People dramatically underestimate (or are outright unaware of) the effect of Elon's takeover of twitter had on the tech industry. Twitter needed to collapse, so everyone would see what firing 80% of the workers would do to a tech company.

That collapse didn't happen.

Twitter went from being the heartbeat of the internet to X, the second Facebook for your parents to repost catturd2 posts and Pepe memes on.

Their ops teams are probably ground into dust.

For real - this made me laugh, because I had the immediate exact thought. Oh boy

Trying to keep alive 30yr old tech stacks and still pass security reviews, while doing stuff like manually compiling and packaging python 2 and jre6 tools. Ouch.

(sorry, replied to wrong comment!)

I've taken money to create software for most of three decades and I don't think I've ever actually worked on software that needed the people who created it to be near it while it was running, once it was working.

I think the record single instance uptime on a customer site was most of a decade, running a TV station.

yeah, the work I'm proudest of are the projects I've been able to walk away from that still function

They don't - not the same way that farms or factories need laborers. Some small fraction of your software workers need to be around to handle the running software and hardware in case of failure. In the context of union bargaining power, the difference is important.

If the factory workers don't show up for work, your factory's output immediately drops to 0%. If none of your software engineers show up, most of your company's code will continue to run, some of it in a degraded state, for a while. (How much depends on your sub-industry, and how much you're outsourcing to AWS). And if you can get 5% of your workers to show up, you might be able to handle 90% of the on-call load.

Didn’t twitter get 3/4 people laid off? Seems to still work as of time of writing (x.com).

They cut quite a lot projects and side products (from tweet deck to different statistics and insights to ads), some other things they scaled down a lot (in the past one could read everything without being signed in, now they limit to sign in users, which certainly takes a lot of load and thus need to keep systems running)

Also initially they had a lot of breakage.

Also they made an entire separate company X.ai to do Grok and some other stuff which certainly involved hiring people.

Indeed when you have fewer people you generally reduce scope

Looking at Twitter's valuation, revenue, user count, uptime, new feature launches and really any other metric since the big layoff I wouldn't exactly consider the company thriving.

The claim isn’t that they’re thriving. It’s that it works. I’m not sure on any figures since it isn’t a public company. Where are you getting your numbers?

More bots than ever, bots can be interesting , but outside the political intrigue behind their commissioning these bots are not very interesting.

And, for now at least, advertisers on twitter can't sell products to these bots. So lost money.