The two “cannot run a livestream in the year 2024,” the Harris campaign snarked on X.
Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has already proven itself adept at baiting Donald Trump and his supporters using the playground-tested technique of calling Republicans “weird.” The campaign, which has proven itself to be Extremely Online through TikToks evoking Trump’s lack of “aura” and hearty embrace of the “brat” label, is now provoking its opponent by pointing out how not online Trump is.
Trump is so out of touch, he can’t work the internet, the Harris campaign posits, pointing to Monday evening’s livestreamed interview between Trump and Elon Musk, which was delayed by some 45 minutes due to technical issues.
“Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself—self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024,” the Harris campaign shared on X (formerly Twitter) after the lengthy conversation between the two. The campaign’s rapid response team addressed the statement to “those unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.com.”
Harris used Zoom to speak to hundreds of thousands. I’ve used it for work for years. It’s absolutely fine.
If you have a very narrow scope, single person talking objective with no production value then yes it’s fine.
The scope here is a live stream to hundreds of thousands of people with modest quality.
So yes, it’s not just fine, it’s good.
The goal was a livestream, not a fancy video or anything.
~200,000 simultaneous connections vs ~2,000,000 simultaneous connections is a world of difference.
Additionally, while a successful Zoom call, it still had issues, with a dedicated Zoom support team.
Nothing about either of these events were “easy” or “fine”.
The big difference is that Musk is an arrogant idiot and decided to roll-his-own streaming service with a reduced headcount and a product that that is lacking proper load balancing, reservations, & scaling through load testing & real world tests scenarios that ramp up scale over time.
What’s sad is that at least partially because of this asshat, a lot of other companies got the idea that they can just fire lots of their staff and let the remaining people pick up the slack (because they should be thankful they even have a job)…I cannot wait for the chickens to come home to roost not only at Xitter, but other companies doing this because he did.