algorithm that presents tweets to users). But, following mass layoffs by Musk, Twitter is now short-staffed, according to former staff, some of whom have contacts still within Twitter, and has been forced to instigate frequent code freezes, preventing the deployment of iterative changes to the platform’s codebase. That means vast volumes of code changes are pushed out at once when they do happen—so if anything goes wrong, it’s difficult to unpick what’s to blame.

Musk has responded to significant outages, such as the one this week, by introducing further freezes until the underlying issue is identified—which former staff say simply kicks the problem down the road.

The problem appears to be one of Musk’s own making. By getting rid of so many long-tenured staff, it appears Twitter has routed its institutional knowledge about how the platform works and interacts with other parts of the app. 

Fast Company has seen conversations among former Twitter engineers suggesting that Twitter cannot identify what caused the most recent outage because it has tried to push out too many new code changes at once, and it’s impossible to identify which of the changes caused the issue. Other former Twitter engineers suggested to Fast Company that the problem of bundling so many changes into a single new release of the app is due to deploying so many code freezes.

This is like a house of cards where one wrong move will bring the entire platform down. And the blame lies with Elon as his “ready, fire, aim” mentality has not only created this situation, but will likely be the root cause of Twitter’s ultimate downfall. Which based on this and the Platformer story from earlier, illustrates that Twitter is doomed. It’s just a matter of when at this point.

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.

The Washington Post is reporting that Twitter and by extension Elon Musk is making millions of dollars thanks to extremist influences. Here’s how:

Elon Musk’s restoration of 10 Twitter accounts that were banned under the platform’s previous management has generated enough engagement since they returned to the platform to likely generate $19 million in advertising revenue annually, a nonprofit dedicated to countering hate speech online has concluded.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) said the 10 accounts were among hundreds thought to have been restored under a “general amnesty” that Musk announced in late November. 

The report comes as Musk is working to generate revenue for the company, which he has said is in dire financial straits despite the layoffs of thousands of employees and the suspension of payments for a number of services including rent on Twitter’s downtown San Francisco headquarters. Twitter’s advertising revenue in December was 70 percent lower than the previous year, according to data from Standard Media Index, an advertising research firm. 

CCDH’s chief executive, Imran Ahmed, linked the drop off in ad revenue to the decision by Musk to restore formerly banned accounts. “Our research shows that there is a depressingly banal answer to why Elon Musk would reinstate the accounts of self-professed Nazis, disinformation actors, misogynists and homophobes — it’s highly profitable,” he said. 

Musk did not immediately respond to request for comment. Twitter’s communications department was eliminated in layoffs last year.

The CCDH uncovered multiple examples of advertisements from major national brands, including Amazon, Apple TV, the NFL and Fiverr, that appeared next to content from the 10 extremist influencers. In one instance, an ad for Wendy’s appeared next to a tweet by Stew Peters, an anti-vaccine influencer with 168,000 followers, where he referred to the vaccine as a “BioWeapon” and claimed people have been “murdered” by it. 

In another example, an ad for the streaming service Peacock appeared next to a tweet from Anthime Gionet, an influencer known as Baked Alaska, who was recently sentenced for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The ad appeared next to a tweet where Gionet asked his followers whether he should “say the n-word.”

Brand advertisements also appeared next to tweets about election fraud, vaccine conspiracy theories, false statements about Ukraine and bio weapons, and tweets denigrating women in business, CCDH said.

This pretty much confirms what many have suspected. Which is that Elon is so desperate for cash that he will do anything including being an ally to hate in all its forms under the guise of “free speech”. The only saving grace is that $19 million in annual revenue is a drop in the bucket in terms of what Twitter likely needs to survive. But even that tiny amount of revenue may make Elon go further and do more on this front.

The best way to stop this is for major advertisers to abandon Twitter as an advertising medium. After all, if you’re a Proctor And Gamble or a Samsung or Apple, why would you want your advertising to appear amongst hateful content? Common sense says that you don’t want that to happen. Thus the only way to defend against that is to not have your advertisements on the platform. So let’s see if this report encourages those companies and companies like them to abandon Twitter en masse.

Since Elon Musk took over, leaks about his various failures and challenges with Twitter have been appearing in the media. And today is no different. Hot on the heels of today’s Twitter outage comes a leaked email from Elon himself:

So this suggests a number of things to me:

• Twitter is generally unstable at the moment. Specifically when new features like expanded Tweet counts are launched. Which I am guessing is why he wants new feature development paused.
• Twitter’s sunsetting of some of their data centres is likely a factor in this instability. That is coming from the fact that he’s pausing Twitter’s transition away from the two data centres referenced in the Tweet.
• Elon knows that if Twitter is this unstable during the Super Bowl, his chances of getting advertisers back onto the platform and getting people to pay for Twitter Blue will be slim and none with slim packing their bags to leave town.

Bottom line: Twitter is in very deep trouble. And it’s starting to become clear that Elon can’t fix it. Which means we can expect to see more outages like this soon. And I would guess we won’t have to wait long to see those outages as Super Bowl Sunday may be the tipping point for Twitter.

Just before 5PM today, a Twitter outage was reported by Down Detector:

Many are unable to Tweet. Other users are seeing a different error message: “You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets.” Either way this is bad for Twitter. It isn’t clear what is causing this. But my guess is that it might have something to do with the launch of 4,000 character tweets:

While this is limited to Twitter Blue subscribers in the US at launch, what few of them exist, anyone worldwide can read these Tweets. The timing is too coincidental, and it will be interesting to see how Elon fixes this.

Remind me again why I should pay you $8 a month? Right now I don’t see the value proposition.