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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#811

Post by bioemerl »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #457
bioemerl wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a too great demonstration of "you only need" because there will be a lot of brain drain issues with this company, worry and drama internally resulting in bad productivity.

He sought out the drama so if he's capable he should've predicted it and been fine with it because he has ways to resolve it, something like that.

Oh absolutely, but at that point you're judging more the qualities of Elon's ability to lead a company then the consequences of having too many or too few people to run a big website like Twitter.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#812

Post by deeblering4 »

toofy wrote: post #707
PM_me_your_math wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enforcers: "Those are the rules" Everyone: what about our freedom of speech? Enforcers: those are our rules New Boss: You're playing by my rules now Ex-enforcers: what bout our freedom of speech? New Boss: Welcome to your machine

so the new boss doesn’t actually believe in the ideology he loudly preaches?

"richest man in the world" and "free speech advocate" are two ideologies in direct conflict with one another

substitute "richest" for "most powerful" and it gets worse

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#813

Post by blueprint »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #679
yummies wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a much simpler and less juicy angle here: someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication , and it got removed. It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). This isn't "Twitter took down a disparaging post about Twitter", it's that they tried to stop the sharing of internal data. That being said, I don't…

Oh, please. This "internal communication" was a bunch of blue hearts if the source is to be believed. What vital business information did that leak?

the fact there's an internal communication system and what stack it's built on, for starters. I'd imagine employees were required to agree not to disclose that sort of info but I could be mistaken.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#814

Post by tomhallett »

yummies wrote: post #639
john-radio wrote: post #402

A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is ironic if you consider all…

I think there's a much simpler and less juicy angle here: someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication , and it got removed. It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). This isn't "Twitter took down a disparaging post about Twitter", it's that they tried to stop the sharing of internal data. That being said, I don't…

I think the question is - did the twitter employee delete their own tweet, regardless of their reasoning, or was the tweet deleted in the backend by a different twitter employee?

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#815

Post by sjm »

yummies wrote: post #639
john-radio wrote: post #402

A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is ironic if you consider all…

I think there's a much simpler and less juicy angle here: someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication , and it got removed. It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). This isn't "Twitter took down a disparaging post about Twitter", it's that they tried to stop the sharing of internal data. That being said, I don't…

Is Twitter going to remove all screenshots/leaks of any company's internal comms? If not, this is not a good look.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#817

Post by saisundar »

A grim day. As a tech worker, my solidarity is entirely with the employees of Twitter.

The irony is that Twitter, more than any other social platform, helped create the aura around Elon, Tesla in particular. In some sense, Twitter was quintessential to what Elon is today.

For him to now - make a bid for twitter - back out of it in futile - acquire it, lay off execs - lay off half the force

Is surreal. If this had been anyone apart from Elon, they would have been ostracized.

I am saddened, but also a bit terrified since I see strong parallels between Elon, and... Other such figures. But Elon now owns a social media platform that "informs" upwards of a 500million users a month.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#818

Post by Ancapistani »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #794
Ancapistani wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it. I'm almost 40 and have been working at tech startups since I was in my 20s. I've been through what they're going through. The difference is that people are being laid off, terminated, or otherwise losing their jobs every day . It's not a new or interesting phenomenon. What's interesting are the conditions that led to it happening to these people, both inside and outside Twitter. It's novel and may have broa…

> What's interesting are the conditions that led to it happening to these people, both inside and outside Twitter. Which, in your estimation, are?...

Inside Twitter, I don't have enough context to say much in detail. I will say that 7.5k employees seems very high given their product offerings, and that the existence of things like an "ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability Team" at least lend credence to the idea that many of those people weren't contributing directly to the company's revenue.

Outside of Twitter: the purchase was high profile and novel, made by a popular figure whose star seems to still be on the rise. There was drama around it for months, and we still don't really know if Musk really meant to buy it. Musk's personality alone is interesting. Then there are the responses of people approximately split down party lines in the US, the various communities that use Twitter heavily today, advertisers, and high-profile people who have run afoul of Twitter in the past.

Finally - and perhaps most impactful of all, though it's not been extensively discussed here - there is the possible impact this will have on US politics. Exactly how much of Trump's popularity ~2015-2020 was due to his tweets? Will his account be reinstated? If so, will he use it? Will he resume using it the way he did before, or will he feel less encumbered by Twitter's policies and be even more bombastic/inflammatory? How will that impact the 2024 presidential election?

From where I sit, I have no idea where things will end up. Any outcome from "Musk loses tens of billions of dollars as Twitter ceases operation" to "Elon Musk sends his congratulations to President Trump from his home at the SpaceX lunar outpost after his election to a second term".

If you don't find such a range of possibilities interesting, I don't know what to tell you :)

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#819

Post by psadri »

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…

There is at least one extreme data point that says you can do an incredible amount with very few people: WhatsApp (~30 engineers @ 500M daily users)

At that point WhatsApp had first class clients for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia and Web + a server backend that scaled to 2B+ daily users.

This doesn't happen by accident. WhatsApp founders created an environment where this could happen:

- focusing on a few things (saying no a lot)

- everyone on the team is highly capable

- a work environment that allows people to focus on work (minimal meetings, good long term planning, fixing root causes vs constant firefighting...)

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#820

Post by danans »

mikkergp wrote: post #269
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…

It will be interesting to see how Elon defines success. Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users. So if you think Elon is going to succeed at making Twitter a better Twitter as we know it, then I'm confident this take is wrong. Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he…

> Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users.

I think this is failing to imagine how bad things could get societally. Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start enjoying consuming and being associated with malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech.

Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and hateful people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.

Yes, that would mean a majority of people would have to adopt those perspectives - to the detriment of society at large - but it's happened before in many parts of the world, and could happen again. That is a long-term goal of fascists anyways - to re-normalize that kind of thing, and to re-combine industry and media with a religious ethnostate.

At the very least, the previously quiet pre-existing enjoyment of malevolent speech has been exposed for all to see over the last several years. The question is whether it has a growing audience.

I'm not saying that's Elon's goal, but accelerationism seems to be something he is aligned with as long as it doesn't come at a cost to him.

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