[HN Gopher] X Engineering Year Retrospective
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X Engineering Year Retrospective
Author : sirobg
Score : 36 points
Date : 2023-10-27 21:44 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| outside1234 wrote:
| "Shrank site traffic by 80%, yielding cost savings and cratering
| the company as a whole"
|
| I hope everyone there is getting paid in advance for their
| work...
| tymekpavel wrote:
| I'm curious if you have a source for that? There has been lots
| of speculation on how much X traffic has reduced, but the best
| data I can find basically says that it might've dropped from
| the 2nd most visited website to the 5th most visited website in
| the world (according to SimilarWeb).
| kenjackson wrote:
| The numbers I see are declines in traffic of 15-20% with ad
| revenue declines of more than 50%.
|
| https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/musk-twitter-x-
| acquisi...
|
| I think for many sites this would be pretty horrible. I feel
| like the bar for X is that it still runs.
| tomohawk wrote:
| I've seen this in other places I've worked. Too many people and
| too much money to spend can be a lot worse than too few and not
| enough.
| VHRanger wrote:
| Yes, twitter is doing so well currently as a business
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's garbage, yes, but all these companies overhired for
| years and it was a no-brainer that they all needed to fix
| that. Hard to criticize that decision in principle. Though
| the execution of it seemed like a clown show.
| marcinzm wrote:
| If your main focus is growth or potential growth then
| inefficiencies are fine if they allow increased product
| velocity. A unified platform for N features is more efficient
| but communication overheads will cut velocity on improvements
| for all those N features. Of course if growth is no longer a
| focus that's a different story.
| imperialdrive wrote:
| That project must be so much fun to work on. I'd pay just to
| shadow it.
| swimwiththebeat wrote:
| I'm inclined to believe that they consolidated their code across
| a lot of their microservices and simplified their architecture
| since that was stressed a lot from the moment Musk acquired
| Twitter. But we also can't really verify or disprove it.
|
| I'm a bit confused about their so-called improvements to video
| recommendation quality and bot detection. I've seen a lot of
| sentiment from people that they see more bots, hate speech, and
| irrelevant content on their timelines. Maybe what I'm hearing is
| just anecdotal evidence or stories in a bubble?
|
| The Sacramento data center migration to Portland is an
| entertaining story detailed here[1]. Here's the Hacker News
| thread on it[2].
|
| They have a GPU supercompute cluster?? It seems like they have
| the capability to do training and inference with state-of-the-art
| algorithms at massive scales then. Why have Twitter's
| recommendations and ad revenue (even before the acquisition) been
| so poor then?
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/elon-musk-moved-twitter-
| serv...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37470110
| marcinzm wrote:
| >They have a GPU supercompute cluster?? It seems like they have
| the capability to do training and inference with state-of-the-
| art algorithms at massive scales then. Why have Twitter's
| recommendations and ad revenue (even before the acquisition)
| been so poor then?
|
| In general, assuming you are in some sort of decent state
| better ML doesn't make your revenue 50% better. It makes it 5%
| better per year.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I'm a bit confused about their so-called improvements to
| video recommendation quality and bot detection.
|
| Let's not dismiss the possibility that they're just lying. I
| don't think they're trustworthy enough to be given the benefit
| of the doubt.
| insanitybit wrote:
| > Among the changes we made was a shift of all media/blob
| artifacts out of the cloud, which reduced our overall cloud data
| storage size by 60%, and separately, we succeeded in reducing
| cloud data processing costs by 75%.
|
| Huh. I feel like that's the one place to _not_ leave cloud. 90%
| of why I want to use AWS is S3.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| That's why Musk is forward thinking, leading the charge for us
| techies to follow.
| smaps wrote:
| Cloud storage is expensive, I'm willing to bet that's a lot of
| money saved at their scale.
| cratermoon wrote:
| "Shutdown the Sacramento data center and re-provisioned the 5,200
| racks and 148,000 servers, which generated more than $100M in
| annual savings."
|
| Yeah, about that.. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/elon-musk-
| moved-twitter-serv...
|
| "Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket
| knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the
| floor, which allowed him to pry open the floor panels. He then
| crawled under the server floor himself, used the knife to jimmy
| open an electrical cabinet, pulled the server plugs, and waited
| to see what happened. Nothing exploded. The server was ready to
| be moved."
| rabf wrote:
| Changelog: https://twitter.com/cb_doge/status/1717668534078034024
| csteubs wrote:
| I hope their Trust & Security team has a roadmap that prioritizes
| topic and thread-jacking. The advent of GPT and their recent
| changes to creator compensation has created a massive drive for
| engagement by any means; the results are fairly predictable.
| Clicking on any trending topic usually surfaces completely
| unrelated videos with that topic's hashtags (and all of the other
| trending topic hashtags) appended to the tweet.
|
| Then you have the "content creators" who use GPT to summarize or
| add details to a post from a larger content aggregator in hopes
| of bandwagoning engagement. I see a lot of this type of behavior
| from popular History-focused accounts and the mega-accounts that
| post engagement bait content (think canned, "desert island"-type
| questions and polls). It's less malicious but certainly
| reinforces cynicism towards the state of Twitter/X and the
| broader social web.
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