SocialMedia / Technology

the bloodletting has begun (again) at twitter

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An old Twitter error message from the mid-2010s

The Interwebs are filled with the top story that Twitter’s former head of engineering, Foad Dabiri, resigned a day after the DeSantis DeSaster on Twitter Spaces. Dabiri said a lot of nice things on the way out, but the timing of his leaving is no coincidence. Musk will fire people at the drop of a hat. I’m pretty sure that if Dabiri didn’t come to the conclusion to resign on his own that Musk probably offered him the choice of resigning or being fired. What makes Dabiri’s departure even worse is his relative longevity at Twitter; he’s been employed at Twitter for four years, which is almost forever in San Francisco’s tech field.

I keep reading numerous stories that touch on the fact that Musk has now fired over 80% of the staff he inherited with the purchase of Twitter. With a deeply gutted staff and high-level personnel with institutional knowledge leaving, there’s no way in my not-so-humble-opinion that Twitter will fully recover from Musk’s takeover. That, and the fact that Musk want’s to create ‘X’ on top of Twitter’s ashes means that the world will be treated to a long slow slide into irrelevance, to be sold at a loss to someone else.

The question many have asked is why Twitter Spaces were used at all? Many who once worked for Twitter have charitably described Spaces as “janky” and “beta quality” code. Unfortunately Musk doesn’t care about code and service quality as he’s demonstrated with Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta, which has been in some form of alpha or beta release since FSD’s first iteration, Autopilot, was announced for pre-purchase in October 2014. Since that time releases have been pushed out irregularly to all Tesla cars that can support it. At least Twitter Spaces crashing won’t put pedestrians in mortal danger the way FSD in a Tesla would if it malfunctions.

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