Twitter Spaces groans under weight of Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk's egos Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's plan to hold an "historic" US presidential campaign launch on a Twitter Spaces stream went about as well as you'd expect on a platform slowly collapsing under the weight of its former CEO's hubris. Twitter Spaces, an audio-only streaming service, melted in the face of DeSantis-drawn crowds, with …
From the article:
One of the suggestions that Twitch may have for Twitter is to not fire more than 80 percent of your staff and cut your engineering team to a mere 550 people who are worried they won't be able to maintain the service.
Duh!
Perhaps if Elon weren't so busy licking right-wing ass, he might have the wherewithal to develop the infrastructure in his toy to allow him to keep licking right-wing ass.
Also, there was this:
We asked Twitter for an explanation of its performance yesterday, but in lieu of a helpful response only received the poop emoji.
Actually this is an accurate, low-bandwidth response. He is unambiguously stating that the performance was shit.
And stated in a way that will probably not "melt the servers".
Don't turn blue! Don't hold your breath! You might get a response from Apple before Twatter replies to Reg.com about the short comings... And I doubt all of the viewers were there because they support Ron De-sanitary napkin... Some were there with popcorn enjoying Twatter implode! I'm sure some of those viewers will post here with their experience!
...a single-emoji useless/unhelpful response (Twit), or no response at all (Apple)?
Depends on what you're going for. Both an emoji or silence (which can be truly golden) beat the profanity-laden tirade both company's CEOs probably desire to direct toward El Reg.
To reframe it as "what's the worst possible response to an inquiry?" I pick the silence. Knowing in advance that a poop emoji awaits reduces the shock of such a response and is more bearable than the anxiousness of no reply at all (there is still some anxiousness, even when you expect no response).
> stream reached a peak of 600,000 people
All trying to listen to the same audio-only stream. Why, that is over one tenth the audience for The Archers, who only manage 13 minutes per evening, not even every evening in the week!
What an amazing time to be alive, to be able to witness such a feat! What genius, to be able to bring us these marvels of the modern age!
(/s ooobbviously)
The Archers stlll going? I remember Morse used to listen at least to a Saturday(?) evening synopsis but I would have both were long dead and buried.
For a broadcast only event 600,000 listeners is more typically crystal set generation. How many hundreds of millions watched the recent costumed poncing about in the Abbey?
Audio only streaming of voices is very low bandwidth, so for it to fall over with barely half a million listeners is some really piss poor infrastructure. ESPN+ sees audience levels higher than that watching full HD video streams of live events, and Netflix/Disney/Apple/Amazon/etc. may not be doing live events (much) but they support many millions of simultaneous streams. I think Amazon exceeded 10 million viewers for some of its live Thursday NFL games last fall, with many of them watching a 4K stream!
Musk is finding out the hard way you can't bully and fire your way to decent infrastructure, but the good news for him is that as people flee Twitter the infrastructure will have to support fewer and fewer simultaneous users.
Making himself a polarizing figure will be a disaster for Tesla, especially given that the people who have been buying electric cars are almost all on the left since the right wing in the US is still denying global warming is a thing. He won't be selling many of those goofy looking trucks to Trump voters in rural America, that's for sure!
It probably already is - supposedly Tesla's long order backlog evaporated in a matter of months, and they did a half dozen price cuts until recently bringing prices back up, to rebalance supply and demand lest they end up having to cut production. They certainly won't be building all those factories all over the world he was talking about, the demand - especially outside the US - will simply not materialize as he had predicted and he has no one to blame but himself.
There's nothing wrong with a CEO or a company having political views and expressing them, but they have to be prepared for the consequences. This thing with Musk seems to have come out of left field, he had been pretty apolitical over the years. Not sure why he decided to tell everyone who he is, and I'll bet a lot of Tesla shareholders wish they'd had advance notice so they could have sold their shares.
This doesn't help either
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/02/climate-change-denialism-flooding-twitter-scientists
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/5/23494220/elon-musk-twitter-climate-misinformation-rise-analysis
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/14/climate-crisis-deniers-target-scientists-abuse-musk-twitter
They've just shown some of it on the news. What an embarrassment, hearing Musk giving it all the "is it still working?" stuff was priceless.
It may well have been a clusterfuck because he'd sacked so many staff, but I'm guessing that a lot more are going to be fired after this.
This is a blatant right winger who has bought a communication platform with a reach that Murdoch's setup can only dream about. Now Musk has clearly come out as as raw right wing as you can get away with without being locked up 18 years for seditious conspiracy he will attract all the nutters - and the money from the gazillionaires still sponsoring these wack jobs. That is the only way I can see him get *any* return for the $44bn that he and Twitter are on the hook for in loan and interest charges.
Basically, the clear and present danger to the US has jumped from Trump to Musk, who (a) has a much larger fan base who by now are already indoctrinated enough to overlook deficiencies and who (b) is smart enoigh to only go for President by proxy so he can continue to avoid scrutiny (but finally maybe get a proxy to lose the babysitting of his Tesla tweets).
Do not underestmate this - Musk is converting Twitter into truth social, f=but for the people HE wants to wi the election. And as far as I can tell, that is no longer Trump, probably because Trump will be spending too much time in court..
Twitter engineering boss quits after DeSantis launch glitches
From that BBC article:
> However, Mr Dabiri said: "Working with @elonmusk has been highly educational, and it was enlightening to see how his principles and vision are shaping the future of this company."
Now, that is a carefully worded reply (and who can blame him - he quit rather than be pushed, Musk is probably outraged that Elon[1] didn't get the chance to defenestrate and would set his rabid legal ferrets onto any more informative statement).
[1] Come on, you know Musk refers to himself in the third party as any good mook character does; although he imagines himself as poor misunderstood Galactus, big space ships, Silver herald (albeit with broken windows) and all, when we see "Musk smash".
There's a story in the Mediterranean/Middle East/Central Asia area,about someone variously called the Mullah Nasrudin or Goha/Juha/Hoja/Giuffa, who had a donkey, and a distressing lack of finances. So he cut back on his donkey's feed day by day, until it fell over and died of starvation. "Now that's a pity," he was heard to remark. "I could've got it living on nothing at all!"
Meanwhile i expect Elon Musk'll keep pushing at his gaskrankinstation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4topF9qZSjs&ab_channel=FlyingNunRecords
but I think it's mostly dead by now.
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