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

301–310 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#301

Post by edderly »

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…

I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#302

Post by boringg »

jdub wrote: post #76

Musk is capricious, cruel, and clueless. Whether or not you liked Twitter, it's a culturally significant platform, and Musk has almost certainly destroyed any hope it had of surviving. In barely a week. Hopefully it destroys him, too.

I think you are out of touch with how poor Twitter is as a medium currently. Either Musk brings it back to some validity or he puts the final nail in the coffin and creates a space for some new better technology to fill the void (that last bit is a bit sarcastic about the new tech).

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#303

Post by seydor »

jameshart wrote: post #233
seydor wrote: post #203

Quoted post unavailable.

Twitter is hundreds of millions of authenticated messages a day, delivered with an expectation of instantaneousness and simultaneity, to hundreds of millions of clients. There are images and video embeds and URL previews on tweets. There are fraudulent and abusive users who are trying to spam the user base. There are users whose threat model includes ‘will be attacked by the concerted cyber-offensive capabilities of…

I 'll keep downplaying it. It's a 280 character asynchronous telegraph office that crashes more often than whales wiggling their tail, has had 100 awful iterations of the interface , spam issues, terrible search etc etc. But it's popular because it's the Chosen One by the mainstream media, which brought politicians and CEOs in it. If the MSM decides that it's too rightwing, they will take their toys to the next twitter clone that barely works and all of their audience will follow.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#305

Post by eropple »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #276
Loughla wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? I'll bite on this one. For reference, I personally believe Elon Musk is a degenerate blowhard who has literally zero concept of what life actually is like for billions of people on the planet, nor does he care. I believe he belongs to the class of people known as 'parasites'. Here's my take: 1 year: Initially, we'll see improvements. Dead wei…

> up to and including "vague" threats of violence. I'm no expert in Twitter, but I have heard many people of note complain about receiving death threats on Twitter. One example: https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dea... > Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed that some mornings she starts her day by reading the death threats she has received from men on Twitter. Making a death threat, or a threa…

> Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform?

Because, put plainly: I don't think there's much reason to expect Musk to take them seriously.The previous management had only minimal capability to curb this behavior, or claimed they did, because of scale. They'd deal with cases that rose to the top, but not a lot more. Musk, on the other hand, is ideologically congruent with much of it, and there are no indications that his yelling about "free speech, especially for the right wing" comes with consequences or even minor disapproval for that speech when you use it to threaten to kill somebody.

Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think so, though.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#306

Post by VectorLock »

mlatu wrote: post #250
pavlov wrote: post #68

In four years Musk will be bored to death with Twitter and will sell it to private equity and the Saudis for $5 billion. At that point it will be mostly a platform for porn creators and crypto pumping, the only two verticals where Twitter seems to be actually growing lately.

didnt elon get a loan from a saudi crownprince and paying interest of around a billion$ per year?

We know what they do with journalists that tick them off, I shudder to think what they'd do to someone who doesn't repay their debts...

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#307

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#308

Post by KaiserPro »

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.

Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO.

If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone idolises Jobs.)

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#309

Post by bogomipz »

I was curious about the second Tweet on that page, which states:

>"Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice. The team that was studying algorithmic amplification. The team that was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies. All that is gone."

Does anyone if this team published any of their research on algorithmic transparency and algorithmic amplification? Could anyone say more about their work and what if any literature or tooling might be available to the public?

Post reply on HN