And before that, Twitter tried to appease a blue-haired 'Trigglypuff' mob, with questionable economical success.
But the assessment was that there were way too many people to solve the task of running Twitter. And Twitter is still running.
(Some of that time it was trying to serve me intranet pages.)
Reddit, Twitter, Facebook all had outages in the beginning all the time, it's not a deal breaker for heavily network effect products.
So really, yes, getting rid of some staff has caused outages, but it's also sped up development of new features, and not really affected usage.
Like if I make a wrench and one year I make 50% less of them I wouldn't say I developed a new feature. If I created a slightly different wrench I might call it a new feature but just doing more or less of something I already have isn't _new_.
So to circle back, what new features has twitter developed?
In this case it is still happening because that's mostly bugs, and they definitely aren't fixing the bugs. Also, because some of the signal comes from how many people have blocked you, and personally repellent right-wingers get frequently blocked!
At least be intellectually honest. Please. I know you hate Elon, but at least consider the actual facts. (This is more change than twitter did for 15 years before Elon)
Are you counting the fact that those are now different UI tabs as a new "feature"? Twitter always had the ability to switch between chronological feed of just accounts you followed, and an algo-curated feed of those tweets + other tweets you may have interest in, sorted by interest rank - that's exactly what "for you" is now.
> blue checks
Really not sure what you're claiming here. Verification was already a thing, as was Twitter Blue (long form tweets for paid accounts) - the only "feature" elmo introduced is ambiguity about what that check represents - is it someone who has spent the last 15 years on twitter as a notable public presence with a verifiable identity? or some rando with $8 on a prepaid credit card? Who knows, now.
> unlimited video
to count this as a feature the video player has to actually work reliably. it does not, by any metric. endless buffer, glitching, skipping with no way to reload lost chunks. the 10s videos were an annoying limitation but they just worked.
> This is more change than twitter did for 15 years before Elon
Circles. Spaces. Communities. Community Notes. Co-tweets. Alt text tagging as a first-class citizen of image posting. User tipping options. NFT profile pics. These are all features released in the last 5 years of twitter before elmo took over.
If we're talking about intellectual honesty let's apply it evenly.
Remember when he said they'd turn fleets (Snapchat) back on months ago and didn't?
And no need to spend 44,000,000,000$ on twitter if all you want is to destroy the brand and replace it with a letter brand that's ungoogleable. But hey... what do I know.
I mean, I agree this is Elon's dream. But so is SpaceX and Tesla which he did quite well on.
Also - you're quote reminds of the oft cited henry ford quote:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Google didn't start adding the ability to do flights in the search engine because nobody was using that. People love one stop shopping.
Honestly I can't follow the example at all. What does banking (one thing billionaire genius Musk wants to do on twitter) have to do with sending 140 character text posts? I don't see any kind of connection there at all.
Meanwhile Flight Search is a type of Search. The name kind of gives it away.
It better to think of WeChat like an iPhone as opposed to Twitter. So rather than opening up the Amazon App you can navigate to JD's store on WeChat. Obviously if you don't use WeChat / Twitter then them gaining a app store-lite feature isn't useful to you but cross-selling is a successful practice.
I'm sure JCPenny / etc would love if you could buy on Twitter though. Replace ad fees with just a simple %-age cut of the sale.
Can you imagine all the time and money that was put into staffing Twitter? There is value to an organization and its unwritten human network upon which it operates. Then it was just blown away over night to appease some beanie wearing mouth breathers on the platform