I used to run Clara.io. It was a SaaS-based 3D editor. We shifted priorities back in 2015 but we were able to keep Clara.io running until December 2022 with less than one person investment per year. Details: http://www.cgchannel.com/2022/12/clara-io-is-closing-down/
Keeping a well designed website running isn't a major investment. Evolving a product though is.
I think the jury is out whether Twitter is going to continue to being a going concern. It could very well a major success.
But the fact that it didn't just crash and burn isn't that surprising.
I mean, if all mechanics and car designers and the entire auto industry were Thanos-snapped, my car would keep running for probably 6 months. There wouldn't be any new cars, though?
You don't have the headcount to keep the service(s) running. You have the headcount to develop new features and services. It still remains to be seen how the reduction will effect Twitter in the long term.
Perhaps they should only have headcount to keep the service running. Twitters value proposition is still exactly the same as it was 10 years ago, and removing any new features since would not be noticed by most. Developing new features once the initial success has come could be considered making it worse if anything (e.g. reddit). Isn't the lack of new features one of the reasons we like HN?
> Perhaps they should only have headcount to keep the service running.
These companies are generally valued as they are on the expectation of future growth. If Google said “yeah, we’re just going to keep everything as it is, forever, on a skeleton crew”, its investors would _freak out_, and rightly so.
Twitter made only very small, incremental product improvements in its ~10 years as a public company. It may as well round down to zero. That's one of the reasons its been gutted by Musk and co. Trimming the fat was the right decision there.
There's always bloat somewhere, but some of that bloat is there to allow your company to weather unexpected occurrences.
Sure you have two extra SREs you don't "need", and your HR department might be slightly overstaffed. But then one critical employee gets cancer and is off work for 6 months, and another employee has to go on maternity leave, and you don't have any extra employees in that department anymore. Hope you didn't fire your bloat!
That depends on how you define "running fine". It wasn't running fine for 3rd party app developers and now they are cut off completely. DMs and like counts have been screwy ever since the layoff. There have been major outages, whole days where nobody could log in, other days where people were forced logged out. It's only "running fine" I'm the sense of how Twitter ran 10 years ago.
> still running fine is the elephant in the room here
No, it is not. Twitter had more down times in the last weeks than ever before. Regularly the timeline is not loading and since a few days the viewer count is broken.
