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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#581

Post by tshaddox »

thinkingemote wrote: post #409

Musk and friends compare Twitter to other tech companies and see that it's ratio of employees to revenue is lowest. He therefore thinks he must halve the number employees and/or increase revenue to get this ratio up. From the chat log exhibits from the Twitter vs Musk case: https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#47 A VC (Jason Calacanis) does back of the envelope calculations: Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev /…

It would be nice if revenue and employee count were completely independent. Heck, you could fire everyone except one person and have an incredibly high ratio! (Don’t fire that last person or else you’ll get a divide by zero error.)

Interestingly, he’s already tweeting out complaints about a massive drop in revenue. His theory is that this is caused not by his erratic behavior, but instead by activists who hate free speech: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880?s=46...

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#582

Post by johannes1234321 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #551
john-radio wrote: post #402

A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is ironic if you consider all…

IMHO freedom in US is usually in fact 1) free for people who have $$ or 2) poor people who advocates for 1) for whatever the reason. Basically freedom means less regulation from governments, which is only good for super riches and large enterprises. If you are not you should welcome more government regulation to counter the other elephant in the room. Two evils is always better than one.

Yes, regulation is often pushed to protect the peasants from the aristocrats, to protect workers from the capitalists but by far not always: Regulation is also pushed to manifest the power of the powerful ... which means there are also freedoms for the weak to protect.

It is a centuries long battle to find the balance in always changing times.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#583

Post by kibwen »

rockostrich wrote: post #337
mikkergp wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting to see how Elon defines success. Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users. So if you think Elon is going to succeed at making Twitter a better Twitter as we know it, then I'm confident this take is wrong. Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he…

I have no doubts that a super app will succeed in the US like Pinduoduo has in China but I highly doubt that's going to come from the environment that Elon is already establishing at Twitter. You can't successfully build dozens of new products by laying off a big chunk of the staff and telling people to work 12 hour shifts 7 days a week when they've gotten comfortable with a reasonable work-life balance (I know Tesla…

We already have super-apps. They're called "Android" and "iOS".

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#584

Post by jasmer »

bentt wrote: post #448
losvedir wrote: post #180

And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package. Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is h…

In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires t…

Twitter is not 'SpaceX' in every way.

It's 'social' and 'media' which are completely different operating environments.

Twitter is long, long established as another company.

The 'user base' of Twitter is entirely different kind of customer.

He has no 'big government subsidies' to rely on, aka neither Tesla nor Space X would exist without major budgetary support from Big Gov.

I suggest Twitter under Elon may be more profitable. Or different in some other way as well, but I'll give it only 25% chance it becomes like you're suggesting.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#585

Post by rkapsoro »

john-radio wrote: post #402

A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is ironic if you consider all…

AFAIK they haven't changed content management policy yet. This is application of the current rules/process.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#586

Post by cmeacham98 »

yanderekko wrote: post #505
john-radio wrote: post #402

A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is ironic if you consider all…

>Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now. I somehow have a feeling that this is not the first time in history that an embedded Tweet in a news story has been removed, either by Twitter or the author.

Yes, but it is probably (one of) the first times it was done so blatantly in Twitter's own interest.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#587

Post by e40 »

tshaddox wrote: post #558
john-radio wrote: post #402

A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is ironic if you consider all…

> This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to) It’s not ironic or remotely unexpected if you’ve taken notice of any of his actual actions involving freedom of speech.

Elon is the type of person where action and words tell a very different story. In that way, it's expected. It's still ironic as hell, given his words.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#588

Post by ChildOfChaos »

tshaddox wrote: post #558
john-radio wrote: post #402

A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is ironic if you consider all…

> This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to) It’s not ironic or remotely unexpected if you’ve taken notice of any of his actual actions involving freedom of speech.

It's starting to feel like Musk is playing this political game to me.

Pretending he is championing the little guy, that he/twitter/everyone is somehow being repressed and they/he is fighting against it. His recent tweet on how 'activists' are the cause of twitters recent revenue drop for example.

Even with the blue check marks, he is framing it as it being open to all and the little guy taking the power back, all you have to do is pay him $8 a month for it. Viva la revolution indeed!

It feels like social engineering to me and the same game that has been played very successfully in division politics.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#589

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jimt1234 wrote: post #564
nostromo wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to) Freedom of speech is not the first amendment and vice versa. Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private, while the First Amendment only applies in America and to the government. People think they sound smart when they say freedom of speech onl…

Conversely, people often reference "First Amendment" in situations that have nothing to do with government censorship.

> people often reference "First Amendment" in situations that have nothing to do with government censorship

At least on HN, I’ve never seen this, except as a totem.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#590

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

cronix wrote: post #576
yanderekko wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now. I somehow have a feeling that this is not the first time in history that an embedded Tweet in a news story has been removed, either by Twitter or the author.

Smart journalists screen capture the tweet and post it as a photo.

Sure, but a screenshot of a tweet is trivial to fake.
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