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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#641

Post by kenjackson »

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…

> I hope there's a decent severance package

If Musk's behavior with exec termination is any indication, there will be no severance package.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#642

Post by robswc »

FortiDude wrote: post #433

hot take: big tech layoffs are actually very good because they release into the wild a slew of competent workers with great credentials who will hopefully get hired by a company which does something useful for humanity instead of selling ads

Big tech layoffs are never really "good." Even in the way you're describing. Its a nice notion... but I imagine most of the laid off workers will be doing the same thing, just at another company.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#643

Post by virissimo »

lucideer wrote: post #610
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…

> Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces Is it though? Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea. Add to that I've never really seen anyone espouse this ideal that actually understood (or could articulate) what "free speech" even means... Certainly in the context of Musk's cam…

> Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.

I think it unlikely that Ancient Athens was heavily influenced by US culture on the topic of free speech as an ideal: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Socrates/The-Athenian-i...

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#644

Post by nonethewiser »

lucideer wrote: post #610
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…

> Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces Is it though? Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea. Add to that I've never really seen anyone espouse this ideal that actually understood (or could articulate) what "free speech" even means... Certainly in the context of Musk's cam…

For sure. People many other places dont really care about free speech. They are totally OK with government censorship in favor of social harmony.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#645

Post by chipotle_coyote »

rkapsoro wrote: post #585
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.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules

If there’s a current publicly-stated Twitter rule that prohibits screenshots of an internal Slack channel full of blue heart emojis, I’m not aware of it; it’s not abusive, it’s not hateful conduct, it’s not illegal, and presuming there wasn’t personally identifying information in the screenshot, it’s not private information by Twitter’s own definition as linked above.

If this was a screenshot from a Slack channel of any other tech company, do you really think Twitter would have quickly taken it down? I honestly don’t.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#646

Post by pornel »

ugh123 wrote: post #619
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…

It may not be violating "twitter rules", but it's likely violating company policy not to expose internal dealings (even as trivial as screenshots of slack emojis).

So Twitter's corporate interests can trump the free speech ideology. What a surprise.

Leaking a private slack can be political activism for worker's rights. I'm not saying these particular heart emojis are, but here Twitter is still in position of judging whether particular tweet was acceptable or not.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#647

Post by robswc »

notacoward wrote: post #279
pavlov wrote: post #68

In four years Musk will be bored to death with Twitter and will sell it to private equity and the Saudis for $5 billion. At that point it will be mostly a platform for porn creators and crypto pumping, the only two verticals where Twitter seems to be actually growing lately.

Do you really think it will be four years? Considering his attention span, and the rapidity with which Twitter is already deteriorating, I suspect it will be much less than that.

I know this is cliche to say... but I have been reading this comment for the past 10 years. Maybe one year it will be true but it has a terrible track record.

I was assured Tesla would be "dead" by 2018 and in the 2000s you would get comments about how re-usable rockets were just impossible.

For the record, I think twitter is a different beast but at the end of the day, I think life will go on.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#648

Post by faizshah »

redwood wrote: post #9

In my view no single medium (the media is the message) has done more to weaken the quality of public discourse in the world than Twitter. But maybe Facebook proves that even if you're allowed to use prose crazies dominate so maybe the issue is deeper

I read this kind of comment all the time on HN, it’s so confusing to me. I only joined twitter 2 years ago because there are a large number of high quality tweet threads on finance, ML, NLP, breaking news etc. A lot of the time I get information earlier on twitter than I do on any other platform. If anything, for me, twitter has strengthened the quality of public discourse.

If some big event happens I can read an expert’s tweet thread on the matter 30 minutes after the event happened instead of reading an editorialized piece with a bunch of random comments. I was reading tweet threads on the recession 1 year ago with deep analysis from experts. When the FOMC meeting happens 1 hour later I get a thread on the financial implications, another on the economic implications and another on the political implications. You don’t get that quality of information at that speed on any other platform.

I strongly suspect most of these comments about the quality of twitter are actually angry that the people you follow post opinions you don’t like. I see political opinions I don’t like all the time from my finance follows, I just scroll away not sure why that is a problem?

If anything Facebook and YouTube’s algorithm were the most damaging in 2010s because they heavily promoted extremist content to random people. I don’t see that from twitter especially not at the same volume as 2010s FB and YT.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#649

Post by thebradbain »

kenjackson wrote: post #641
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…

> I hope there's a decent severance package If Musk's behavior with exec termination is any indication, there will be no severance package.

And then there will be a huge class action in violation of California’s WARN Act.

He’s going to have to be paying out at least 2 months pay as severance.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#650

Post by dan-robertson »

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 /…

I think the employees are pretty expensive to keep, even compared to other tech companies. Twitter now has a lot of debt to service from the acquisition and I think the employees now get cash instead of RSUs (paid based on the acquisition price) whereas employees at other tech companies have effectively seen comp decrease as the stock prices went down.

So there might be some philosophical attempt to reduce headcount. There might also be some attempt to hire more later and at a lower price (or at least one that isn’t artificially high).

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