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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#951

Post by Thorentis »

tshaddox wrote: post #780
yummies wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a much simpler and less juicy angle here: someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication , and it got removed. It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). This isn't "Twitter took down a disparaging post about Twitter", it's that they tried to stop the sharing of internal data. That being said, I don't…

> It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.

> should allow all legal speech.

It is usually illegal or in breach of contract to share internal company communications. This isn't the "gotcha" you're looking for.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#952

Post by fleddr »

bamboozled wrote: post #891
tshaddox wrote: post #581

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…

That tweet really makes me think he has gone paranoid / crazy. “Activists groups pressuring advertisers trying to destroy free speech in America ?” The dude is a conspiracy theorist now ?

I'm sorry, but on Twitter this is hardly a conspiracy theory, just a normal day. Activists constantly pressure brands, for various reasons.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#953

Post by flumpcakes »

uejfiweun wrote: post #931
memish wrote: post #850

There's an asymmetry here where Twitter and other companies get blamed for layoffs, but didn't get praised for providing highly paid jobs that put their employees in the top 1%. Even Stripe just had layoffs and they are a much more productive, tighter run ship. Twitter cutting deeper than Stripe shouldn't be surprising. It's not a secret that they were overstaffed and are known for rest & vest. This goes way back. In…

Agh, I WISH tech companies provided jobs that put employees in the top 1%. The truth is that in an era of gigantic wealth inequality, being in the top 1% of income doesn't mean shit. I may make good money, but when I can't even afford the shittiest studio apartment in town and I have no choice but to be a renter bitch, it doesn't make me feel rich at all.

> being in the top 1% of income doesn't mean shit

I think the other 99% would disagree.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#954

Post by madeofpalk »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #753
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 /…

This is an ignorant question: to what extent is it relevant that a hardware company like Apple effectively employs/contracts services of e.g. Foxconn to the tune of probably a million employees? It feel a little bit misleading to take a look at company in isolation, as different companies have different dependencies and depths of integration.

Apple's a funny one when it comes to staff numbers as well - they operate over 500 stores around the world, so their employee count is somewhat "boosted" by that.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#955

Post by dylan604 »

Chyzwar wrote: post #920
dylan604 wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now. Yay! Journalists that do nothing but build a story around Tweets is not journalism. That's BuzzFeed. The fact that legit news sources decided to follow BuzzFeed is just a very sad comment on the state of affairs we live in now.

Actually, BuzzFeed aside garbage reporting have also decent investigations journalism as well https://www.buzzfeed.com/investigations

I know BuzzFeedNews is different than BuzzFeed.

I know I used the formal capitalization of the specific site BuzzFeed, but it is a pretty good phrase if used as buzz feed. "Journalists" that try to make a story out of "what's the buzz" is more of the underlying point. That's just an aggregator. There's not complexity to the story that a journalist has pulled together. There's no getting a feel for the person being interviewed to feel if they might have more info to be pulled out to expand the story.

Having said that, there is a time and a place to a feel for the buzz, and places like BuzzFeed are perfectly adequate at doing that. But to confuse a buzz feed as a piece of news/journalism is just insulting to journalism.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#956

Post by vineyardmike »

rockostrich wrote: post #337
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…

I have no doubts that a super app will succeed in the US like Pinduoduo has in China but I highly doubt that's going to come from the environment that Elon is already establishing at Twitter. You can't successfully build dozens of new products by laying off a big chunk of the staff and telling people to work 12 hour shifts 7 days a week when they've gotten comfortable with a reasonable work-life balance (I know Tesla…

I have no desire for a super app and I don’t think anyone else does either tbh.

The Chinese internet is heavily restricted and censored and regulated by their government. It simply cannot be used as a model in the west. Technology progresses in cycles, and the Chinese and American internet cycles don’t line up. Eg China uses QR codes for payment everywhere because they cycled off cash while the US largely missed that train, but has near universal credit cards and NFC availability. Americans would never pay at a cash register through QR codes.

Android and IOS are great at providing a moldable surface for apps. A super app aggregates censorship to one entity, which isn’t a market force in the west. The “chat bot” style super apps also didn’t take off in the west because our technology is more expensive. We’re richer so we have, on average, higher end devices that can render more AND we can pay to build more feature rich native apps. We aggregate app data at the operating system level (notification center, Google home app, Siri, Uber integration into native mapping app, etc). China can’t because most of android is created in America, and they’d essentially have to hard-fork it to build changes their way (again those changes largely include censorship choke points)

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#957

Post by fleddr »

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 couldn't agree more. An entire series of anti-social tactics have been exclusively invented on the Twitter network, and then normalized.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#958

Post by three_seagrass »

ytpete wrote: post #898
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…

Ironically, "free speech" as a broader principle can also be interpreted to mean a private company should not be compelled to carry or broadcast anyone else's speech if they don't want to. Any private company can choose what kind of community norms and tone they want to set, and moderate accordingly. Some platforms may allow hate speech, others not. Some may allow porn, others not. Taking editorial control away robs…

Pretty much. There are also limitations to freedom of speech the principle if not first amendment or freedom of association.

John Stuart Mill specifically calls this out in the harm principle. From what I've observed, people who invoke "it's freedom of speech philosophy" rarely understand that even as a philosophy, free speech not a blank check to be able to say whatever you want w/o consequence. Or they equate it to freedom of reach.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#959

Post by fleddr »

twawaaay wrote: post #905

> Musk’s team has already tried to evaluate the productivity of Twitter employees by asking engineers to print out the code that they have written in the last 30 to 60 days. Musk also brought in Tesla engineers to look over Twitter code. At one company I worked we had a bug in the software for the device we were manufacturing. There were millions of units at peoples' homes and the bug caused couple hundred of these u…

You know you can talk back, right?

When you'd bring that tiny print of code and give your explanation, do you honestly believe a Tesla engineer is not equipped to understand the value of those few lines?

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#960

Post by fleddr »

aliljet wrote: post #8

I'm pretty curious about how and where Twitter employees were distributed. For a company ostensibly worth $44 billion, having 7,500 staff feels pretty damn lean. It feels like Musk isn't just purging people, he's purging the Twitter culture...

Market cap has always been a bullshit metric. It's not liquid.
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