Twitter Spaces groans under weight of Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk's egos
- Reference: 1685032988
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/05/25/twitter_spaces_ron_desantis/
- Source link:
Twitter Spaces, an audio-only streaming service, melted in the face of DeSantis-drawn crowds, with technical glitches leading to minutes of dead air, feedback and hushed whispers exchanged between hosts Musk and fellow PayPal alum David Sacks, and the nervous hum of assistants.
A [1]highlight reel of the disaster posted to Reddit captured some of the most entertaining bits. Favorites include frantic whispers of "now it's quiet" after the microphone feedback cleared, signaling to Sacks it was his time to speak. As it turned out, the entrepreneur didn't get through his introduction before technical issues caused the stream to go dead.
[2]
"We've got so many people here that we're kinda melting the servers," Sacks said, "which is a good sign," he added, before launching into effusive praise of Musk's purchase of Twitter until the steam crashed again. "There's 382,000 people on," an unidentified person said on the stream as it came back online.
[3]
[4]
According to [5]The Washington Post , the stream reached a peak of 600,000 people while speakers, including DeSantis and Sacks, disappeared from the call amid all the technical difficulties.
"We've never seen this before," Musk [6]remarked during the stream, which doesn't bode well for his [7]predictions that Twitter will have more than one billion users by 2024.
[8]
Like any bad Teams meeting, after around 20 minutes of failures to get the stream started with Musk's account as the host, the group jumped to a new Twitter Spaces hosted by Sacks, but only around 150,000 people bothered tuning in by the time DeSantis started speaking, WP reported.
Sacks was shuttled to Fox News after the event, where host Laura Ingraham asked him what exactly happened. "We had a million people simultaneously trying to get into a Twitter space," Sacks claimed.
Sacks [9]said Twitter Spaces had never had that level of traffic before, with his estimate of the previous largest stream topping out at around 100,000 watchers.
The town square that couldn't
If 382,000 people are able to crash a Twitter Space, perhaps Musk and company need to place a call to video streaming site Twitch, which boasts that its average site-wide viewership at any given moment is around [10]2.5 million people.
[11]SCOTUS rules Google and Twitter didn't contribute to terrorist attacks
[12]Ex-Twitter sextet sues Elon Musk for 'stiffing' them on severance
[13]Australia asks Twitter how it will mod content without staff, gets ghosted
[14]Elon Musk finally finds 'someone foolish enough to take the job' of Twitter CEO
For those who may argue that those 2.5 million Twitchers weren't watching the same stream, that's not necessarily true. As of December of last year, several Twitch streamers have racked up [15]concurrent viewers in the millions . We asked Twitch how it manages to record millions of stream viewers without melting its own servers, but didn't immediately hear back.
One of the suggestions that Twitch may have for Twitter is to not fire [16]more than 80 percent of your staff and cut your engineering team to a mere [17]550 people who are worried they won't be able to maintain the service.
[18]
Twitter has also been [19]bouncing its backend between datacenters, which caused at least a couple of glitches and outages earlier this year. With Musk's modus operandi appearing to center on [20]not paying bills to cut costs, the bird site may simply not have the infrastructure left to handle a large – or even moderate, by internet standards – influx of users.
We asked Twitter for an explanation of its performance yesterday, but in lieu of a helpful response only received the poop emoji. Again. ®
Get our [21]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/13r11so/video_of_the_failed_desantis_launch_by_elon/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZG-ahftzi0zfvUXUG3ZoBgAAAM4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZG-ahftzi0zfvUXUG3ZoBgAAAM4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZG-ahftzi0zfvUXUG3ZoBgAAAM4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2023/05/24/ron-desantis-2024-president-announcement/
[6] https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1661708508163719171
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/28/musk_twitter_slides/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZG-ahftzi0zfvUXUG3ZoBgAAAM4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1661572087679684608
[10] https://www.twitch.tv/p/press-center/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/19/us_supreme_section_230/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/18/twitter_staff_sue_musk/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/17/twitter_australia_regulation/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/12/new_twitter_ceo/
[15] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1133008/channels-twitch-all-time-viewers/
[16] https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-twitter-intl-hnk/index.html
[17] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-than-550-full-time-engineers.html
[18] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZG-ahftzi0zfvUXUG3ZoBgAAAM4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/09/twitter_glitches_raises_tweet_limit/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/18/twitter_staff_sue_musk/
[21] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
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".
We asked Twitter for an explanation
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!
Re: We asked Twitter for an explanation
Don't turn blue!
Of course not! The reply made all look brown. It even colours the candidates appropriately and also makes them smell as they behave.
"We asked Twitter for an explanation of its performance yesterday, but in lieu of a helpful response only received the poop emoji."
I can't think of a better response. Maybe it wasn't all that bad of an idea to fire all those PR people.
What's worse...
...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).
They should ask what Twitter thinks about it's own service quality. I'm sure they'll answer honestly.
What amazing technology
> 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)
Pretty sad
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.
So much for Musk the tech genius...
His cozying up to MAGA and the rest of the Right Wing in the USA will not end well. There are even calls for him to be fired from Tesla.
The skills needed to run Twatter and Tesla are very different.
Something has gotta give... and soon.
A launch as successful as his recent rocket missions
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.
OK, but keep something in mind..
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..
I just want to say how much I enjoy the first sentence of this article.