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Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

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Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's odd about it? Why wouldn't he be proud of his team for successfully building stuff he thought was important to build?

Being so proud you lose your sanity? That's quite odd. It's an insane amount of hyperbole.

Didn’t Steve Jobs make that usage of ‘insane’ popular in SV?

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#222
First of all, this isn't a diss on the guy who was fired, though it must sting. This is how things go.*

Second of all, for the question "why now?": Twitter's CEO Parag has to "run through the tape": regardless of what he thinks might happen, he has to keep to the plan and in fact can't talk to the potential acquirer. One reason is that perhaps the deal won't happen, but also he's just not allowed to.

If that sounds strange, consider CNN+ which was launched and killed within a couple of weeks. The buyer of CNN couldn't tell CNN what they thought but planned all along to nuke it; the CNN people either didn't understand that, were fanatics, or just didn't give a fuck.

* We don't know the whole story so it's possible he was actually doing something bad. But I think that's very unlikely, as these days those things are usually mentioned rather than being swept under the carpet.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#224
post #112

Is he the one who gave final approval of the anonymous login-wall, which pops up after 2 screens of scrolling in Twitter? If so, good riddance, as that is an incredibly hostile user pattern. BTW, maybe it's purely coincidence, but after refreshing my browser cache it seems to have gone away today.

Nothing could be worse than the crap reddit has been doing for the last year or so to force users (or from their perspective, useds, as rms likes to say) to download its app or login. First they outright blocked viewing posts unless logged in, then they disabled that, and now brought it back so that random posts are blocked from viewing with a message "This hasn't been reviewed" whatever that means. Someone at reddit…

Reddit is doing this because it works and has real impact on the bottom line, and effectively zero impact on user retention. As long as users continue to behave the way they do it would be fiscally irresponsible to shareholders for the company not to do it, same with Twitter.

If you don't like it the best thing you can do is to bounce and never use the product again. Users doing this en masse is the only thing that will get companies to do anything differently.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#226
post #90

If he's fired now the current board can offer him a severance package that may not be on the table once Elon takes over. Might be a good thing, or strategic?

Wild. Technically is that legal?

Why wouldn't it be? The sale hasn't finalized, so unless there's evidence that they're intentionally harming the company they can continue to operate as usual.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#227

> Spaces, Communities, Topics, Creator tools, Safety controls Interesting: as a casual Twitter user since 2008, I am completely unaware of Spaces, Communities, Topics, and Creator tools. Probably because I use Tweetdeck (desktop) and Tweetbot (mobile). I never see trending posts or ads, either.

I use the regular app and website as a casual user and am only aware of Topics.

My experience with Topics was really bad, I followed the "web development" topic and it just surfaces tweets of people who took a coding bootcamp and posting the thread emoji a lot. I tried for a while marking tweets in the Topic as not relevant but it didn't change anything.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#228
post #84

So there's two options right - the first is that Parag is for some reason making big strategic decisions about the direction of the company despite the fact that we all know he'll be gone if the deal closes. Or he's making big strategic changes at the behest of the acquirers before the deal closes. Neither of these things seem particularly kosher moves to make. The question is how to figure out which one it is. It wo…

So many possibilities. Top people with favorable clauses might be finagling their own golden parachutes.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#229
post #112

Is he the one who gave final approval of the anonymous login-wall, which pops up after 2 screens of scrolling in Twitter? If so, good riddance, as that is an incredibly hostile user pattern. BTW, maybe it's purely coincidence, but after refreshing my browser cache it seems to have gone away today.

I got hit with this wall halfway down the thread, really resonated with this comment.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#230
post #112

Is he the one who gave final approval of the anonymous login-wall, which pops up after 2 screens of scrolling in Twitter? If so, good riddance, as that is an incredibly hostile user pattern. BTW, maybe it's purely coincidence, but after refreshing my browser cache it seems to have gone away today.

Is he the one who gave final approval of the anonymous login-wall

From the second Tweet in the thread:

Twitter’s DAU has grown by over 87% since Q2 2018 and our team has shipped bold and exciting new evolutions to the product

You can't measure DAU precisely without logged-in users! So... yeah, that's probably a big part of how they got their DAU metric to grow 87%...

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