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

Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

sfstandard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#201

Post by brookst »

jsheard wrote: post #116
TheAdamist wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats generally the point with sudden disruptive moves - high attrition. Reduce the headcount without having to be in the news for layoffs.

They've already cut about 80% of their workforce since Elon took over, I'm not sure how much more attrition they can take. Sure the site still mostly works in the technical sense, but the way it works now has led to a significant decline in revenue and active users.

There’s how much the company can take, and how much Elon thinks the company can take. He subscribes to the ubermensch view, where him and maybe two other superior specimens of manhood could single handedly run the entire company.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#202

Post by acdha »

gadders wrote: post #169
acdha wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that Twitter didn’t ban conservatives for their political views but for violating their terms of service. In Trump’s case that was continued calls for violence and election interference, more than a hypothetical concern after his followers made an unprecedented violent attack on the U.S. electoral process. As you can easily verify, most conservatives were never banned: the people who were banned mad…

[dead]

Look, we all know you’re making that up but if we take you at face value, you just defined conservatism as the beliefs bad enough to get Twitter’s famously hands-off moderators to act. Nobody got blocked for advocating for smaller government, business-friendly policies, or talking about their religious or family values – it was threats of violence, slurs, targeted harassment, election misinformation, etc. None of the conservatives I know would claim those as defining their beliefs, and they’d be rather insulted to have you define them that way.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#203

Post by brookst »

michaelt wrote: post #161
jsheard wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've already cut about 80% of their workforce since Elon took over, I'm not sure how much more attrition they can take. Sure the site still mostly works in the technical sense, but the way it works now has led to a significant decline in revenue and active users.

To me "revenue and MAUs have declined significantly" sounds like a reason they would want to reduce employee numbers, rather than a reason they wouldn't . At least in a conventional business that uses revenue to pay wages.

Layoffs are expensive compared to making people miserable so they quit.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#205

Post by dirtybirdnj »

anotherhue wrote: post #143
bcx wrote: post #130

It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes. I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision. I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin. As for commutes, I’d b…

during one visit to those Zendesk offices an urgent slack message (verily) was sent out advising everyone to get away from the windows, as there was shooting outside. About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks. I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until…

[flagged]

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#206

Post by sfmz »

milkshakes wrote: post #181
gtirloni wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> San Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities When I visited SF for the first time in 2019, it felt really weird that such a rich place would have so many people living in tents in public spaces. Being naive, I saw dozens of tents in Sue Bierman Park and thought they were having an event or something. Then it dawned on me what I was seeing and it never made sense because certainly it doesn't take a lo…

I don't think it's a resource allocation issue. SF government alone spends almost a billion a year[1] on trying to improve the situation. That's not including the non-profit spending. Money won't buy the city out of this situation as long as there exist people who don't want to live in homes and play by the rules. 1: https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/budget/

They cleaned it up for President Xi's visit.

https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/14/city-clears-homeless-encam...

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#207

Post by dmix »

francisofascii wrote: post #118

So he's not moving X to Texas? Or is this just the preliminary move?

He said they want to move all the HQs to Texas, which implies they could still have offices in California just maybe smaller. This may be part of the plan.

They are also opening a new Palo Alto office for xAI where they could move a lot of engineering talent as well. Which is likely the other big reason.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#208

Post by rsynnott »

loceng wrote: post #77
DevX101 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have him blocked but the CEO has 200 million followers. Even assuming 20% are real people, I'd imagine there's quite a few of those who'd love to work at his company.

Why do you have him blocked, and just not following him?

So after naughty ol' Mr Car took over Twitter, but before I stopped using the site (this would probably have been around Oct 22), I started, after never having followed or interacted with him, getting multiple inane tweets from Musk in my feed every day, along with constant suggestions to follow him. So I blocked him (I think he was one of three people in 15 years on the site who I felt the need to block). I assume this is fairly common for Twitter users; can't imagine it's gotten _better_ since.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#209

Post by [deleted] »

standardUser wrote: post #132

Twitter was given a famously sweet deal by the city to occupy that troubled stretch of Market St. In the time I lived nearby (until the pandemic) the area never really improved. San Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities, no just that it largely allows them, but that it allows them in and around the busiest and most publicly-utilized transit hubs and the city center.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN