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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#791

Post by ninth_ant »

sequoia wrote: post #773
neel8986 wrote: post #614

The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful. Really feel sorry for my younger self who believed that Musk truly cares about Humanity. Never ever hero worship a billionaire while thinking he will change the world. They are all ego manic pos hungry for more and more control. Small things you can do a) If you care about environment don't buy an over expensive electric car. Think about efforts to improve Public…

"The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful." Sorry I may have missed this in the article–was it something beyond being laid off? Being laid off sucks (it's happened to me) but it's a normal part of business operations.

They are treated like disposable trash, tossed into the wind by a capricious ultra-rich jerk who bought the company on a whim. The consequences of that poorly thought out “decision” meant the purchase had to be a leveraged buyout which necessitated heavy cost cutting.

How is this not disgraceful? This not “normal business operations”, this is peoples lives being torn apart while the ultra rich play games with their livelihoods.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#792

Post by reactspa »

googlryas wrote: post #720
reactspa wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter employee on October 21: "Slowly making the migration to Mastodon" Same Twitter employee today (November 4): furiously posting on Twitter about having gotten fired from Twitter. Karma? Ref: - https://twitter.com/ruchowdh/status/1583518479210393600 - https://twitter.com/ruchowdh

What's with the take off of "IYKYK"(in her bio)? Is it because people feel special advertising that they're part of some elite/secret ring of true knowledge sharers? Literally if the phrase was excluded, it's factualness would still be true. Basically, I find people who say "IYKYK" to commonly be completely insufferable performance artists.

Can you imagine complaining about being fired from a company after publicly declaring that you were abandoning its product and that you preferred their competitor's product?

IYKYK.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#793

Post by VikingCoder »

dylan604 wrote: post #711
VikingCoder wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to buy a book that shows every single Tweet from Donald J. Trump, ever since he descended that elevator to announce his candidacy, through Biden's inauguration, and a little beyond... ...annotated with fact-checking, and historical context. Probably with a few lines from speeches thrown in as well. To really document the heck out of how insane those years were.

>descended that elevator escalator My favorite was the Twitter account to see if it would get banned by only retweeting Trump's account(s). They wanted to show how the rules were applied differently between accounts.

My favorite is when like PBS tweets out the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July, and right-wing nutjobs accuse it of being un-American.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#794

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

Ancapistani wrote: post #719
Bhilai wrote: 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…

I get it. I'm almost 40 and have been working at tech startups since I was in my 20s. I've been through what they're going through. The difference is that people are being laid off, terminated, or otherwise losing their jobs every day . It's not a new or interesting phenomenon. What's interesting are the conditions that led to it happening to these people, both inside and outside Twitter. It's novel and may have broa…

> What's interesting are the conditions that led to it happening to these people, both inside and outside Twitter.

Which, in your estimation, are?...

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#795

Post by alecbz »

pdpi wrote: post #714
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…

The first amendment isn't even particularly strong protection - it only forbids Congress from restricting freedom of speech, but doesn't set out any specific rights, or preclude states from setting their own laws restricting rights. E.g. the Portuguese constitution has much stronger guarantees. It explicitly recognises freedom of exprssion as a right, but it also explicitly recognises freedom of access to information…

> or preclude states from setting their own laws restricting rights.

1A on its own does not do this, but AIUI a subsequent amendment (I think one of the reconstruction amendments?) has been interpreted to apply the restrictions in the constitution to state governments as well.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#796

Post by simplotek »

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.

No, not at all. There are plenty of countries who go to greater lengths to protect their individual rights without the US even registering as a suggested influence. Most countries which managed to transition away from authoritarian oppressive regimes did grew political antibodies to ensure the right to freely express your ideas without being subjected to persecution as it happened in the not so distant past.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#797

Post by gdy »

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…

I don't think that the Bill of Rights, for example, was influenced by US culture.

"the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689#Provisions...

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#798

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

tomp wrote: post #122
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

Really? On which other platform can you directly communicate (or at least listen to, unfiltered) to the worlds dictators, political leaders, and billionaires?

Nonsense. This a big beef with me about Twitter. It purports to be an egalitarian platform where you can "directly communicate" with significant people, but the sheer volume and signal-to-noise ratio of popular accounts means that they will never even see your comment, let alone reply, except in extraordinarily rare examples.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#800

Post by flappyeagle »

Elon is pushing a giant reset button on Twitter. This is long overdue and the pain is a result of accumulated managerial debt.

Twitter will be fine operationally. It might have some short term hiccups as people pick up the pieces but the network effects and the value proposition are unchanged.

Letting go of these people also makes room for more wild thinkers and hacker types to join the party.

Sometimes the team that got you there isn't the team that can take you to the next level. I feel bad personally for everyone who liked their job, but many of these jobs existed for years longer than they should have.

These are all smart individuals who have a big important company on their CV. No one is going to fault them for being laid off from Twitter when the cuts are this deep; they're already neck deep in recruiter spam if they have any degree of competence.

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