Listen, if you are on Twitter and you haven't recently downloaded your data, you really need to. Like, now.

With the recent layoffs, I am willing to bet money that Twitter is going to implode very soon. Maybe not permanently, but dramatically, and very, very soon. Like "Liz Truss vs a head of lettuce" soon.

I base this quite simply on knowing the kind of shit my wife deals with every day, and listening to people on the news who have talked to Twitter employees about the site at all. Not only do I think there's some Thing that will cause Twitter to puke all over itself like a 19yo who just discovered wine coolers, but I think there are multiple Things, and they are not in the future. They are occurring right now.

They fired the people who know which software licenses are up for renewal next. They fired the people who know that this cache needs to be manually emptied, and yeah they should have written a script for it but there were so many other projects that it was easier for Bob to just manually do it on Friday mornings while on his 2nd cup of coffee. They fired the people who know to not poke this thing in that way bc this thing works in a non-standard fashion, but it works, so even though the software manual says "poke it," don't do that. They fired the people that know that this queue getting up over X number of tickets means it starts eating tickets and erasing half the data you need to fix issues, so you have to compress the ticket numbers at least every 2 days with an ad hoc utility script that Jane wrote after your team discovered this issue. Not all of the institutional knowledge is gone, but a lot of it is, and once that knowledge is gone, it's not coming back. Once that knowledge is gone, things unravel quickly at an institution that size.

Whatever happens on the social end of things - and that's a fucking mess - make your contingency plans for not losing touch with people now, and get downloads of your shit. Now. Not later. This will not fizzle out like LiveJournal. I'm willing to bet that it will simply cease to be one day soon. It might come back once it disappears.

I'm just not counting on it, and neither should you.

Fun thing: downloading an archive of your data from Twitter requires... Twitter to be working, and they say it’s going to take at least 24 hours for the zip file to become available (and I have NO doubt that this specification was made back when they had the full staffing load, rather than Jason the Intern, Eric the Crawler and Timmy the (actual) Dog who are probably all that remains of the previous staff... because all the good people who didn’t get sacked have almost certainly expedited their resignations). 

Get your data early, folks.  It will almost certainly take longer than advertised.

In case you're like me and didn't know how to download your Twitter data.

SREs and Ops people are the ones who keep sites up and running (naming convention for the job depends on the company and time period).

I worked in Ops for a company years ago that laid off about 1/2 the staff. Our team was the only one to only lose 1 person. Out of a team of about 15.

Because we kept the site running.

We were the ones who got woken up in the middle of the night when stuff went wrong. Not even for stuff that directly impacted users - at least right away. If it didn’t get fixed, it would impact users at some point, depending on the severity.

But we were protected from that layoff because we were essential to the site continuing to operate.

And Twitter just gutted the team that does that for them.

This is such a typical "the capitalist who bought the company doesn't understand how the product works, so he cut costs in a way that's going to destroy the product and therefore the company" fatality.

Thank God I got off Twitter when it first looked like he was gonna buy it. Enjoy your imploding empire you sack of shit