Hilarious how people here have tolerated all garbage and bugs from pre-Musk Twitter takeover for years and now they all complain about them now.
It is selective memory based on the current villain of the year to hate. Twitter has always been an outrage capital with a strong network effect. It is just that for the 220M+ daily active users, it is better than the sea of worse alternatives out there.
Many HNers here won’t admit it, but the reality is that network effects are real hence the difficulty in creating a viable alternative, No anecdote, short term hype or subjective responses such as ‘for me it is’ refutes that.
Even a cursory search of HN brings up absurd bugs[1]:
> Slightly related but very interesting: the 2010 Twitter bug where simply tweeting "Accept [username]" would automatically force them to follow you.
From what Musk has told us since he took over, and others it sounds like an unholy mess behind the scenes. From [2]:
> In Tuesday's hearing, which ran for more than two hours, Zatko painted a portrait of a company plagued by widespread security issues and unable to control the data it collects. Calm and measured, he stuck closely to his expertise, unpacking technical details of Twitter's systems with real-world examples of how information held by the company could be misused.
> "It's not far-fetched to say that an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all of the senators in this room," he warned.
From [3], a Twitter engineer on the work ethic:
> “If you’re not feeling it, you can take a few days off,” he was recorded saying. “People have taken months off.”
> “I basically went to work like four hours a week last quarter,” he added. “And it’s just how it works in our company.”
Which tells me a lot. And should we forget about this doozy from Dorsey's days in charge?[4]
> Oh, and while he was in charge, there was no backup of Twitter’s database.
I could go on for a long time but it's clear that people are being selective with their memories.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16942844
[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/09/13/1122671582/twitter-whistleblo...
[3] https://nypost.com/2022/05/17/twitter-engineer-says-commie-s...
[4] https://fortune.com/2015/09/30/jack-dorsey-twitter-ceo-fired...
Even if I myself hadn't experienced more serious bugs than those prior to the takeover, it'd still seem a stretch.
Their traditional largest issue is their terrible ad targeting but that's not gotten better.
> Twitter has told an undisclosed number of users their private messages may have been leaked to third-parties for more than a year.
> The software “bug”, which has since been fixed, involved direct messages between users and businesses that offer customer services via Twitter.
> "The issue has persisted since May 2017," Twitter said.
They did have problems like state actors getting spies hired and leaking data directly of course.