Musk is being revealed as an emperor with no clothes. He was originally lauded because he had great ideas, put his money where his mouth was, and delivered some great products. And yeah, his companies needed to be a grind to succeed where so many have failed (Tesla being the only American car startup to succeed in something like 100 years). But going into a respected tech company like Twitter and gutting 80% of the workforce, acting like you know better than the engineers who built the thing, and rolling out and back policies and features without any real plan or thought, is showing that Elon believes he can just rinse and repeat his grindcore/dictatorial culture on any company and it will be successful. Something like Twitter with hundreds of millions of users and most of them non-paying, with governments and big brands depending on it, that runs a lot of the public discourse, can’t withstand this bull in a china shop management mentality. We all are seeing this unfold and these posts are shorthand ways of calling this out. It doesn’t need to be said in such great detail. The upvotes are an acknowledgement from the rest of us that we see it too.

> But going into a respected tech company like Twitter and gutting 80% of the workforce, acting like you know better than the engineers who built the thing, and rolling out and back policies and features without any real plan or thought, is showing that Elon believes he can just rinse and repeat his grindcore/dictatorial culture on any company and it will be successful.

I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty incredible POC. I don't know if you can separate the chaos based on erratic decision making and Musk personality. But I imagine some tech execs running successful simple products with huge eng head count behind it looks at this and thinks that an engineering product doesn't necessarily need thousands of engineers. I think the next few years you'll see a huge reduction in head count across the board. And on top of that, the amount of change and experimentation (some or most of it bad) can continue with a much lower headcount.

> We all are seeing this unfold and these posts are shorthand ways of calling this out

HN isn't a place to vote your sentiment like a popularity contest. It's a place for discussion. So if you post the equivalent of "space man bad", and someone does believe, yes, space man is bad, he shouldn't necessarily upvote it. It's just low quality low information post

> I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty incredible POC.

Twitter may have had some bloat, but it also had excellent SREs and solid reliability engineering. Nobody who knew about that expected it to collapse overnight.

But serious failures will happen, as the graceful degradation turns into not-so-graceful outages, new features break things in unexpected ways, and the remaining infra staff burn out. It’s just a matter of time.

I'd love to hear some predictions or metrics to look out for in the next few months/years. Tech valuations and free money have been frothy for so long, no one bothered asking what is actually needed to run a service at a meaningful scale, but we may have the answer soon.

I'm reminded of corporate raider Carl Ichan firing 12 floors at of people after spending some time and not being able to figure out what they do. The company was ACM (manufacturing railcars), about 30 years ago. Turns out those 12 floors of people were actually costing jobs in other place just to support them. Well he fired all 12 floors and nothing changed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSatPoD2W-o

> Something like Twitter with hundreds of millions of users and most of them non-paying, with governments and big brands depending on it..

And yet its on the path to bankruptcy because of years of poor management and failure to capitalize on its value to those brands.

There's not really a lot to say because it's Musk's behavior that's "low quality". A debate won't change anyone's mind, either, as we've seen that there's no consistent position to defend. It's just whims. So all that's left is to point and laugh.

It's because Musk is commonly defended, and borderline worshiped across most of HN. The downfall of twitter is the perfect opportunity for a wake-up call. And that's why this type of comment is more and more visible.

So you're saying that low quality low information comments are "sticking it to him and his supporters" as opposed to a more thought out comment regarding the policy or direction? And this will "wake up" his supporters by calling him a narcissist and thin skinned for the umpteenth time (in the same comment thread!)

I'd say more that there have been years of fawning comments with no value over Elon being a genius... Those low quality comments are turning to follow the trend to Elon hate. Call it virtual signaling, following the crowd, echo chamber. It happens. I see the same thing for the hype cycle with kube and other tech cycles as well. It's actually an indirect benefit for me with hn as it's usually ahead of the hype cycle.

Yes, the "he's a genius" posts are equally as cringy. As were the "its a private platform, build your own if you don't like it posts" circa earlier last year were awful too. The answer isn't to do the same thing but switch sides.

I think that's an ungenerous read. I read it more as "there is built up frustration here around this guy, so you'll see more of this venting right now." And that makes sense to me. I don't think the comment is constructive either, but I get where it's coming from. Whatever the standards are here, we're still humans.

maybe low-quality comments will drive you to consider the nature of Reality, it could be a game-changer for you. wide-eyed curiosity, steel man, high quality good faith sanctimonious snobbery, I am human not a bot.

We were all obviously hoping for interesting technology. In stead free advertisement is replaced by no advertisement? Even if all ad-tech would be terrible there must be 1000 less terrible applicable ideas of which 900 unoriginal.

Everything twitter reminds me of its early days when people argued we didn't need RSS anymore. How I mocked the platformists with the hypothetical. Had I told them exactly what is going on right now I wouldn't have believed it myself.

Maybe other social services will/should follow the example? I hear the new RSS spec will ban linking to other RSS feeds.

At one time that might have been true. To say so now means you have a pretty distorted view of how sentiment has changed.

> This may be too meta, but there are a number of topics where I find the HN comments really low quality.

I agree. I'm not sure why, but there's something about Musk's behavior that really irks a lot of HN readers.

To be honest, for some reason I can't pinpoint [0] I feel a tremendous sense of schadenfreude against Musk. Hopefully that hasn't affected my comment posts too much.

[0] I'm somewhat politically conservative, so I don't think it's that. I'll have to reflect on this.

> there's something about Musk's behavior that really irks a lot of HN readers

Hypocrisy. Cruelty. Lack of empathy.

… Hype. Fanboys&fangirls.

Not really schadenfreude for me, just disappointment lately.

Oh come off it already.

Those people never had a fall from grace, there was never a point to commenting on them like that.

>The Musk comments are ridiculously low quality

What makes it low quality if he's deserving of ridicule?

Because it's not adding anything of interest and we already know what kind of person he is.

Musk gets this kind of scathing critique because of the baseline. Many people here believed the hype, so they feel obliged to shake it off and shout it from the rooftops.

Putin on the other hand is just a murderous dictator which is basically the consensus, so nobody feels the need to repeat this.

Plenty of idiots still following Putin and carrying water for him.

Putin's enemies are statistically more likely to jump out of hotel rooms on higher floors than Musk's.

I can't wait until they return the favor.

> I don't remember posts about Putin, someone who's actually dangerous, getting such ridiculous replies

Well, Putin never had a fan base on HN. There wasn't anyone arguing "Putin is actually the savior of humanity". There's no "I told you so" aspect to Putin.

Unfortunately, Putin does have a fanbase on HN.

There are some Russian users of course. But the contingent seems pretty small compared to the Musk fans.

That's a lot of words to say "I agree with Elon Musk's Twitter shenanigans"

Yeah but it’s high quality because it uses a lot of words.

Elon Musk is a deeply unserious person so it should come as little surprise that he attracts unserious discussion.

Exactly. Most people, including Putin, don't engage in the same level of unserious behavior that Elon Musk does.

If you troll everyone, sack loads of people, release internal private emails in a bizarre push to manufacture a right wing conspiracy theory that isn’t couched in reality, you own Twitter and you act like a jerk stopping free linking on it, I’m not sure there’s much left to say really. Musk has gone from being someone who I thought was fairly decent and pushing humanity forward to someone who is a thin skinned conspiracy theorist trying to f-the-libs. I’m starting to think that for all the progress Tesla and SpaceX have made maybe we shouldn’t have billionaires at all, it’s too much power for individuals.