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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#691

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), but it's also significant because -

He hasn't made any major changes to algorithms / policies yet. They're tripping over their own pre-Musk rules.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#692

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…

Enforcers: "Those are the rules" Everyone: what about our freedom of speech? Enforcers: those are our rules New Boss: You're playing by my rules now Ex-enforcers: what bout our freedom of speech? New Boss: Welcome to your machine

Where do our free speech rights say that you are entitled to publish an opinion / statement on a particular channel or someone's private media outlet?

Somehow the notion of rights is being expanded as a catch-all of various hopes and desires, misunderstood or expected to put obligations on people or entities that those rights do not apply to. This makes rights soft and hard to disagree with, and actually less clear and less valuable.

You have the right to say something. You can go say it at politicians making a speech, you can write a letter, publish an article in some newspaper that will publish it. Not the right to say it on Twitter. Or the New York Times, or whatever outlet. You don't have the right / specific private entities are not required to enable your opinion.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#694

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 s…

Activists: take credit

Some dude: "it's totally not them!"

Why would he not think that?

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#695

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…

A prediction - trump will get back on Twitter and will again use the hell out of it, with corresponding election results

I don't think so. That would mean admitting his Truth Social platform is not as good as Twitter. I don't think he'd do that.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#696
post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I don't understand how anyone could not blame activists for this? They themselves are taking credit for it.

Who is "they"? Activist is an expansive noun that covers every possible viewpoint, so this is meaningless without further qualification. Is it randos on Twitter, or someone with actual clout?

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#697
post #619

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).

If a non-Twitter employee posts a tweet with an image of their corporate internal communications, does Twitter take those tweets down automatically or at the other corp's request or does the person that made the tweet have to remove it when their corp overlords demand? I honestly don't know the mechanisms for getting a tweet removed that is deemed to violate some policy some where.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#698
post #541

Sorry to say this but comments on this thread are very disappointing and show a basic lack of empathy in HN crowd. I am obviously generalizing and I know most of you are not heartless souls. FFS people, a huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current market conditions. Whatever you think of Elon or Twitter employees, its good to be grounded in…

This is a discussion board. Therefore, commenting at all requires something to discuss, and there is nothing really to discuss specifically around the topic of empathy towards the laid off employees. It sucks, we all know it sucks, and it shouldn't be minimized but there's no "other side" to that viewpoint, so what is there to talk about? People aren't "heartless" because they choose to talk about the bigger picture…

The vast majority of the people let go were management-class silicon valley people. Not a single tear should be shed.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#699

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…

> Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? 1: Profitable 2: More signal, less noise 3: Significantly less misinformation 4: (Maybe) A reliable way to get news Personally, I'm eating popcorn on this one. I think Musk got himself in trouble for letting his big mouth yap, and he fired the execs as revenge. As a software developer who's seen good and bad organizations, I'm very curious a…

Sure. Bankrupt.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#700

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…

> "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…

And freedom of speech also includes to the rights of private individuals and companies to determine what they share on their own platforms, and what they can or cannot be compelled to host or say.
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