Elon & Twitter

[Crutonius]

Another twitter doom prediction failed completely:

Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks

One insider says the company’s current staffing isn’t able to sustain the platform.

www.technologyreview.com

Well, 6 months later it's working better than ever. Just like all the other Musk naysayer predictions, if you have patience to wait for a while and check back, most of them turns out to be completely false. These doomers are betting on we forget their outrageous predictions and move on, but history remembers.

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[bkp_duke]

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Love when people try to take an N=1 and make it apply to everything.

Meh, they failed on this livestream. The people here happy about it would have been moaning if it were for the other political party, that's what's really going on here.

Did you guys jump for joy in happiness when Starship failed to reach orbit? Probably.

This is Elon, the team will learn from the failure and fix it.

 

[stopcrazypp]

In a nutshell...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1661503979791216640

This is, of course, a tech failure, and much commentary drags Tesla (especially FSD) into the general sphere of incompetence. Is there any hope that Elon will just stop with the gratuitous self-owns? Probably not.

Ouch, that was really hard to watch. Even by their own estimate in the audio snippet, there was only about 400k people (not like it was a millions or more like other video stream platforms like Twitch or YouTube) and it was an audio only stream, but yet they couldn't keep the stream up for a few minutes. I don't particularly care if Twitter crashes and burns, but as you say, this can rub off on people's impression of the tech prowess of Tesla.

Who would be attracted to use the platform for similar announcements in the future after they botched this up so bad?

 

[EfficientWatts]

Love when people try to take an N=1 and make it apply to everything.

I disagree with you on many things, but I agree with you on this to a certain extent. Some other sites liken this to a SpaceX rocket exploding (forgetting the process by which SpaceX does things) and trying to say 1 rocket exploded, therefore SpaceX sucks. That being said, if that N=1 event was carrying humans on a SpaceX rocket and that blew up, or N=1 was an important announcement on Twitter that had a lot of tech difficulties, that one failure is still going to look mighty bad and a different level of scrutiny will be applied to that.

In general people honestly here (on various sides) need to stop using the N=1 grenade/mic drop so liberally for things that don't justify it, at least without context or additional justification.

 

[ohmman]

I disagree with you on many things, but I agree with you on this to a certain extent. Some other sites liken this to a SpaceX rocket exploding (forgetting the process by which SpaceX does things) and trying to say 1 rocket exploded, therefore SpaceX sucks. That being said, if that N=1 event was carrying humans on a SpaceX rocket and that blew up, or N=1 was an important announcement on Twitter that had a lot of tech difficulties, that one failure is still going to look mighty bad and a different level of scrutiny will be applied to that.

In general people honestly here (on various sides) need to stop using the N=1 grenade, at least without context.

Also agree. But worth noting that this particular event was definitely a capital N=1 event that probably had extra attention and resources on it compared to a random lowercase n=1 event.

 

[bkp_duke]

I disagree with you on many things, but I agree with you on this to a certain extent. Some other sites liken this to a SpaceX rocket exploding (forgetting the process by which SpaceX does things) and trying to say 1 rocket exploded, therefore SpaceX sucks. That being said, if that N=1 event was carrying humans on a SpaceX rocket and that blew up, or N=1 was an important announcement on Twitter that had a lot of tech difficulties, that one failure is still going to look mighty bad and a different level of scrutiny will be applied to that.

In general people honestly here (on various sides) need to stop using the N=1 grenade/mic drop so liberally for things that don't justify it, at least without context or additional justification.

Agreed, but it was a political announcement. It's not like WW3 had started and Twitter was trying to replace the Emergency Broadcast Service.

Was it embarrassing? Absolutely. Is Elon actively working on mitigation at this minute? I would bet on it.

 

[bkp_duke]

Also agree. But worth noting that this particular event was definitely a capital N=1 event that probably had extra attention and resources on it compared to a random lowercase n=1 event.

It doesn't scale like that. I literally build these kinds of things out on Private Clouds for customers.

They probably mis-allocated resources to one single part of the flow (i.e. intake server or something). I would be very very surprised if they had mis-allocated resources on the broadcast side.

 

[Crutonius]

Love when people try to take an N=1 and make it apply to everything.

Meh, they failed on this livestream. The people here happy about it would have been moaning if it were for the other political party, that's what's really going on here.

Did you guys jump for joy in happiness when Starship failed to reach orbit? Probably.

This is Elon, the team will learn from the failure and fix it.

I did not jump for joy when Starship failed. SpaceX has a noble goal. And I'm actually a little unclear if that was a failure or not. You can't make a rocket program without blowing up a lot of rockets. I'm sure they learned a lot of lessons.

This event, however, goes beyond a meh. This was a pretty hard faceplant. Twitter crashed on an audio only stream of half a million. That's objectively terrible compared to any other mainstream social media site.

 

[stopcrazypp]

Love when people try to take an N=1 and make it apply to everything.

Meh, they failed on this livestream. The people here happy about it would have been moaning if it were for the other political party, that's what's really going on here.

Did you guys jump for joy in happiness when Starship failed to reach orbit? Probably.

This is Elon, the team will learn from the failure and fix it.

I doubt most people are here jumping in joy and neither did they do so for Starship failing to orbit. A lot still want Elon to run Tesla and were strong fans of him.

It's just the Twitter purchase and his shenanigans there have been like a trainwreck in slow motion and people hope he changes course, so things don't get worse (for Tesla).

 

[ohmman]

It doesn't scale like that. I literally build these kinds of things out on Private Clouds for customers.

They probably mis-allocated resources to one single part of the flow (i.e. intake server or something). I would be very very surprised if they had mis-allocated resources on the broadcast side.

I also worked in a high stress distributed real time streaming environment. We sandboxed high profile events repeatedly to ensure we could handle load. I agree it’s probably only a few simple things that went wrong but the preparation is what failed here.

 

[bkp_duke]

I also worked in a high stress distributed real time streaming environment. We sandboxed high profile events repeatedly to ensure we could handle load. I agree it’s probably only a few simple things that went wrong but the preparation is what failed here.

I also wonder, since I haven't listened, was it every participant having issues, or just one? I could totally see Elon doing this from his jet on Starlink and having a piss-poor connection (has happened on one of his streams before).

 

[JRP3]

#DeSaster trending on Twitter now

 

[stopcrazypp]

I also wonder, since I haven't listened, was it every participant having issues, or just one? I could totally see Elon doing this from his jet on Starlink and having a piss-poor connection (has happened on one of his streams before).

From the video linked above, they were broadcasting live from Twitter's Headquarters. Elon was sitting right next to David Sacks, who first took the mike. From the icons you can see Desantis was there also (although likely remotely). When Sacks kept dropping off, they tried to disconnect him (and Desantis dropped off also) and do everything with Elon's account, but that failed to stay up also.

From other reporting, this went on for about 20 minutes until they shut it down and reopened another stream with a new link using Sack's account and attendance dropped to about 275k peak.

Speculation from Sacks is the failure has something to do Elon's account having so many followers, although according to this CNBC report the new stream also had glitches, including in the middle of DeSantis's remarks:

Twitter glitches plague Ron DeSantis' much-hyped presidential announcement with Elon Musk

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign announcement plans evening were derailed by massive technical glitches on Elon Musk's Twitter.

www.google.com

NYTimes cites:

Inside Twitter, employees had been alarmed by Mr. Musk’s turn into politics and whether the social media site could handle the influx of traffic, three employees said. There was no planning for what are known as “site reliability issues” for the event with Mr. DeSantis, two of the people said, and workers were prepared to do whatever they could to keep the social network running.

Elon Musk’s Event With Ron DeSantis Exposes Twitter’s Weaknesses

What was supposed to be a crowning moment for Mr. Musk’s Twitter turned into a series of technical glitches.

www.nytimes.com

“Spaces was largely a prototype, not a finished product,” the former employee told CNN. “It’s a beta test that never ended.”

They added that Spaces relies on a mix of Twitter’s technical infrastructure and Amazon Web Services servers, “things that aren’t intended to handle Twitter-scale traffic.”

Twitter acquired the video streaming platform Periscope in 2015. The former employee said Twitter Spaces had been built on Periscope’s existing infrastructure and not integrated with Twitter properly — which likely contributed to Wednesday’s technical problems.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/05/24/tech/twitter-desantis-meltdown/index.html

From what I can gather, according to former employees, Spaces was not originally designed for large audiences in the first place (only on the order of hundreds, not hundreds of thousands) and the current employees didn't make advance preparations for the events (the way it was put, it seems they were only going to address issues as they pop up). So presumably they didn't do load/stress testing ahead of the event to ensure the platform would be able to handle expected load.

 

[30seconds]

I’m sure that Elon got valuable data on how to fix twitter for the next launch of some right wing huckster

 

[spacerfc]

...

And? Last time I checked, twitter is still up and running fine.

 

[spacerfc]

So the product has gotten worse recently? Maybe open your eyes to reality.

So the product got worse in 2019?

 

[JRP3]

So the product got worse in 2019?

You claim the drop had nothing to do with Twitter, so what was it? We know what happened in 2019, some of us know what happened in the last year.

 

[spacerfc]

Here's what the surveying company itself attributed to the drop back then:

That's just the surveying company making up a narrative without evidence, it's no different from the posts here.

There're also tons of people got upset about Elon keep Tesla running during the initial phase of the pandemic and his pandemic tweets, yet Tesla's ranking increased in 2020 and 2021.

So basically both Twitter and Tesla took a hit this year, which obviously you can plug your ears/cover your eyes and say it's all a coincidence, but I don't think objectively it makes sense to claim there was no negative affect.

I'm not the one making the claim, it was the surveyor itself!

The surveyor doesn't have more clue to the reason of the ranking than any of us, probably less since he wouldn't be following Tesla closely.

And no, Twitter didn't took a hit, if you actually look at the data, Twitter's ranking dropped by 5 places from 2021 to 2022, but this year its ranking has actually increased by 1. The fact that you got the incorrect impression that "Twitter also took a hit" by reading the surveyor's narrative just goes to show the narrative does not reflect the data at all.

 

[spacerfc]

You claim the drop had nothing to do with Twitter, so what was it? We know what happened in 2019, some of us know what happened in the last year.

I don't know, that's at least a term paper level of project to figure out, I don't have time and I don't think this ranking is relevant to TSLA (for example Axios itself admits Facebook has booming business with sinking "reputation")

If I need to analyze this, I would start with a sentiment analysis of main stream media articles about Tesla during the years.

 

[stopcrazypp]

You can go right ahead and take issue with the surveyor, but point is it's definitely on topic for this thread as such, given the surveyor is the one who tied it with Twitter.

Also both declines pointed out coincided with Elon's Twitter shenanigans.