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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Has anyone else noticed Twitter being really buggy since Elon Musk took over? It's worse than Facebook Messenger. For example, it has had trouble loading images for the last day. I don't get why people have concluded that you can fire all these people and have everything be fine. The content moderation is better, but Twitter as a piece of software is obviously much worse now.

I'm not saying that means firing those people was a bad idea. Maybe having software work perfectly is not worth the cost, and the stock market's reaction to the mass layoffs at FAANG suggests they weren't pulling their weight. But that brings me to a related question. Why was it so common up until recently for people to say that, despite the very high salaries of software engineers in California, they were actually very underpaid given the amount they made for their employers? This now appears not to be even close to true. Why did people think this? Was it just some dumb profit divided by headcount calculation?

I've encountered bugs on Twitter since Elon took over, including images not loading a couple days ago IIRC, but I haven't noticed Twitter being worse in this regard since Elon took over. Maybe there are some actual stats on this, but my experience of Twitter pre-Elon was that we would get various minor outages and/or weird nagging issues every few months that would usually take a day to get fixed, and I haven't noticed this rate changing post-Elon.

The only significant QOL issue I've noticed is the enforcement of the official Twitter app on Android, which also does an absolutely awful job at maintaining your position on the timeline. The amount of times I've seen a Tweet and wanted to look at it more carefully, only to have it forever lost to the abyss because the Twitter app decided to invisibly refresh my feed and force me to jump to the top is uncountable, and this severely negatively affects my Twitter experience.

This is now the third day of images not loading for me.