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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#701
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

Have you not noticed tiktok? People are being trained to have the attention span of a gnat.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#702
post #666
post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually your employer has confidentiality and non-disparage clauses in your employment contract and separation agreements. So "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." probably would be more like "This Tweet violated your contractual agreement to your employer".

This is exactly right and it's ridiculous people don't see this. Free speech isn't equal to breaking confidentiality agreements on a platform owned and operated by the company you work for.

Free speech and breaking confidentiality agreements are orthogonal to one another. The latter might result in legal action or firing but it has nothing to do with the right to publish.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#703

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 think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#704
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason he's laying off people. Due to his financing, he has to pay $1 billion per year just in interest. "Love to borrow money to buy a company and then saddle that company with the debt so I can lay off thousands of people" https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1587457450311122945

It should be illegal to buy a company with money you borrow against the value of that company. When your primary financial goal is servicing debt over building long term value - the incentives become completely misaligned.

agree to an extant, but we do it all the time with mortgages, as in buy with loan against value of the asset. the only difference is that bank wouldn't give me a 2M loan against 1M house. In this case this seems like a play on credibility of Musk that banks & other investors are willing to overpay. IMO its a mistake & misaligns the incentives but lets see.

I do however feel that there should be civility in these layoffs regardless of what Musk's belief's about performance of these employees (or Musk fanboi's). There should be proper severance/healthcare and prorated vesting.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#705
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…

Those techies had years in which to organize their workplace under US labor law to forestall exactly this kind of outcome. For the past 20 years, there was no group of employees on earth with more latent power than US tech workers, but this very fact blinded them to the possibility that they might ever lose this power. What feeble efforts there were at collective action were organized around divisive "social justice"…

Don't blame labor for failing to unionize when media has been filling the room with anti union sentiment for a century.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#706
post #561

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…

Every time this debate comes up, someone suggests that companies like Twitter are in violation of the first amendment when they remove a user's post. To me they often sound like the ignorant ones.

More from The Intercept, here's a document from DHS on disinfo discussing using 3rd party non profits as a "clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda." https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1587257992449208320 in the same thread there's a Draft DHS quad review, which plans agency policy, leaked that shows growing focus on MDM (misinfo, disinfo, malinfo) to protect homeland against spread of "toxic narratives." How the agency defines false info and what narratives are prioritized isn’t clear.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#707

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

so the new boss doesn’t actually believe in the ideology he loudly preaches?

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#708

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? I'll bite on this one. For reference, I personally believe Elon Musk is a degenerate blowhard who has literally zero concept of what life actually is like for billions of people on the planet, nor does he care. I believe he belongs to the class of people known as 'parasites'. Here's my take: 1 year: Initially, we'll see improvements. Dead wei…

Twitter has already done essentially nothing about overt threats, much less vague ones, against anyone who wasn't a twitter-staff legible good-guy celebrity.

The toxic threats even sometimes come from twitter staff and insiders, for example when Coinbase announced their no-politics-at-work policy, Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo tweeted in reply that that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong would be "lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary".

The fish rots from the head.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#709
post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would say he (and other billionaires like Thiel) is immature in a very classical sense: he goes through the world like a child without appreciation for how difficult it was to create a society in which everybody could (say) engage in discourse safely; he sees some flaws in the system and thinks that because he is a special person and he saw what he thinks is a flaw he is entitled to pull it apart. But there is no methodical improvement being proposed. People like this are simply destroying the work of their forebears (of creating a stable pluralistic society) for personal benefit. It is not the behavior of responsible humans, much less leaders.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#710
post #652
post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will send a request to archive a copy of a tweet in the Wayback Machine just in case, especially if the tweet is critical of Twitter from now on.

Wayback Machine will remove archived tweets. For example, Taylor Lorenz’s tweets were erased after she requested it.[1] Other archives get removed if the people running the Internet Archive dislike the content. Similar to how Paypal isn’t a bank and eBay isn’t an auction site, The Internet Archive isn’t an archive. 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://twitter....

Tweets are subject to copyright so I doubt the Wayback machine has any legal leg to stand on for continuing to host someone's tweets after a takedown request.

When copyright expires in 125 years or whatever if the archive still exists they can publish them again.

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