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| Ask HN: Twitter was unanimously predicted to implode. Nothing happened. Why? | ||
| recommended by 1 user | 2023 | 6 points by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | big tech | original thread | | ||
Twitter laid off 50% of its staff. Principal and staff engineers made lengthy Twitter threads predicting the collapse of the system given its nuance, complexity, and how their positions were key to its survival. Pundits predicted that the site would likely not survive a few weeks, that there was no fat to trim at the company and all the workers let go were essential for daily operations. Now that it's been three months, what happened to the dreary prognosis? Where is the continuous downtime? Where is the permanent feature freeze? Where is the imminent collapse we were told about? I noticed that nobody is talking about how none of those predictions seem to have manifested. Why? | ||
| One user recommended this thread. What they said: |
| rvz Aug 28, 2023 | on: We Don’t Need a New Twitter | context |
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Exactly. Whilst many here are still screaming about Twitter / X collapsing with yet 220M+ daily active users. Their predictions were quite deranged:
Prediction 1:
November 2022 was meant to be the time when Twitter / X the social network and service was 'predicted' to implode in the coming weeks after the layoffs [0][1] and not be up and running globally.
Reality: In reality, it is still up and running and working today with hundreds of millions of users using it right now.
Prediction 2:
Threads was supposed to "hollow out Twitter in extremely rapid fashion" [2] and one predicted to give it a couple of months for Threads to do just that.
Reality: Well, we have given it two months and Threads is the one that is hollowing itself out in "extremely rapid fashion" and lost 80% of its users after signing up to the service. [3]
Prediction 3:
The outages Twitter / X had would make the majority of users migrating elsewhere and they will stick around on the new service.
Reality:
Anyone who knows about network effects knows that obviously didn't happen and was less effective since even when Twitter / X went down the users would rather wait for it to get back up than to fully migrate off the network.
Conclusion:
So you see at this point we gave it enough time for the Twitter / X predictions by the doomsday folks and and it seems that all of those predictions were alarmist false prophesies by a few extremely angry techies who won't admit they were incorrect.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580669
[3] https://gizmodo.com/threads-has-lost-more-than-80-of-daily-a...