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Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

bloomberg.com

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Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#451

Post by snotrockets »

firstSpeaker wrote: post #427
bjclark wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When twitch was acquired by Amazon the rumor was that they were the single biggest AWS customer and they were going to go out of business because they didn’t have the cash to pay the bills. It would have been bad for AWS and Amazon was investing in games. If you read between the lines that’s basically said in this article from that time. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/26/6067085/amazon-twitch-tv-video...

> single biggest AWS I think that has always been Amazon.com since it runs on AWS.

Amazon doesn't run on AWS. There's separation between Amazon resources and AWS ones, even if much of the tech stack is shared.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#452

Post by matchbok »

bananapub wrote: post #227
matchbok wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something called hard work?

and they say HN has no sense of humour, bravo

Please go try to build a company, hire people, make payroll, and.... actually build something. Then get back to me.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#453

Post by matchbok »

refulgentis wrote: post #94
matchbok wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something called hard work?

Bless you my sweet summer child. (OP, in some of the longform pieces written since The Event they touch on this transition being a mystery too, but I think it's a tale as old as time: earnest, smile on their face, performs work and passion, team player, right place right time and asked.)

Econ 101, read it.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#454

Post by matchbok »

rchaud wrote: post #414
matchbok wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something called hard work?

I'm almost expecting a mention of bootstraps, and not of the CSS framework variety.

Nah, just a basic understanding of how a business works. I suggest you read up!

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#455

Post by matchbok »

BizarreByte wrote: post #332
matchbok wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real workers? So the execs that literally run the company and give people the jobs are... what exactly?

Overpaid parasites in a lot of cases.

Great, if you can do the job, feel free to apply.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#456

Post by matchbok »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #287
matchbok wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real workers? So the execs that literally run the company and give people the jobs are... what exactly?

The unequal partner in a near/actual exploitative working arrangement

Please read Business 101 sweet child.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#457

Post by Grimblewald »

lchengify wrote: post #92

Not mentioned in the article but definitely the elephant in the room: The rise of TikTok streaming [1] TikTok doesn't focus on gamers, but attention is finite. TikTok surpassed Twitch a while ago in revenue and it's accelerated since then. TikTok + Youtube (very profitable) makes Twitch at best a flat third place. Not a great business to be in when ZIRP ends. > Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, th…

not to mention new user experience. I've tried to use twitch, several times. Each time I am bombareded with tasks to do and things to click, when really I just want to do what I came for - watch some videos. Youtube and tiktok do that, no BS just here's your videos.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#458

Post by VirusNewbie »

ProxCoques wrote: post #438
93po wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they've had a lot of downtime Twitter is possibly the website most well known for downtime, and has been since literally the beginning. There's no real measure for whether it's true it's down more than usual lately, and sensationalist journalism and anecdotal reports from people with an axe to grind aren't really reliable. The closest thing I can think of is looking at Google trends, which shows that "twitter down"…

This is what I find ... interesting about the engineering layoffs - was Musk right? Was there a large part of the engineering function at Twitter that was just existing on some mythology, and was in fact just not needed? If so, are the FAANG companies (and others) the same? Legions of engineering roles just bullshit wastes of $200K salaries plus share options and free pizza? I utterly hate Musk, so firmly hope he was…

> interesting about the engineering layoffs - was Musk right?

Yes and no. Twitter was started before so much of the common “web scale” Open Source projects existed. Cassandra, Kafka, Spark, Kubernetes, etc didn’t exist yet.

So versions of the aforementioned and then some were completely done from scratch at twitter, who has continued to maintain those projects despite them not being the premier open source offering in each of those categories. They also never achieved the scale of some of the largest tech companies where it makes economic sense to have say, a custom database or queue system.

Finally, Twitter has been using GCP for some of their new projects in the last few years, but they still had old legacy systems and teams to maintain that software, so they couldn’t fully reap the rewards of the cloud.

So, if you rebuilt twitter today you could likely do it for a fraction of the engineers they had at peak, by leveraging either cloud or popular existing OSS solutions. But that’s from scratch, not porting millions of lines of legacy code.

What Musk should have done was migrate various systems, then wind down teams. That probably would have worked, but been expensive in the short term.

So I think they cut too much, and I also think they honestly thought more engineers would be up for “hardcore twitter”, instead of quitting.

Musk forgot that all his very loyal Tesla employees may have also factored in their 10x RSU appreciation. It’s a lot easier to put up with insane working hours when your next years stock grant is 500k or million or something. Doesn’t apply at twitter.

Tl;DR: not a Musk hater at all, but he fucked up at Twitter.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#459

Post by squeaky-clean »

Fabricio20 wrote: post #307
jpalawaga wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads are controlled by the streamers. They can do prerolls if they desire, or you can at least control whether or not if they're running by rollings ads mid-stream. And apple tv app isn't abandoned, I use it every day. that being said, you're not compeltely off-base, some streamers are now simulcasting on youtube , presumable to mitigate some of this.

This is not entirely true, at least not anymore. Twitch forces ads every two hours? or so nowadays (some predefined amount of time), even if the streamer has ads disabled entirely. I believe it's either that or preroll ads? Don't quote me on this but I've seen it happen and explained like that by more than one streamer. Prerolls in particular are super annoying to the point that I've moved on to twitch turbo, even th…

It's not that twitch forces ads every 2 hours or at random intervals. The streamer has a control on their dashboard to trigger to trigger X seconds of ads. If you don't run the minimum amount of ads in a 2 hour window, Twitch WILL take over control of the ads. But if you stay on top of things you can entirely control when ads occur so they don't happen in the middle of an eSports match.

It's either that or pre-roll ads like you said.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#460

Post by SergeAx »

kenhwang wrote: post #148
lchengify wrote: post #92

Not mentioned in the article but definitely the elephant in the room: The rise of TikTok streaming [1] TikTok doesn't focus on gamers, but attention is finite. TikTok surpassed Twitch a while ago in revenue and it's accelerated since then. TikTok + Youtube (very profitable) makes Twitch at best a flat third place. Not a great business to be in when ZIRP ends. > Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, th…

I've worked for a major streaming company and with several other major streaming companies (including Twitch); I'd like to think I have a pretty good understanding of streaming costs. > Youtube (very profitable) The "very" part is probably not true, and that's with Google's massive advertising empire behind it. There's a good reason why Google is going so hard at anti-adblocker initiatives. You can't run a profitable…

What about the OnlyFans model?
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