Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

831–840 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#831

Post by mikkergp »

danans wrote: post #820
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…

> 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. I think this is failing to imagine how bad things could get societally. Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start enjoying consuming and being associated with malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech. Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews that the Nazis…

Ironically? I think in order for this to happen we would have to be _less_ polarized. I don't think in the current state you could _increase_ revenue from it's current place by splitting the customer base.

On the one hand if this keeps going bad maybe he just says fuck it and goes accelerationist like you said. On the other hand, there's a lot of people who put money into this. I truly hope it remains sensible, and do still have faith that our nation isn't this bad off.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#832

Post by brightball »

mikkergp wrote: post #269
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…

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…

The one thing Twitter has going for it is network effect. Tons of people are trying to spin up competitors and encouraging people to go there based on political leanings or other reasons. The fragmentation will just lead to Twitter remaining as the place where everybody comes back.

I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t work out for him because network effects are really hard to overcome.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#833

Post by watwut »

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…

Musk is pro free speech, when it is speech he likes and finds funny. Not at all with speech he dislikes.

It is stupid, but free speech became codeword for "my opponents should shut up while my friends can arbitrary harrass them". And that is me being euphemistic about it.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#834

Post by partiallypro »

ninth_ant wrote: post #791
sequoia wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 l…

You just described layoffs in general. Are you as upset over the other tech companies doing layoffs, that go from Square to Microsoft?

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#836

Post by lizknope »

bichiliad wrote: post #344

When there were layoffs at Etsy back in 2017, one of the unintended consequences were that a lot more people quit voluntarily afterwards. Attrition was a lot higher than expected. I have to believe that the people who remain are not all going to want to stay at the company that Twitter is becoming, whether it be for lack of institutional knowledge, peer support, or just because they liked their coworkers and are sad…

That happens at every company. I've been working in the tech industry for 25 years at 8 different companies. You lay off people and then the best engineers start looking for a new job and leaving 2-3 months afterward.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#837

Post by notahacker »

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.

I quite enjoyed the creativity that went into setting up this physical world bot to respond to Trump tweets. https://twitter.com/burnedyourtweet

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#838

Post by Chinjut »

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…

I think that Christina Angeli tweet was voluntarily deleted, according to https://twitter.com/CA_CrissyAngel/status/158834782975154995....

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#839

Post by arrrg »

wobbly_bush wrote: post #824
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…

> A huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current market conditions At the end of the day, CA is an at-will employment state. Anyone can get fired anytime, and it is up to everyone to be prepared for that. Any person working in any company X can meet the same fate - it's like being prepared for an earthquake, which can happen anytime. I'm not…

Being prepared for getting fired (in the sense of having a financial cushion) is one thing.

What I’m seeing here, however is a discrepancy between saying that working hard and burning brightly for your employer is meaningful and fulfilling and something to strive towards (as seen in the threads around expectations at Twitter of working 12h days and meeting tight deadlines) and on the other hand the expectation to dispassionately deal with being fired.

That just doesn’t go together. It‘s just a weird perspective. Those views don’t seem to be consistent with each other.

If your work is meaningful to you then psychologically being fired can have a devastating impact. You can’t be at the same time emotionally invested in your workplace and also not affected by being fired.

I know that HN is not one person, but that’s the perspective I’m perceiving.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#840

Post by fullshark »

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…

We aren't employees on HN, just temporarily embarrassed founders.
Post reply on HN