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Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

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Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#681

Post by ShredKazoo »

SilverBirch wrote: post #653
ShredKazoo wrote: post #602

So here's my understanding of what happened, appreciating corrections: * Twitter was known for liberal corporate politics, most employees liberal * Purchased by center-right billionaire in the name of freedom of speech (modern liberals against freedom of speech) * Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult * Billionaire delivers ultimatum, many employees out * Unclear if sufficient know…

Regular people have been trying to explain this to the "center-right" for a while now: Twitter's moderation policies weren't primarily dictated by their political views, they were primarily dictated by building an advertiser friendly platform. Which Musk exploded almost immediately by endorsing a far right homophobic conspiracy theory about a violent attack on the family member of an elected politician. You can say "…

From what I understand, Twitter's moderation is noticeably more left-wing than that of Facebook. And yet Facebook makes a lot of ad dollars. So I do think there's a discretionary element there.

I agree that Musk hasn't been behaving in a way that's advertiser-friendly.

Jack Dorsey is super familiar with Twitter and said Elon was the best solution for it if it was gonna stay a company: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/25/jack-dorsey-says-elon-musk....

I'm sure we can find someone, somewhere who correctly predicted in advance how things could go down, but I'm skeptical that it was a widespread prediction. Certainly feel free to prove me wrong.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#682

Post by MarkMarine »

yrgulation wrote: post #522

My respect to twitter folks quitting en mass is through the roof. I understand those who can not quit right now due to financial commitments. But as soon as your house is in order, quit. This will send a strong message to anyone trying to emulate musk.

And the people looking at your resume later. Staying at Twitter now will need a darn good explanation, otherwise I guess the assumption is you buy into this BS, or you need your visa. If you need your visa I get it, otherwise that is a stain on your resume

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#683

Post by Havoc »

klyrs wrote: post #392
minimaxir wrote: post #32

Elon's first non-reply tweet since the news broke: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593415171149791232 > How do you make a small fortune in social media? > Start out with a large one.

Good word, it gets better from there: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593455727611215872 > And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol > Let that sink in … He literally cannot distinguish between good and bad attention. He still thinks he's winning this.

To be fair for Twitter any sort of eyeballs are eyeballs. Doesn’t matter that they’re just there to watch the carnage

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#684

Post by LoveMortuus »

pschuegr wrote: post #25

I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues…

Do you think this could be one of those "There were making fun of me and telling me to quit, but now they call me a genius", kinda like what happened with many YouTubers and entrepreneurs?

I personally don't like how negative everyone has been since EM took over. The 44 billion wasn't 100% his money, he got funding, so he's still liable. And since Twitter is known for being hated, very few people have something positive to say about Twitter. I think EM making changes is good.

Of course losing your job isn't fun, but I don't think that this amount of negativity is productive or good for anyone.

Don't get me wrong, EM makes mistakes, even if he doesn't address them, like HyperLoop, which is not only practical but also not his idea. But like why not wait a bit too actually see what's his vision for Twitter, beyond just saying that he's trying to serve his ego.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#685

Post by jrimbault »

georgeg23 wrote: post #537
prawn wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ with an adblocker and never see ads.

But he still gets analytics and tracking info that way.

I've only seen twitter through tweetdeck for the last decade, and I believe it hasn't seen a new feature or design (both in functionality and form) change in at least 4 years ? It has become bug riddled (but I still use it), but all timelines are still linear.

(example: polls have never been ported to tweetdeck)

I don't think tweetdeck has seen active maintenance in years.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#686

Post by SilverBirch »

bagels wrote: post #340
birdfood wrote: post #256

If twitter were to cease operation today, what is the maximum amount of money Elon can personally recuperate?

Probably zero. Musk paid 44B for Twitter. This was with some loans and some equity sold. Generously, Twitter was worth half what he paid, 22B at the time he took over, given the decline in the market from when the Twitter tender offer was made. $13B in loans $7.1B from equity investors (did they have a liquidation preference?) How much has he degraded the value by scaring away all the advertisers? https://archive.ph/…

Just to nit pick - Musk didn't pay 44B for Twitter. The total value was 44Bn, that was structured as 13B debt secured against Twitter. So let's say Twitter goes bankrupt (not totally ceases operations) - files for chapter 11.

You'd have to find some way of restructuring the company to pay the creditors. In the most simplified approach, the most likely the only way of doing that is to sell the company. If the company sold for more than 13Bn (perfectly possible, although not hugely likely given the damage he's done) then anything above that would go to Elon and his equity investors, but we'd be talking about them walking away with close to nothing. But it's also perfectly possible that Elon just steps in and buys the 13Bn debt and continues to run the company.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#688

Post by pentae »

andyjda wrote: post #419
nemothekid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars. It's a comp…

> I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: t…

But.. isn't he trying to turn it into a Super App like WeChat? That means they have to build about 10 other huge products plus every new idea the boss comes out with in by next week. After having their headcount cut in half. Sounds pretty hardcore to me

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#689

Post by TheFattestNinja »

bydlocoder wrote: post #346
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember getting into Sangria (Scala's GraphQL implementation) for the first time a couple years ago and seeing Twitter devs helping contribute to the lib. Was excited to see Twitter push that envelope. Now sad to see it all go away.

Twitter is one the few Scala shops around, would be sad to lose it.

Shameless plug but Morgan Stanley FID tech does some pretty unique and advanced work on Scala (Optimus).

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#690

Post by bydlocoder »

coldtea wrote: post #673
andyjda wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: t…

I mean, their original setup during early years (and I'm not making this up) required them to restart their Rails service every day, else it would crash/stuck because of memory leaks. That's not a "tech startup" based on "hardcore engineering", that's a startup based on a social idea and implemented with some trivial tech. Scaling this to hundreds of millions is not exactly a "hardcore engineering" thing either. Most…

Do you think they still run Ruby that can't reclaim allocated unmanaged memory? Do you have any idea how their stack looks now?
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