Whither Twitter? - Updated

Now that Elon Musk owns Twitter, what can we expect for Twitter's future? According to one engineer still working at Twitter, the future looks dim.

 “Sometimes you’ll get notifications that are a little off,” says one engineer currently working at Twitter, who’s concerned about the way the platform is reacting after vast swathes of his colleagues who were previously employed to keep the site running smoothly were fired. (That last sentence is why the engineer has been granted anonymity to talk for this story.) After struggling with downtime during its “Fail Whale” days, Twitter eventually became lauded for its team of site reliability engineers, or SREs. Yet this team has been decimated in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover. “It’s small things, at the moment, but they do really add up as far as the perception of stability,” says the engineer.

The small suggestions of something wrong will amplify and multiply as time goes on, he predicts—in part because the skeleton staff remaining to handle these issues will quickly burn out. “Round-the-clock is detrimental to quality, and we’re already kind of seeing this,” he says. 

I've seen some signs of degradation already. Most notably, several times I've tried to like a tweet but the button did nothing. (I use likes for bookmarking tweets because the Talon app I use on my phone doesn't support bookmarks). 

More serious is the loss of identity verification for the famous blue badge. Last night, I saw two cases where well-known people had their identity faked. Here's one example. This is causing me (and many others) to lose trust in the platform. If they don;'t get this issue straightened out soon, I think it will doom the platform faster than anything else. Perhaps I should have titled this post "Wither Twitter". 

Update: Here's a good article from Mobile Syrup that goes into more detail about what's going with the fake accounts. They have a serious problem and if they don't start offering verified accounts, Twitter will be dead in short order because nobody will be able to trust anything they see on the platform.