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

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

#381

Post by doctorpangloss »

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…

> Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.

This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes to get from my door in 21st and Valencia to the door at 313 Brandan next to South Park.

This touches on some positive trends in San Francisco: of course, I e-bike, so I can get anywhere pretty fast, and the infrastructure improvements have made things faster and safer. I’m not really sure whom the bike is not a good fit for, so my expectation is commuters will catch up to this trend. More people will bike, resulting in vastly less toil, and better use of the city infrastructure overall.

Separately as a business owner, I’m not sure there is a generalizable strategy to office locations, even to tax avoidance. You want pretty smart people working for you, and smart people like spending 16 minutes on a journey instead of 50 minutes, and they can figure out how to do a lot of things more efficiently, and they’re going to all live together, and maybe that’s the value that locality in San Francisco provides: an aggregation of tradeoffs that people who apply themselves 100% to everything can enjoy.

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

#382

Post by throw-away_42 »

brabel wrote: post #365
AlexandrB wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? No it wasn't! You used to be able to view entire Twitter threads without being logged in. It was also possible to go to someone's account page and see their posts in reverse chronological order. The latter went away shortly after Musk took over. The former took a little longer, but is now gone as well. In many cases you can't even view a single tweet without the site trying to get you to log in.

I clearly remember it wasn't, they would pop up with a login page as soon as you scrolled down.

Maybe for you, but not for most of the rest of the universe.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/tech/twitter-public-access-re...

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

#383

Post by wonderwonder »

pcwalton wrote: post #336
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.)

It is interesting that they appear to have solved or at least dramatically reduced the porn spam. Still cant open a post though without seeing 10+ posts about something completely unrelated in the comments

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

#384

Post by nox101 »

bob_theslob646 wrote: post #196

I'm puzzled by this move. The more and more I read about a business being political the less I want to support it. I have been a long time twitter user for 15 years (some years daily and some years weekly) and I just made a threads account.

I don't know about the move to San Jose specifically but 9th-10th and Market in SF is arguably not a nice place currently.

This is 2 blocks away

https://www.ktvu.com/news/report-workers-at-sf-federal-build...

This is 2 blocks away

https://sfstandard.com/2024/07/15/sideshow-crash-market-stre...

This is 1 block away

https://sfstandard.com/2023/04/10/downtown-san-francisco-who...

I hope SF can fix itself but it's arguably on the government to make the city safe and clean. I wouldn't be begrudge any company leaving it currently. I'm not that's not the only reason they're leaving and if they wanted to say in SF there are probably some other locations, maybe Mission Bay, they could have picked. But, SF is ridiculously expensive and downtown still seems like it's got further to fall. There will need to be huge changes in zoning and lots of investment for it to recover.

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

#385

Post by janalsncm »

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/

> spends almost a billion a year

That sounds like an allocation issue. There aren’t enough beds. If you became homeless in SF tonight, you would be on the street.

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

#386

Post by chairmansteve »

brookst wrote: post #201
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.

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.

"where him and maybe two other superior specimens of manhood could single handedly run the entire company" - while driving their manly cyber trucks.

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

#387

Post by kevingadd »

tacker2000 wrote: post #290
ionwake wrote: post #80

As a UK chap, can someone give me their opinion on if San Jose is a more pleasant place to live than San Fran these days?

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.

The drug use and homelessness are still pretty visible in downtown San Jose, or were when I lived there 2 years ago. Your personal tolerance level for it may be different from mine - I just treat it as a reality of city life, but my sister complained about it any time she visited because it made her feel actively unsafe.

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

#388

Post by acdha »

ImJamal wrote: post #270
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…

They did not ban Trump for "continued calls for violence and election interference". Look at the two Tweets they used as a justification of his ban [1] > The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!! And > To all of those who have asked, I…

Again, if those were all he’d posted and his followers hadn’t just responded to his past calls with a violent assault on the election process, he’d never have gotten banned. As you can see by reading the page you linked, this decision was made with that context in mind after years of crossing the boundaries, and they did not want their corporate resources potentially being used for additional political violence.

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

#389

Post by diffxx »

brabel wrote: post #365
AlexandrB wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? No it wasn't! You used to be able to view entire Twitter threads without being logged in. It was also possible to go to someone's account page and see their posts in reverse chronological order. The latter went away shortly after Musk took over. The former took a little longer, but is now gone as well. In many cases you can't even view a single tweet without the site trying to get you to log in.

I clearly remember it wasn't, they would pop up with a login page as soon as you scrolled down.

Yes, but you could bypass the login page.

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

#390

Post by dragontamer »

nuz wrote: post #128
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.

They've cut out things like viewing who liked a tweet etc (for cost savings I suspect) so the site is probably dirt cheap. Can't imagine ads don't pay for the cost of running servers at this point, and a headcount reduction might bring it to profitability.

The issue is the $13 Billion loans and estimated $1.3 Billion/year interest payments.

I'm sure Elon can wipe those out himself, but it's still a lot of money that isn't accounted for. Twitter cannot merely float at barely profitability. Twitter needs at least $1.3 Billion/year to counteract interest payments.

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