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

sfstandard.com

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

#331

Post by caycep »

sangnoir wrote: post #293
anotherhue wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger... Like forcing them to drive to the office 2-5 days each week when they could continue working from home?

vs "I never understood why the company would not pay taxes to improve the environment around its chosen home"?

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

#332

Post by recursive »

timeon wrote: post #301
anon291 wrote: post #273

Realistically, X is better than its ever been; community notes have been a game-changer in terms of fact-checking. Higher quality and much more balanced.

Nor really. It used to work for all people with browser now it is only for logged-in.

That must have been a very long time ago.

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

#333

Post by TulliusCicero »

timeon wrote: post #302
tacker2000 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Jose is very much a suburbia-type city, very spread out, downtown is rather small and you need a car 90% of the time, whereas SF is much denser. I assume the drug use/homeless issues are less prevalent in San Jose, at least it was that way 10 yrs ago.

> suburbia-type city Isn't this oxymoron? Isn't city the `urbia`?

No. Many, perhaps most US major cities have suburban type zoning all over the place.

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

#334

Post by brabel »

runako wrote: post #244
tiahura wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you think it would collapse when he canned the 80%

Revenue is down by a larger percentage than the headcount, right? I think that counts as "collapse" by any reasonable definition.

Not really, revenue seems to have fallen but not so much and it's growing again according to this: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

    2014 1.4
    2015 2.2
    2016 2.5
    2017 2.4
    2018 3
    2019 3.4
    2020 3.7
    2021 5
    2022 4.4
    2023 3.4
Number of users is actually larger than ever now:

    2015 304
    2016 313
    2017 310
    2018 298
    2019 312
    2020 347
    2021 362
    2022 401
    2023 421
I think everyone can agree this looks nothing like "collapse".

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

#335

Post by telotortium »

lucianbr wrote: post #299
labcomputer wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the city had this situation about 20 years ago and what they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in the outskirts, build small houses and relocate these people. That will never work in SF because it involves moving the homeless someplace else involuntarily and moving them all to a singular place. So the homeless “advocates” will accuse you of being a Nazi who is trying to create a literal concentration camp. It doesn…

But why are the homeless "advocates" such a force? Don't the rest of the people living and voting in the city outnumber them by multiple orders of magnitude?

In politics generally, there's much more incentive for a small interest group to lobby[1] or advocate for a policy that provides a concentrated benefit to the group, than there is for the whole population to fight back to eliminate the small per-capita cost of the policy to the population. Also, many of the voters in SF have at least progressive sympathies, which include not "oppressing" groups that are seen to be "oppressed", even if they happen to break the law or make life unpleasant. So lots of money is spent in an ineffective but superficially compassionate way.

[1] In the broadest sense, not at all restricted to professional political lobbyists.

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

#336

Post by pcwalton »

anon291 wrote: post #273

Realistically, X is better than its ever been; community notes have been a game-changer in terms of fact-checking. Higher quality and much more balanced.

It's pretty undeniable that the bot problem is significantly worse than it was before Musk. (I'm not going to take a position on the value of any of the other changes to the product.)

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

#337

Post by dgfitz »

caycep wrote: post #331
sangnoir wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger... Like forcing them to drive to the office 2-5 days each week when they could continue working from home?

vs "I never understood why the company would not pay taxes to improve the environment around its chosen home"?

Yeah, because that works...

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

#338

Post by misiti3780 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #287
silexia wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Measured how?

You could start by looking at stock price. TSLA is flat since 2020, and their only release in a long time is the Cybertruck which is frankly terrible. They've also lost a huge amount of marketshare. Oh, and Musk's outspoken political opinions are toxic to most EV buyers and have massively turned off a large part of the fanbase that originally propelled him to success. Twitter is a complete dumpster fire (revenue down…

This take is so uninformed it's ridiculous:

They released a refreshed Model X and Model S in 2021, a refreshed Model 3 in 2023, and the Cybertruck in 2023/2024. FSD 12 was also released in 2024. Most of the world does not care about Elon Musk's political opinions, and the fact that some people do is a testament to how unhinged everyone is in 2024. The Cybertruck is terrible based on what? It's an incredible piece of technology, and everyone who owns one loves it.

Twitter is a dumpster fire—fine. I couldn't care less about Twitter, but at least it's not heavily moderated like its competitors. If you don't like Twitter, don't use it. SpaceX is very successful by every metric, even without Starship.

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

#339

Post by anonymoushn »

anon291 wrote: post #273

Realistically, X is better than its ever been; community notes have been a game-changer in terms of fact-checking. Higher quality and much more balanced.

The reply section of posts with any reach has become unusable on purpose, and they're making it even worse. Great!

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

#340

Post by aqme28 »

drewda wrote: post #149
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…

That SF's payroll tax exemption was specifically created for Twitter: https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/twitter-will-get-pa... Here's one summary of it as of last year: > The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize…

I'm really curious if there has been a comprehensive study on incentive corporate tax breaks like these. It has become my understanding that these are rarely worth it.

Reminds me on this very interesting video on the subject focusing on Louisiana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38)

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