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 the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to), but it's also significant because -
Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now. News and blog sites love to render Twitter URLs as a preview of the tweet; but if Twitter under Musk is going to start removing tweets that go against its corporate interests of the hour (is it against Twitter policy to post screenshots of any corporate Slack channel, or only Twitter's own?), then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.
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 disagree with the sentiment here in the sibling comments, this just isn't the steelman you're looking for.
Best of luck to all remaining and recently parted Twitter folk.
Agree re: the less sinister explanation. I think only this particular tweet has been removed and the other tweets referred in the article are still up.
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?
I can't remember the details now, but I remember a couple years back the New York Times published a big exposé on a screwup in the Middle East perpetuated by... The New York Times. My understanding is that this type of thing isn't even so uncommon.
> This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to)
It’s not ironic or remotely unexpected if you’ve taken notice of any of his actual actions involving freedom of speech.
It's starting to feel like Musk is playing this political game to me.
Pretending he is championing the little guy, that he/twitter/everyone is somehow being repressed and they/he is fighting against it. His recent tweet on how 'activists' are the cause of twitters recent revenue drop for example.
Even with the blue check marks, he is framing it as it being open to all and the little guy taking the power back, all you have to do is pay him $8 a month for it. Viva la revolution indeed!
It feels like social engineering to me and the same game that has been played very successfully in division politics.
Everything Musk does in the public sphere is a performance. He's putting on a show, and the show is always crafted according to whatever he thinks will sway the public in the direction he wants them to go.
> "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to)
Freedom of speech is not the first amendment and vice versa. Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private, while the First Amendment only applies in America and to the government.
People think they sound smart when they say freedom of speech only applies to government censorship, but they actually sound ignorant of the concept's millennia-long history pre-dating the discovery of America entirely.
The first amendment isn't even particularly strong protection - it only forbids Congress from restricting freedom of speech, but doesn't set out any specific rights, or preclude states from setting their own laws restricting rights.
E.g. the Portuguese constitution has much stronger guarantees. It explicitly recognises freedom of exprssion as a right, but it also explicitly recognises freedom of access to information as a right: you have a right to inform yourself, and the exercise of that right cannot be limited by any form of censorship.
It also specifically recognises a bunch more rights associated with media. Some rights protect journalists, such as the right to source confidentiality (which isn't even law in the US, let alone a constitutional right), and the right to elect representatives to their employers'editorial team. On the flipside, there's also rights protecting the public from media interference: regulators have the power (and responsibility) to prevent the consolidation of media ownership, and the media's ownership and sources of income must be made public.
Every time this debate comes up, someone suggests that companies like Twitter are in violation of the first amendment when they remove a user's post. To me they often sound like the ignorant ones.
Ironically, "free speech" as a broader principle can also be interpreted to mean a private company should not be compelled to carry or broadcast anyone else's speech if they don't want to. Any private company can choose what kind of community norms and tone they want to set, and moderate accordingly. Some platforms may allow hate speech, others not. Some may allow porn, others not. Taking editorial control away robs that forum of its own free speech agency.
The concept outside the context of legal sanctions is an odd one though. It's much like the anti-cancel culture argument. It seems some want freedom of speech with absolutely no chance of any consequence whatsoever. I think there's a reason why the more broad sense of freedom of speech has never been codified.
> Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private
Private spaces? Nonsense. You can't go in to a restaurant and start ranting about the Jews or whatever, and then say that they're violating the "ideal of free speech" when they kick you out. Free speech means you get to espouse an idea, not force people to hear it.
The disagreement is about whether Twitter is a public or private space. It seems to me to be pretty obviously private, and AFAICT the people who argue that it's public don't have much justification beyond "I want it to be, because I or someone I like got kicked out."
> Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces
Is it though?
Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.
Add to that I've never really seen anyone espouse this ideal that actually understood (or could articulate) what "free speech" even means...
Certainly in the context of Musk's campaign, neither he nor most of his followers are genuine in their support for "free speech". Musk in particular has been a staunch supporter of censorship in practice, and has only paid lip service to free speech for clicks.
The first amendment has very little to do with the "freedom of speech" most people are constantly arguing about. But they are conflated so the first amendment gets dragged into the same old tired conversations.
To me the first amendment is much more interesting. Its roots in ancient Greece. Its importance in sustaining a democratic government. The paradoxical nature of trying to extend its reach to private entities...
And freedom of speech also includes to the rights of private individuals and companies to determine what they share on their own platforms, and what they can or cannot be compelled to host or say.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“
"Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private"
Since we can't agree on a definition of "freedom of speech" this doesn't mean much.
In practice it seems to mean something is a "freedom of speech issue" when a speaker wants someone to not face social consequences for some action (For example an Elon Musk fan saying he shouldn't be charged with investor fraud because "freedom of speech"), and when a speaker wants someone to face social consequences they stay conveniently silent. (Say, an Elon Musk fan not complaining when he fires an employee for something they said).
>Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now.
Yay! Journalists that do nothing but build a story around Tweets is not journalism. That's BuzzFeed. The fact that legit news sources decided to follow BuzzFeed is just a very sad comment on the state of affairs we live in now.
Many of the child posts assume that Twitter deleted these tweets. That isn't clear to me. It's possible the original authors did (happy to see proof either way).
When one is laid off, there are often clauses in the severance agreement that forbid disparaging the company or leaking secrets, or similar things.
If I wanted that severance check and someone pointed out to me that the tweet may be in violation of the severance agreement, I would delete it too.
> This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech"
Another ironic thing is the number of people who lectured anyone disagreeing with twitter's content moderation decisions that twitter is a commercial enterprise that can do whatever it pleases (usually this means yielding to activist pressure) and who are now acting indignant when Musk acts like he owns the place (which he does).
Is that fair? The criticism about these deleted posts seems to be pointing out the contradiction between the claim of widening the speech available and the way that it is being limited here, not that Twitter has no right to do it.
It may not be violating "twitter rules", but it's likely violating company policy not to expose internal dealings (even as trivial as screenshots of slack emojis).
So Twitter's corporate interests can trump the free speech ideology. What a surprise.
Leaking a private slack can be political activism for worker's rights. I'm not saying these particular heart emojis are, but here Twitter is still in position of judging whether particular tweet was acceptable or not.
If a non-Twitter employee posts a tweet with an image of their corporate internal communications, does Twitter take those tweets down automatically or at the other corp's request or does the person that made the tweet have to remove it when their corp overlords demand? I honestly don't know the mechanisms for getting a tweet removed that is deemed to violate some policy some where.
It's a truly strange conspiracy theory to extrapolate that Musk will simply delete Tweets he doesn't like. About a billion of those get posted each day. It's extremely unlikely he called for it on this one, sounds more like a HR policy.
Smart journalists destroy their own relevancy? Barely anybody reads their articles, that's why they post and link to it from Twitter. And thereby grow a personal audience they can take to any other newspaper.
>Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now.
I somehow have a feeling that this is not the first time in history that an embedded Tweet in a news story has been removed, either by Twitter or the author.
People who post to drama sites routinely take screenshots of tweets and posts from other sites because it's an easy way to have permanence even in the face of hostile moderation. This will just extend to normal journalists now.
Musk is pro free speech, when it is speech he likes and finds funny. Not at all with speech he dislikes.
It is stupid, but free speech became codeword for "my opponents should shut up while my friends can arbitrary harrass them". And that is me being euphemistic about it.
> "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment
Freedom of speech is different than the first amendment. The first amendment prohibits the government from limiting freedom of speech, but the concept itself is more general than the law.
> consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech"
It is a bit frustrating how people refuse to understand the difference between "you can't speak this because we don't like what you said" and "you can't post internal company privileged information while being employee at the same company". Supporting freedom of speech doesn't mean Musk would endorse anybody doing anything, including divulging company's internal communications publicly (and without permission from people whose communications are getting revealed, probably).
> then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.
That has long been the case, Twitter was removing and blocking messages (and people) for much less reasonable causes than leaking private communications of Twitter employees.
Just looking at her account, her tweet about being fired/laid off is still there. I don't know what it originally was, but it seems like a picture was posted and depending on what it was might have been the issue. Like if it was a bunch of her coworkers in the office maybe that was against the rules for whatever reason.
If there’s a current publicly-stated Twitter rule that prohibits screenshots of an internal Slack channel full of blue heart emojis, I’m not aware of it; it’s not abusive, it’s not hateful conduct, it’s not illegal, and presuming there wasn’t personally identifying information in the screenshot, it’s not private information by Twitter’s own definition as linked above.
If this was a screenshot from a Slack channel of any other tech company, do you really think Twitter would have quickly taken it down? I honestly don’t.
Is it because people feel special advertising that they're part of some elite/secret ring of true knowledge sharers? Literally if the phrase was excluded, it's factualness would still be true.
Basically, I find people who say "IYKYK" to commonly be completely insufferable performance artists.
>This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to), but it's also significant because -
He hasn't made any major changes to algorithms / policies yet. They're tripping over their own pre-Musk rules.
IMHO freedom in US is usually in fact 1) free for people who have $$ or 2) poor people who advocates for 1) for whatever the reason.
Basically freedom means less regulation from governments, which is only good for super riches and large enterprises. If you are not you should welcome more government regulation to counter the other elephant in the room. Two evils is always better than one.
Yes, regulation is often pushed to protect the peasants from the aristocrats, to protect workers from the capitalists but by far not always: Regulation is also pushed to manifest the power of the powerful ... which means there are also freedoms for the weak to protect.
It is a centuries long battle to find the balance in always changing times.
I want to buy a book that shows every single Tweet from Donald J. Trump, ever since he descended that elevator to announce his candidacy, through Biden's inauguration, and a little beyond...
...annotated with fact-checking, and historical context.
Probably with a few lines from speeches thrown in as well. To really document the heck out of how insane those years were.
My favorite was the Twitter account to see if it would get banned by only retweeting Trump's account(s). They wanted to show how the rules were applied differently between accounts.
Do we know that the company did it? Or did the tweeter do it after it was suggested to them by someone knowledgeable that posting internal company communications might violate the NDAs and corporate policies on company owned communication platforms? And why are only some of the tweets being removed?
Always a lot of assumptions in the comments of every Twitter story I have read over the last week or so… and so far most of the assumptions tend to be pretty wrong when the dust settles.
I'm sure the BBC did exactly that for ages, iirc because somebody who got their tweet embedded by them changed their display name to "big dogs cock" or something.
Wayback Machine will remove archived tweets. For example, Taylor Lorenz’s tweets were erased after she requested it.[1] Other archives get removed if the people running the Internet Archive dislike the content. Similar to how Paypal isn’t a bank and eBay isn’t an auction site, The Internet Archive isn’t an archive.
Usually your employer has confidentiality and non-disparage clauses in your employment contract and separation agreements. So "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." probably would be more like "This Tweet violated your contractual agreement to your employer".
This is exactly right and it's ridiculous people don't see this. Free speech isn't equal to breaking confidentiality agreements on a platform owned and operated by the company you work for.
Where do our free speech rights say that you are entitled to publish an opinion / statement on a particular channel or someone's private media outlet?
Somehow the notion of rights is being expanded as a catch-all of various hopes and desires, misunderstood or expected to put obligations on people or entities that those rights do not apply to. This makes rights soft and hard to disagree with, and actually less clear and less valuable.
You have the right to say something. You can go say it at politicians making a speech, you can write a letter, publish an article in some newspaper that will publish it. Not the right to say it on Twitter. Or the New York Times, or whatever outlet. You don't have the right / specific private entities are not required to enable your opinion.
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 hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now.
I think this is also a great experiment for everyone who either thinks Elon is a genius and the greatest thing to bless this Earth, or those who say he's overrated and Tesla and SpaceX were successes independent of him. I think Twitter has been around long enough that we've all formed impressions of it. Let's see what this single change of replacing ownership actually results in.
Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?
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 is good at min-maxing, but I don't know that Twitter has a great competitive advantage to build on. It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter. The biggest thing Elon would have to do is build trust with users and partner companies and that certainly does not seem like the direction he's heading. On the one hand I wouldn't bet against Elon, on the other hand the deck seems stacked against him. He'll have to prove he can run a SASS Twitter with minimal staff, which may be possible. But I don't know he does that and goes into al these other areas (payments, advertising, trust and safety) that seem very hands on to build relationships with partner companies, PCI Compliance, handle customer concerns, fraud etc.
Managing people requires people. He wants to make the moderation process more transparent? He'll either have to invent perfect text analysis AI, or he'll need people to process and respond to abuse complaints and petitions.
> 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.
> It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter.
Being the elites' gathering place is indeed its biggest advantage, and the fact that consumers can get public visibility on issues they're facing helps companies with their public image. There are many times where I or friends have posted about issues after exhausting the standard support channels, and quickly cut through the bureaucratic red tape and got our problem solved. I think that's a monetizable angle.
I think something similar would apply to other elites as well. Politicians can get direct feedback from constituents, music artists get direct feedback from fans (see the recent Lizzo "spaz" thing), and so on. However, in the current climate, elites are getting skewed feedback, so "more free speech" could actually help, if it's done right.
I have no doubts that a super app will succeed in the US like Pinduoduo has in China but I highly doubt that's going to come from the environment that Elon is already establishing at Twitter. You can't successfully build dozens of new products by laying off a big chunk of the staff and telling people to work 12 hour shifts 7 days a week when they've gotten comfortable with a reasonable work-life balance (I know Tesla and SpaceX are notorious for rejecting work-life balance in general but they aren't software companies).
The one thing Twitter has going for it is network effect. Tons of people are trying to spin up competitors and encouraging people to go there based on political leanings or other reasons. The fragmentation will just lead to Twitter remaining as the place where everybody comes back.
I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t work out for him because network effects are really hard to overcome.
He won't need PCI compliance. He's going to attempt to make a wechat with cryptocurrency as a method of payment in collaboration with binance. We'll see if it sticks.
>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.
Twitter was on its death bed until Trump signed on and became the shit-posting President. This is not an endorsement of Trump or bringing him back, but the type of "free speech" people are talking about saved Twitter, made it a pile of money, and made other media/press companies billions of dollars covering the chaos.
If the guy can make a fully self-driving car, he can make a fully self-moderating social network.
He'll either be the GOAT or the goat, but the gamble is clearly on the table, and Musk being Mush will declare victory before the dice even start to roll.
I dont understand the SpaceX argument since he was an actual original founder if I'm not mistaken, I could see the Tesla argument, but those people never provide any true insight into how he is riding on Teslas former success whenever I run into those (not to mention, if it was so good... why did they need a new CEO). I think it's pretty obvious he is a capable individual, overly ambitious at times, but hey, he somehow makes it work.
I try to be neutral about him, but as a Software Engineer, he is easy to admire, he is able to work on various tech related companies at once and make it work. That is no small feat. We have discussed on HN before that companies like Amazon having employees peeing in bottles usually those sort of issues come down from the top (CEO tier) and trickle down to the bottom, if that's true, and Elon is awful, it would show in all his companies, but he manages to delegate correctly enough to keep a few large companies going.
As an ex spacex employee I can definitely say that it wouldn’t have been half the company today if Musk want in charge. Not a fanboy but trying to give an honest evaluation. Space is crazy hard and doesn’t happen without brilliant people so of course the credit for the success of the company goes to the engineers and everyone that gave some of their best work to making it happen though that type of success doesn’t happen without Musk at the helm. When it comes to space, he is truly a visionary that pushes for the craziest ideas and then challenges these brilliant people to make it happen. He truly loves space and has embraced learning everything there is to know about the engineering side of things so it’s not like what he’s proposing is impossible. It’s just batshit crazy, moon shot type of ideas and then the brilliant people that he’s been able to recruit are able to make it happen. It’s a BRUTAL work environment from a work life balance perspective but you don’t mind because you’re working on SPACESHIPS with some of the most brilliant people you’ve ever met and doing some of the most impactful work of your life.
I try to separate the visionary tech genius side of him from the public crap that he’s done to ruin his public image. He has achieved the impossible so many times that he’s developed a god complex. I can’t speak to the electric car part but I’m impressed that he was able to will the country into caring about electric cars. He literally reinvented the space industry and made it cool again. But personally he’s a shit show that has gone unchecked for too long.
When it comes to Twitter I doubt his magic is going to carry over to running a social media company. His style works because of the culture he’s able to build and the vision that he’s able to sell. From what I can tell he’s ruining the good parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn’t have a vision. Good luck to anyone working there. The years that I spent a working at spacex were the best years of my life that I’d never want to repeat again.
Keeping factories open during the initial COVID lockdowns because of your personal belief that it's "just the flu", and thus putting the lives of your employees at risk, seems like a direct analog to peeing in bottles to me.
Erring on the side of things often changing less then we may anticipate, my guess is that Twitter becomes a sort of Tumblr for people of a certain persuasion, that being the people who like the ideas Musk is putting forward. It still exists, it puts out new features from time to time, there's a large group of people who simultaneously love and hate it and spend enormous time and energy there, but it's role as the primary town hall forum is passed on to some other community or set of communities. Maybe ones we know today, maybe ones we don't.
But my confidence that I can forecast this is low, I'm mostly taking a stab for a bit of fun and to look at this comment in a few years.
One thing I have a high degree of confidence is that Musk will declare victory in almost any outcome, and if it's really so egregious that he can't declare victory with a straight face, he'll find some way to blame everyone else in the world.
In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires that work for him and then will wander back over to SpaceX as they get closer to Starship getting off the ground.
People will be flipping out the whole time and a few Twitter competitors will rise, which will be great. Each Twitter alike will take on its own culture and the bubbles will now be network wide, much like they are with big press outlets like Fox and NYT. But Twitter will be the big daddy that all the journalists are on and if you want to broadcast something it will be the best place.
SpaceX and Tesla have no 'resume cachet'. They are widely known in engineering circles as hiring huge numbers of entry level or just barely above entry level engineers, exploiting their interest in technology to work them like rented mules until they burn out, and then discarding them. It's not a negative having worked at one of these places necessarily but unless the next employer is looking for an engineer with soul burned out of them it's not a positive either.
It's 'social' and 'media' which are completely different operating environments.
Twitter is long, long established as another company.
The 'user base' of Twitter is entirely different kind of customer.
He has no 'big government subsidies' to rely on, aka neither Tesla nor Space X would exist without major budgetary support from Big Gov.
I suggest Twitter under Elon may be more profitable. Or different in some other way as well, but I'll give it only 25% chance it becomes like you're suggesting.
In a way, I agree. Twitter's moving into an era where they have way fewer people but also huge pressure to release a bunch of changes on nightmarishly short schedules. I guarantee there's some senior tech lead who's just been handed a "make $8/month blue checkmarks happen, you have two weeks" assignment.
In an environment like that, "rock stars" who can knock out projects in short order are going to see their careers skyrocket. But the trick is, they're going to pull this off by taking every shortcut they can. Code reviews are out, refactoring is out, performance and scalability concerns are out, etc. They will successfully launch the thing and then flee to the next glorious launch opportunity.
This will work very, very well for a while. The thing about taking on a lot of debt is that it allows you to accomplish big things in short order. But the debt will be hidden, and over a year or two, they will start to find that suddenly getting projects done is becoming nearly impossible, even compared to the pre-Musk days. And things will slowly fall apart.
It might be that all of the technical debt they're about to take on will have been worth it. Debt's a tool, and maybe making big changes to adjust their company's heading is worth it. And maybe to Musk, it's VERY worth it, because technical debt doesn't show up on financial ledgers, and he probably wants the company to look as solvent as possible.
But I wouldn't want to be a software engineer there in a year.
This makes no sense. Tesla, SpaceX, like video game companies, are able to punch above their hiring weight because the domain is "sexy" (engineers get excited about electric cars, space exploration, and video games)
Social media just isn't these days, from an engineering perspective. The fun parts (scaling distributed infrastructure) are already old hat and it's mostly a business rules complexity problem. Most of what all these people are doing relates to complicated and boring business details. It's a corporate job. It won't pay, for engineers, in excitement, so it has to pay in money.
So I'm not sure where all these people that are so excited to work their asses off for something that will be boring for them will come from (exciting for the businesspeople, as there are very hard business problems, but not for the engineers, as there are no hard tech problems in this domain anymore).
The only option will be to do what FAANG and hedge funds have always done, and either really overpay to force top talent to care about these boring problems, or just settle for average talent with average productivity and average outcomes.
Bahaha. Rigor and performance?? Teslas kill people. SpaceX is cool, but pays fuck all because it’s cool.
I once watched the YouTube video of musk talking about battery prices and buying raw materials on the London exchange, and I thought, wow this guy is so insightful, no wonder his companies do well. It’s not till later that I found out that everything he says is someone else’s idea that he takes credit for.
> I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.
When you're generating and distributing and moderating multiple TB of tweets in real time every day to billions of people and also feeding other corporations parts of that data... maybe you do.
I've seen this statement a lot, and I think it's missing something.
Public companies typically have growth as a goal. Twitter was not making a lot of money. Some of these people were working on building a future Twitter that would grow bigger and richer. I'm not saying they were on the path to success, just that I expect a lot of the activity there could be described that way.
Five years ago you could say of Uber 'You don't need 5000 people to run a freelance taxi app', when they had hundreds (thousands?) of people working on autonomous driving. Amazon didn't seem to need scores of backend engineers to run a web store, but now AWS is a huge business. Google employs vast numbers of people but has a relatively small number of impactful products, only some of which make money.
Again, not claiming they were doing it well, just that they were trying stuff beyond maintaining what we see.
i think 7000 is too high as well but don't forget, in a business, the technology part is maybe 10% of the overall effort. There's a lot that goes into running a business beyond the tech.
I don't disagree that 7000 people is too many for what Twitter has become but Twitter has been at the bleeding edge in terms of building web and data systems that can handle scale (while also open sourcing most of that work).
Twitter had a loss but had been profitable before.
Twitter has a huge following/user-base worldwide.
The hard part of creating the brand has happened.
He just needs not to break it, trim some fat and appease advertisers. (In a possible recession, so that is the hard part of his job.)
The HARD problem Elon has is of his own creation.
He leveraged massively to bring this deal to fruition.
During a downturn.
So if let us say Tesla stock goes down considerably that might be an issue.
If Twitter does not get called for its debt, Elon is going to make lots of money when he "brings it back to the people," out of pure kindness mind you, and it goes public again or there is a secondary offering. He bought it in bad times at "low brand value."
The other value to Elon is he will increase his brand. Elon's value is in his name. Twitter can help him there, as it does daily.
Edit: P.S. Oh, a bit more related: It will get sued. In fact it already is in the process from my understanding for botching/ignoring California WARN act regarding layoffs. So... good way of spending money. And he can not demand them to waive it off with a severance letter.
"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." -- Warren Buffett
One thing is for sure: It will be absolute hell for those who will have to keep things running in the coming months. For better or worse Twitter infra is extremely comlex. 50% gone would be very rough even if the cuts were made thoughtfully and things were in KTLO-only mode. But that's not the case. Musk has already been pushing changes through skipping the normal process and will likely continue doing so, aggressively. Not a good combination.
It should be illegal to buy a company with money you borrow against the value of that company. When your primary financial goal is servicing debt over building long term value - the incentives become completely misaligned.
To me the key factor is not if Elons other companies would have succeeded without him. The key factor is that he started all other companies or joined just after the start. Twitter on the other hand has a lot of history and past leaderships.
On the other hand, I think Twitter has so much momentum, it will take a lot of time to implode if Musk makes (even a lot of) mistakes.
I'm curious about whether a paid-for social media business can survive. We so thoroughly educated everyone that social media is free, and there seems to be such resistance to the idea of paying for it, that I doubt it. But I tend to agree with ol' Musky that this has to move from the ad-supported model to improve.
I'm also curious at the rumblings from US politicians. What would happen if the USA nationalised Twitter? Given that politicians from all over the world use it too. A case for a UN intervention?
So many people I know are leaving Twitter, but the political class seems to need it, so I don't see it dying any time soon.
200 billion in value at least. Not kidding. You’re going to see a Twitter that’s has not innovated at all in 10 years start making changes at crazy speed. All social platform competitors will be attacked.
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...)
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.
> I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks
I'm not trying to minimize the fact that this sucks for those affected, but let's not also forget that prior to the acquisition, the employees were given multiple opportunities to unionize and/or turn Twitter into an employee-owned company. This is the direction they collectively chose to go in instead.
Were they, though? Or would Twitter have employed the standard Big Tech response, which is to immediately terminate anyone who does the barest amount of serious organizing?
This is an opportunity to go back to RSS with perhaps some extensions. Nothing would feel more satisfying than downloading your tweets to host them wherever by yourself.
>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 weight is cut, along with some live branches, but we see improvements. More free and open speech, I believe he will follow through on that. Fringe groups have a louder voice and can find people to join their causes, leading to further polarization of politics across the globe, and especially in the US.
3 Years: Quality and use is declining as celebrities and politicians have begun to move away from Twitter due to constant abuse from toxic individuals, up to and including "vague" threats of violence. A minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them.
5 Years: Twitter is dead. There was a political assassination that was formed, planned, and tweeted/broadcast from Twitter live. This may be a state level politician or federal, but it will be someone many people know the name of. Elon Musk blames the engineers for not properly implementing his AI software intended to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
> 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 threat of violence, is not protected speech, it is a crime. Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform?
Also, if it was already happening (up to and including "minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them"), is this the trajectory you see regardless of ownership? And if not how will new ownership contribute to it?
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I think you're probably off the mark, but these are very reasonable and falsifiable predictions and this is what most of this comment chain should be.
>5 Years: Twitter is dead. There was a political assassination that was formed, planned, and tweeted/broadcast from Twitter live.
The internet has existed for decades with laxer moderation and nothing like this has happened - seems like you're making some hidden assumptions about how the political climate will evolve that are pretty questionable.
>1 year: Initially, we'll see improvements. Dead weight is cut, along with some live branches, but we see improvements. More free and open speech, I believe he will follow through on that. Fringe groups have a louder voice and can find people to join their causes, leading to further polarization of politics across the globe, and especially in the US.
Twitter has no real impact on polarization on politics especially in the US.
The problems of the US are first past the post elections, the broken 19th century style primaries, people literally not having enough money to take a day off to vote and/or being too burnt out daily to give a shit about politics.
The result is the extremes get a very very loud voice since they are the only ones with nothing better to do. Twitter suddenly being more "free and open" means the extremes get an even louder voice.
Your average person making up most of the population just wants to kick back and relax from the daily grind. Not go argue on twitter.
I'm not sure why the downvotes. Your predictions don't seem any wilder than a higher post that's all sunshine and unicorns, and in 3-5 years yours can be definitively answered.
Twitter has already done essentially nothing about overt threats, much less vague ones, against anyone who wasn't a twitter-staff legible good-guy celebrity.
The toxic threats even sometimes come from twitter staff and insiders, for example when Coinbase announced their no-politics-at-work policy, Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo tweeted in reply that that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong would be "lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary".
My guess is they will be forced to retreat from a lot of international markets as they don’t have the legal and moderation staff to keep up with regulation.
Critical is mostly subjective to whom you ask. In one way everyone is critical, in another no-one is critical (Except E.g. Ive or Jobs).
That said, I would think they are axing critical people. Then struggle and either fix it or go under. Whenever I was involved in layoffs, critical people have been laid off (from my perspective).
As a manager I was forced to lay off critical people before M&A. Because they we're critical positions I did rehire the positions after acquisition.
Twitter will integrate with blueskyweb.org and the lightning protocol which will bridge users into web5. This will create a Cambrian explosion of innovation in the consumer social space, and begin the end of web2 social platforms like Facebook and Tiktok. The twitter social graph will be used to bootstrap a true Wechat competitor that is based on open protocols and data. Either that or it goes up in flames within 6 months.
> The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now.
So, here's what I've never figured out...
Once your app is built, and you've figured out how to scale it, and everything is autoscaling nicely, and you've reached the critical mass Twitter has...why do you still need all the engineers? Why do you need to keep growing?
At some point, isn't the scaling solved? Once you have a platform that can handle 400M MAUs, what more is there to build?
Does it really take 1,000 engineers to maintain? I'd think automation could take care of most grunt work involved with maintenance.
I think the issue with these massive scale apps is that people want better and fresher features which are not always well defined and get lost in the maze of product development of a huge company. They have to make decisions, do we go with web3 stuff or do we improve current NLP system etc etc. Making decisions is much easier for a small startup than a behemoth of twitters size. And yes, it takes many people. 1000 engineers? Maybe not, bloat has set in at that point, but a few hundred for sure.
Once your app gets to that level, even keeping the lights on requires work. Third party dependencies don’t stop updates, security or otherwise. Laws and regulations change. Advertisers demand features that aren’t seen by the general public. Multiple SRE teams are needed to handle oncall rotations, outages, etc. And now that you have thousands of employees, you need to start building automated HR and IT tooling.
I'd say it's typical discourse in today's world to consider Musk either a total failure or the greatest genius ever. Everything has to be boiled down to this simple Disney-like binary.
Anyway, on this one I consider the chance of failure to be high, from a financial point of view but also because a social network is not an engineering challenge. That said, he seems to seek out such unlikely adventures.
I think Twitter will first take a massive hit before it rises to new heights, if it does.
So looking at other siblings comments in this subthread, sounds like Elon is a genius, rigor in future Twitter, high calibre talent blah blah blah.
Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!
If Elon "pulls it off" and shows other tech company leadership boards "you can get by with 1k employees instead of 7k" (or whatever the final number ends up being), what does that mean for the future of tech jobs?
> Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?
what I hope is that it shrinks to about 1/20th its current size. And then many many smaller platforms spring up. I think one thing that makes social media hard to manage is the sheer scale. It's likely much easier to manage/moderate a smaller social network than a huge one. Also, it wouldn't be as dramatic to be kicked off a platform because then you'd just go somewhere else.
if not that, then i hope Musk moves it from the users being the product to the users being the customer. Charge $10 for 1,000 tweets but keep it free to read. Or maybe charge money for rate of tweets like $10 gets you 5 tweets a day. Make it cost money to engage. Twitter would probably shrink (which is good IMO) but also make more money ( which is good ) and make mobrule, massive information warfare etc cost actual money.
Having to pay to tweet would be the death of Twitter. It wouldn't just shrink, it would be thoroughly decimated. It would initiate a vicious spiral in which Twitter becomes less attractive to read because fewer people are using it to tweet, which causes fewer people to feel the need to tweet, etc. As the audience shrinks big names leave the platform (because getting attention was the name of the game for them), causing even more of the rank-and-file to leave. Advertiser revenue would plummet. Any Twitter that does possibly survive would be a zombie, so minimally profitable there'd be no conceivable way of keeping up with those interest payments.
I get the point information warfare, but you may as well just wish for Twitter and other social media platforms to outright die.
and they are successful by interoperating, until one becomes more popular than the others and turns proprietary. (I just want to get my prediction in also)
So looking at other siblings comments in this subthread, sounds like Elon is a genius, rigor in future Twitter, high calibre talent blah blah blah.
Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!
> Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?
1: Profitable
2: More signal, less noise
3: Significantly less misinformation
4: (Maybe) A reliable way to get news
Personally, I'm eating popcorn on this one. I think Musk got himself in trouble for letting his big mouth yap, and he fired the execs as revenge. As a software developer who's seen good and bad organizations, I'm very curious about the layoffs.
Considering day 1 the new head of Twitter posted false information about the Pelosi attack from a site known to publish fake news, I'm going to guess this probably won't be the case.
His "free speech" views seem likely to result in more misinformation, more noise, and especially more harassment and annoying Firstname Bunchofnumbers making people's mentions even more unusable.
I can't see a path to profitability. In particular, "cutting to profitability" never works in momentum driven tech companies. I think he's underestimated how many people love their twitter community but hate twitter as a platform steward.
I think he will try to make it more "facebook like" in terms of moderation line, which is generally considered to be too rightwing by the MSM , and they will attack him viciously, like they attack FB. He either will sell it or it will be the new Yahoo, my bet is the former.
Twitter won't die, but it won't make much of a profit either. Elon Musk will find another buyer in 2 years for $25 billion and make most of his money back while leaving the company saddled with most of the $11 billion in debt financing.
I think where elon will take twitter is a sort of idea -> project -> mass colaberation, society sized incubator, were news and policy discussions are just a byproduct. But may im just projecting. But it would make kind of sense, to have it all in one app, from pitch, to finance, to realization
Twitter is a toxic clown party lama joust. It's nothing but a means for millions of narcissistic people to decorate themselves with signifier quotes and feel-good platitudes. twitter is where progressives go to sniff each others farts... So good for Elon for charging them 8 dollars a month for their little blue checks. What an embarrassment to my generation twitter is and it makes me ashamed that people in my industry created such a heinous (platform).
Musk and friends compare Twitter to other tech companies and see that it's ratio of employees to revenue is lowest. He therefore thinks he must halve the number employees and/or increase revenue to get this ratio up.
It would be nice if revenue and employee count were completely independent. Heck, you could fire everyone except one person and have an incredibly high ratio! (Don’t fire that last person or else you’ll get a divide by zero error.)
Interestingly, he’s already tweeting out complaints about a massive drop in revenue. His theory is that this is caused not by his erratic behavior, but instead by activists who hate free speech: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880?s=46...
Only 3 years ago Twitter had 5000 employees. They now have 8000 in 2022. That's a massive headcount growth for a company whose stock price declined significantly since then.
This is an ignorant question: to what extent is it relevant that a hardware company like Apple effectively employs/contracts services of e.g. Foxconn to the tune of probably a million employees?
It feel a little bit misleading to take a look at company in isolation, as different companies have different dependencies and depths of integration.
Great point. Revenue reflects the value added of the entire supply chain, not just Apple's. EBITDA/employee instead of revenue/employee would be a more appropriate measure. GP's numbers revised:
Twitter EBITDA per employee: $211mn / 8k employees = $26k per employee
Google (Alphabet) EBITDA per employee: $93.7bn / 135k employees = $694k per employee
Apple EBITDA per employee: $130.5bn / 154k employees = $847k per employee
Twitter EBITDA per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $211mn / 3k employees = $70k per employee
Apple's a funny one when it comes to staff numbers as well - they operate over 500 stores around the world, so their employee count is somewhat "boosted" by that.
Purely looking at the math and the product portfolio, I would argue that since Twitter is such a single-product company, with a near-monopoly in this specific niche, it should have a much higher ratio.
Given these factors, I wouldn't be surprised if Mush cuts the employee base in half again.
I think the employees are pretty expensive to keep, even compared to other tech companies. Twitter now has a lot of debt to service from the acquisition and I think the employees now get cash instead of RSUs (paid based on the acquisition price) whereas employees at other tech companies have effectively seen comp decrease as the stock prices went down.
So there might be some philosophical attempt to reduce headcount. There might also be some attempt to hire more later and at a lower price (or at least one that isn’t artificially high).
This is a great point. Employees at Twitter may be vesting RSUs that need to be converted at Elon's inflated purchase price. Even laying off those people today and rehiring all of them tomorrow would save the company a boatload of money.
At previous places I’ve been at it seems like it’s easier for higher ups to just blanket fire people and then rehire the important ones once people in the know complain. Not super efficient but definitely faster and comical in a depressing way.
“Satya: Thx for the chat. Will stay in touch. And will for sure follow-up on Teams feedback!”
“jack [presumably Dorsey]: I'm off the twitter board mid May and then completely out of company. I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes. Twitter started as a protocol. It should have never been a company. That was the original sin.”
Larry [Ellison; Oracle] I agree that it has huge potential... and it would be lots of fun
Elon: Absolutely:)
[2022-04-26] Larry: Since you think I should come in for at least $2B... I'm in for $2B
The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful. Really feel sorry for my younger self who believed that Musk truly cares about Humanity. Never ever hero worship a billionaire while thinking he will change the world. They are all ego manic pos hungry for more and more control. Small things you can do a) If you care about environment don't buy an over expensive electric car. Think about efforts to improve Public transport b) SpaceX is not about putting man on Mars. It is about elon wanting to control world's internet through Starlink. Whenever a small nation falls for the trap raise your voice.
Starlink's total bandwidth is about the same as a small regional ISP. There is no way it will ever "control the world's internet".
Starlink will serve many places where terrestrial wired or wireless access doesn't make sense, including oceans, very rural areas, uninhabited areas, airplanes, rockets, etc. It will never be able to serve 1% of a high density city. It will never control anything on the scale of the world's internet. This is an absurd conspiracy theory.
There are other billionaires out there doing good things, without needing to have a weekly news scandal:
Bill gates foundation has made tremendous progress with healthcare in developing countries. He’s probably made as much progress that can made in these countries as the walls he’s hitting seem to be corrupt/incompetent governments rather and money or technical.
Mark Cuban’s cost plus drugs company is making a life changing difference for Americans paying a lot per month in medicine, often saving their customers hundreds of dollars per month, and committed to expanding their selection of generic medicines.
"The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful."
Sorry I may have missed this in the article–was it something beyond being laid off? Being laid off sucks (it's happened to me) but it's a normal part of business operations.
They are treated like disposable trash, tossed into the wind by a capricious ultra-rich jerk who bought the company on a whim. The consequences of that poorly thought out “decision” meant the purchase had to be a leveraged buyout which necessitated heavy cost cutting.
How is this not disgraceful? This not “normal business operations”, this is peoples lives being torn apart while the ultra rich play games with their livelihoods.
I was one of those suckers though I kept it mostly to myself (& dont own tesla stock or a tesla). I still do feel Musk's contribution in accelerating EV adoption is invaluable and help markets get over a 'internal combustion local minima'. Also he didn't have to use his pile of money to land rockets and make space launch cheap so I give him credit for that. BUT thats where it ends for me, IMO we need a barely winning, underdog Elon much more than this flamboyant, impulsive, A*h0le billioniare.
what I worry about now is that musk fanbois are willing to bend the rules (in peacetime not covid panic or early days of EVs) for him will set a horrible pressident for workers in general.
In my view no single medium (the media is the message) has done more to weaken the quality of public discourse in the world than Twitter. But maybe Facebook proves that even if you're allowed to use prose crazies dominate so maybe the issue is deeper
I read this kind of comment all the time on HN, it’s so confusing to me. I only joined twitter 2 years ago because there are a large number of high quality tweet threads on finance, ML, NLP, breaking news etc. A lot of the time I get information earlier on twitter than I do on any other platform. If anything, for me, twitter has strengthened the quality of public discourse.
If some big event happens I can read an expert’s tweet thread on the matter 30 minutes after the event happened instead of reading an editorialized piece with a bunch of random comments. I was reading tweet threads on the recession 1 year ago with deep analysis from experts. When the FOMC meeting happens 1 hour later I get a thread on the financial implications, another on the economic implications and another on the political implications. You don’t get that quality of information at that speed on any other platform.
I strongly suspect most of these comments about the quality of twitter are actually angry that the people you follow post opinions you don’t like. I see political opinions I don’t like all the time from my finance follows, I just scroll away not sure why that is a problem?
If anything Facebook and YouTube’s algorithm were the most damaging in 2010s because they heavily promoted extremist content to random people. I don’t see that from twitter especially not at the same volume as 2010s FB and YT.
I don’t think that’s true. Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium where experts had a voice. During the pandemic doctors and infectious diseases experts were using it to call or government blow hards. Now that’s going to die as well and we may return to complete darkness.
Complete darkness? O no, not the dark ages before 2006, when we had walk uphill to school and uphill to go back home. Or I could try to more direct and say: that's utter crap.
> Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium
And twitter is an important reason that other, more reliable and informative news outlets went under.
I saw the opposite. "Experts" being totally wrong and fear mongering without evidence. It was rural governments that said "prove it".
Recall how various studies on covid lethality, vaccination and masks were wildly different. The Israel study is a quick one. This is exactly what happened when influenza was new in the 1920's.
Yet the "experts" made it sound like everyone is going to die if you are not wearing a mask 24/7 and isolating. This is what "do no harm" ideology becomes - causing mass harm to everyone to potentially protect a few.
The panopticon they’ve build is bigger and wider (sharing data between Insta, WhatsApp etc). I don’t know what would be the “Cambridge Analytica of Twitter” but time will tell.
that's literally the very mechanism that weakens public discourse because it turns discourse into a 280 word soundbite popularity contest.
Productive and democratic discourse consists of people assembling a community of their peers eye-to-eye to solve local issues, not billionaires and dictators addressing a mob like Mussolini on the Palazzo Venezia with a megaphone.
You’re missing the point of their comment. If the medium is the problematic thing being focused on in their comment then who the communicating parties are is not significant.
Why is it important to directly communicate with or even "listen to unfiltered" the world's dictators and billionaires? As for communicating directly with politicians it's very unlikely that the vast majority of them manage their own social media accounts. You probably have the same level of direct communication as you do sending their office a letter or an email.
Nonsense. This a big beef with me about Twitter. It purports to be an egalitarian platform where you can "directly communicate" with significant people, but the sheer volume and signal-to-noise ratio of popular accounts means that they will never even see your comment, let alone reply, except in extraordinarily rare examples.
I checked out Twitter again after a few months absence. There is good content, for sure, but by crikey, most of what passes for political discourse amounts to a stream of non sequiturs and ipse dixit (assertion without proof).
> Reddit. Reddit is by far the worst and has the most impact.
I think this may be viewing things through a bubble - my baby boomer parents don't know what reddit is, neither do any of their friends, but you better believe they and all their Facebook friends are all aware of all the latest crazy conspiracy theories. I think Reddit, while popular for certain demographics, is far less wide spread than some of the other social media.
I'll go out on a limb and say it's not entirely the specific medium's fault. It's the people.
It did not used to be this bad with the exception of 4chan (of course), and the state of discourse in life has degraded so far, we even see it at the highest levels of government. Every year that goes by I fear we're losing more and more of our common decency and appreciation for our shared humanity. I have seen families torn apart because of this.
I've started going out of my way to meet my neighbors and smile at strangers.
During the initial COVID outbreak, it was one of the only decent information sources I could find.
Twitter's nice because it gives you fast and easily available tools to curate your own feed. I could quickly follow a variety of professionals across different disciplines and regions to parse together some useful info.
You have to work at it, but anyone who assumes quality information will passively flow to you is mistaken and being misinformed in some way.
Sorry to say this but comments on this thread are very disappointing and show a basic lack of empathy in HN crowd. I am obviously generalizing and I know most of you are not heartless souls.
FFS people, a huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current market conditions. Whatever you think of Elon or Twitter employees, its good to be grounded in suffering of fellow techies.
> Sorry to say this but comments on this thread are very disappointing and show a basic lack of empathy in HN crowd.
The vast majority of comments near the top don't seem to be of this type, so not sure what you're referring to.
I have a lot of sympathy for Twitter employees who just had to deal with the total shitshow of the past ~10 months, with the media spotlight on them.
But that said, the thing I fundamentally disagree with (and I'm speaking from experience) is that getting laid off if this colossal, tragic thing that many HNers seem to think it is:
1. There will definitely be ups and downs, but getting laid off in a growing industry is very different from getting laid off in a shrinking industry. Many companies are tightening their belts but there are still tons of companies hiring right now, and it's not like most tech workers have the concerns of, say, medical transcriptionists, where the vast majority of those jobs just won't exist in 10-20 years.
2. Tech pays well, and the likelihood of huge layoffs at Twitter have been known for months. While I can empathize with people who were laid off, it's difficult to have sympathy if folks haven't prepared, i.e. saving up a cushion and starting their job search early. It is rare to get this much foresight into a layoff.
3. Tech also tends to give much better severance packages than in many other industries. To be clear, lots of other industries give 2 weeks max, if anything at all.
Again, I have tons of sympathy along the lines of the "man, that really f'in sucks that you had to deal with that" level. I disagree with some of the melodrama I'm seeing that this is something like the worst thing that can happen to someone - one of the linked tweets in the article had a Hunger Games screenshot.
This is a discussion board. Therefore, commenting at all requires something to discuss, and there is nothing really to discuss specifically around the topic of empathy towards the laid off employees.
It sucks, we all know it sucks, and it shouldn't be minimized but there's no "other side" to that viewpoint, so what is there to talk about? People aren't "heartless" because they choose to talk about the bigger picture rather than wallowing in sympathy.
Those techies had years in which to organize their workplace under US labor law to forestall exactly this kind of outcome. For the past 20 years, there was no group of employees on earth with more latent power than US tech workers, but this very fact blinded them to the possibility that they might ever lose this power. What feeble efforts there were at collective action were organized around divisive "social justice" topics rather than securing a permanent voice for labor in tech company governance and decision making.
Twitter workers are highly intelligent and the current pity party for them is unseemly. Everyone in the industry saw a day coming when the music would stop, whether because of economic changes or automation, but no one chose to act.
So its our fault for not making a union? Also nothing to do with 40 year decline in consumer rights & stagnated wages & heavy influence of money in politics. Also, to quote Stephen Colbert, its the ribcage's fault that victim got knifed.
Any time a whiff of union talk for tech workers comes up, the industry recoils in abject horror driven by many years of anti-union propaganda ("unions = evil" or "how DARE you well paid, lazy programmers ask for even more"). Especially here in HN given its hyper-capitalist slant. I think it's a bit disingenuous to put all of the blame on tech workers
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 broad impacts well outside the ~3.5k people who are now looking for work.
I don't really relate or sympathize with the Silicon Valley types, no. I don't do the yoga and $8 latte-shakes and the Kegerators and Ping-Ping tables; I come into an office I rent myself in a flyover state, do a full day of work, and then go home, usually after sundown, seven days a week, and I make a lot less than those kids in California do. So it doesn't really burn me up to see the less productive ones trimmed off.
I read elsewhere that they all get 60 days of salary as severance, so I'm not interested in hearing sob stories about being fired right before the holidays either.
If you got laid off in these cuts, you'll do fine. Just find another SV company that's hiring, go in there with "Twitter" prominently on the CV and play up a sob story about how that mean ol' racist fascist homophobe fired you because you wouldn't give him a Roman salute or whatever, and you'll be back to working in an office with bean-bag chairs and free vegan flatbread brunches in a jiffy.
No it’s crazier than that they get paid for the next 90 days but are not allowed to work at Twitter. They’re in a paid but ‘non-working’ status. In addition they will be offered severance. This board is hilarious in thinking that the package musk is offering is in any way ‘cruel’.
Yea i also dont understand the faux outrage. I mean the guy bought it and now he has to make back his investment and if he thinks its gonna happen by kicking out half of the people out then so be it.
Apparently Twitter was too bloated, with some staff not working a lot or doing useless stuff.
In CA this is fully allowed and legal so yea tough luck, but im pretty sure these poor Twitter #OneTeam souls will be gladly picked up other tech companies, they dont have to worry.
> A huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current market conditions
At the end of the day, CA is an at-will employment state. Anyone can get fired anytime, and it is up to everyone to be prepared for that. Any person working in any company X can meet the same fate - it's like being prepared for an earthquake, which can happen anytime. I'm not condoning what's happening at Twitter, but the idea that those employees had no way to be prepared for this is false. Though I agree with you that we should show empathy to those affected.
Being prepared for getting fired (in the sense of having a financial cushion) is one thing.
What I’m seeing here, however is a discrepancy between saying that working hard and burning brightly for your employer is meaningful and fulfilling and something to strive towards (as seen in the threads around expectations at Twitter of working 12h days and meeting tight deadlines) and on the other hand the expectation to dispassionately deal with being fired.
That just doesn’t go together. It‘s just a weird perspective. Those views don’t seem to be consistent with each other.
If your work is meaningful to you then psychologically being fired can have a devastating impact. You can’t be at the same time emotionally invested in your workplace and also not affected by being fired.
I know that HN is not one person, but that’s the perspective I’m perceiving.
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.
Meh, Morgan Stanley has had bigger losses. How much of it is actually their money anyway? My guess is the losses will be passed down to the individuals who gave MS the $$$. Morgan probably bundled it all up, made a nice fee, and passed it on to Musk.
The crown prince already owned a large stake of twitter, and decided to maintain ownership stake after the buyout. They are still a shareholder, like before, not a loan holder.
> 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.
Like justin.tv/twitch, they might do well to identify the pivot.
temperamentally he is mercurial and polarizing which is the opposite of what Twitter needs.
maybe he can turn Twitter into a super-app on the console of every Tesla. a plan is not in evidence other than throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. 'move fast and break things' might really unlock opportunities, or destroy trust.
Zuck was unusually good at fake apologies while continuing to data-rape and strip-mine users, but trust is a problem for Facebook and will be exponentially worse for Musk.
it could indeed turn into MuskChan. if he is really going to turn a blue check into something anyone can buy without providing ID it's just a matter of time before impersonation scams multiply.
it will be an incredible distraction from challenges at his other ventures. Saudis and pedophiles are going to use it to abduct people. what is he going to do when people/nations go nuts about something on Twitter and take it out on Tesla?
I'm also skeptical of the weird turnabout between 'get me out of this deal at any cost' and rushing to pay up in full. either a side deal with e.g. Saudis or there was something existential about to come out in discovery.
Do you really think it will be four years? Considering his attention span, and the rapidity with which Twitter is already deteriorating, I suspect it will be much less than that.
Yeah he’s only seen like a handful of new space rocket designs through from conception to profitability, and he only created one major car company before moving onto other things. He can never stick to anything.
I know this is cliche to say... but I have been reading this comment for the past 10 years. Maybe one year it will be true but it has a terrible track record.
I was assured Tesla would be "dead" by 2018 and in the 2000s you would get comments about how re-usable rockets were just impossible.
For the record, I think twitter is a different beast but at the end of the day, I think life will go on.
There's an asymmetry here where Twitter and other companies get blamed for layoffs, but didn't get praised for providing highly paid jobs that put their employees in the top 1%.
Even Stripe just had layoffs and they are a much more productive, tighter run ship.
Twitter cutting deeper than Stripe shouldn't be surprising. It's not a secret that they were overstaffed and are known for rest & vest.
This goes way back. In 2014 there was a show called Silicon Valley that had an entire character and subplots based on this phenomenon in tech companies. Big Head hanging out on the roof resonated for a reason. Compassion is warranted regardless and productive employees got caught in this too, but that doesn't mean we have to engage in selective amnesia and kneejerk outrage.
Well, it's mostly not Twitter betting blamed for layoffs, it's Musk. Twitter provided those jobs, not Musk. Musk is doing the layoffs, not Twitter. So someone not responsible in the least for the creation of those jobs is ending them.
That is not to say the layoffs were not needed or justified (I don't know) but the asymmetry exists because it's an asymmetric situation.
Layoffs that improve economic productivity should be celebrated. The executives who do them should be congratulated. They are creating economic surplus by freeing up labor to add value elsewhere in the economy where it's needed more. So few people understand how much human prosperity would be stunted if people weren't allowed to be terminated when they were no longer productively adding value in a position.
> In 2014 there was a show called Silicon Valley ...
Yeah, we've heard of it.
> resonated for a reason
Mike Judge has a gift for exaggeration and humor. I'd be surprised if even one out of 100 so called 'slacker' rest and vest employees even resembled 1/10 of big head's cluelessness and "beach / roof" lifestyle.
Agh, I WISH tech companies provided jobs that put employees in the top 1%. The truth is that in an era of gigantic wealth inequality, being in the top 1% of income doesn't mean shit. I may make good money, but when I can't even afford the shittiest studio apartment in town and I have no choice but to be a renter bitch, it doesn't make me feel rich at all.
Readit News
This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to), but it's also significant because -
Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now. News and blog sites love to render Twitter URLs as a preview of the tweet; but if Twitter under Musk is going to start removing tweets that go against its corporate interests of the hour (is it against Twitter policy to post screenshots of any corporate Slack channel, or only Twitter's own?), then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.
That being said, I don't disagree with the sentiment here in the sibling comments, this just isn't the steelman you're looking for.
Best of luck to all remaining and recently parted Twitter folk.
It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.
Yeah, except Musk himself already did that:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824
I mean it’s his company he can do as he likes, but that was one of the first things he did after the buyout.
It’s not ironic or remotely unexpected if you’ve taken notice of any of his actual actions involving freedom of speech.
Pretending he is championing the little guy, that he/twitter/everyone is somehow being repressed and they/he is fighting against it. His recent tweet on how 'activists' are the cause of twitters recent revenue drop for example.
Even with the blue check marks, he is framing it as it being open to all and the little guy taking the power back, all you have to do is pay him $8 a month for it. Viva la revolution indeed!
It feels like social engineering to me and the same game that has been played very successfully in division politics.
Freedom of speech is not the first amendment and vice versa. Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private, while the First Amendment only applies in America and to the government.
People think they sound smart when they say freedom of speech only applies to government censorship, but they actually sound ignorant of the concept's millennia-long history pre-dating the discovery of America entirely.
E.g. the Portuguese constitution has much stronger guarantees. It explicitly recognises freedom of exprssion as a right, but it also explicitly recognises freedom of access to information as a right: you have a right to inform yourself, and the exercise of that right cannot be limited by any form of censorship.
It also specifically recognises a bunch more rights associated with media. Some rights protect journalists, such as the right to source confidentiality (which isn't even law in the US, let alone a constitutional right), and the right to elect representatives to their employers'editorial team. On the flipside, there's also rights protecting the public from media interference: regulators have the power (and responsibility) to prevent the consolidation of media ownership, and the media's ownership and sources of income must be made public.
Private spaces? Nonsense. You can't go in to a restaurant and start ranting about the Jews or whatever, and then say that they're violating the "ideal of free speech" when they kick you out. Free speech means you get to espouse an idea, not force people to hear it.
The disagreement is about whether Twitter is a public or private space. It seems to me to be pretty obviously private, and AFAICT the people who argue that it's public don't have much justification beyond "I want it to be, because I or someone I like got kicked out."
Is it though?
Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.
Add to that I've never really seen anyone espouse this ideal that actually understood (or could articulate) what "free speech" even means...
Certainly in the context of Musk's campaign, neither he nor most of his followers are genuine in their support for "free speech". Musk in particular has been a staunch supporter of censorship in practice, and has only paid lip service to free speech for clicks.
To me the first amendment is much more interesting. Its roots in ancient Greece. Its importance in sustaining a democratic government. The paradoxical nature of trying to extend its reach to private entities...
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“
Since we can't agree on a definition of "freedom of speech" this doesn't mean much.
In practice it seems to mean something is a "freedom of speech issue" when a speaker wants someone to not face social consequences for some action (For example an Elon Musk fan saying he shouldn't be charged with investor fraud because "freedom of speech"), and when a speaker wants someone to face social consequences they stay conveniently silent. (Say, an Elon Musk fan not complaining when he fires an employee for something they said).
You are free to post on your website and Twitter is free to manage their website.
Yay! Journalists that do nothing but build a story around Tweets is not journalism. That's BuzzFeed. The fact that legit news sources decided to follow BuzzFeed is just a very sad comment on the state of affairs we live in now.
When one is laid off, there are often clauses in the severance agreement that forbid disparaging the company or leaking secrets, or similar things.
If I wanted that severance check and someone pointed out to me that the tweet may be in violation of the severance agreement, I would delete it too.
Another ironic thing is the number of people who lectured anyone disagreeing with twitter's content moderation decisions that twitter is a commercial enterprise that can do whatever it pleases (usually this means yielding to activist pressure) and who are now acting indignant when Musk acts like he owns the place (which he does).
Leaking a private slack can be political activism for worker's rights. I'm not saying these particular heart emojis are, but here Twitter is still in position of judging whether particular tweet was acceptable or not.
Smart journalists destroy their own relevancy? Barely anybody reads their articles, that's why they post and link to it from Twitter. And thereby grow a personal audience they can take to any other newspaper.
I somehow have a feeling that this is not the first time in history that an embedded Tweet in a news story has been removed, either by Twitter or the author.
It is stupid, but free speech became codeword for "my opponents should shut up while my friends can arbitrary harrass them". And that is me being euphemistic about it.
Who decides what is „news” and what is „fake-news” ? (Few PC ppl in big corpos?).
Why sayin that „sure you can say what you want, but you have to defend your words” is so controversial ?
Are ppl afraid of being proven wrong or look stupid ?
Freedom of speech is different than the first amendment. The first amendment prohibits the government from limiting freedom of speech, but the concept itself is more general than the law.
It is a bit frustrating how people refuse to understand the difference between "you can't speak this because we don't like what you said" and "you can't post internal company privileged information while being employee at the same company". Supporting freedom of speech doesn't mean Musk would endorse anybody doing anything, including divulging company's internal communications publicly (and without permission from people whose communications are getting revealed, probably).
> then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.
That has long been the case, Twitter was removing and blocking messages (and people) for much less reasonable causes than leaking private communications of Twitter employees.
If there’s a current publicly-stated Twitter rule that prohibits screenshots of an internal Slack channel full of blue heart emojis, I’m not aware of it; it’s not abusive, it’s not hateful conduct, it’s not illegal, and presuming there wasn’t personally identifying information in the screenshot, it’s not private information by Twitter’s own definition as linked above.
If this was a screenshot from a Slack channel of any other tech company, do you really think Twitter would have quickly taken it down? I honestly don’t.
Same Twitter employee today (November 4): furiously posting on Twitter about having gotten fired from Twitter.
Karma?
Ref:
- https://twitter.com/ruchowdh/status/1583518479210393600
- https://twitter.com/ruchowdh
Is it because people feel special advertising that they're part of some elite/secret ring of true knowledge sharers? Literally if the phrase was excluded, it's factualness would still be true.
Basically, I find people who say "IYKYK" to commonly be completely insufferable performance artists.
He hasn't made any major changes to algorithms / policies yet. They're tripping over their own pre-Musk rules.
Basically freedom means less regulation from governments, which is only good for super riches and large enterprises. If you are not you should welcome more government regulation to counter the other elephant in the room. Two evils is always better than one.
It is a centuries long battle to find the balance in always changing times.
Dead Comment
...annotated with fact-checking, and historical context.
Probably with a few lines from speeches thrown in as well. To really document the heck out of how insane those years were.
escalator
My favorite was the Twitter account to see if it would get banned by only retweeting Trump's account(s). They wanted to show how the rules were applied differently between accounts.
Always a lot of assumptions in the comments of every Twitter story I have read over the last week or so… and so far most of the assumptions tend to be pretty wrong when the dust settles.
This seems unlikely. Journalists are pragmatists and won't abandon Twitter unless there is an alternative.
This seems unlikely.
Censorship at its best. Not optimistic about Twitter and where it's heading to.
Twitter can probably not use copyright to fight this, a Tweet probably does not fall under copyright because it is too short, right?
Heck, even taking a photo of the Mona Lisa is subject to copyright in the U.S under the theory there is creativity in the composition of the photo.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://twitter....
But separation agreements need to be signed by both parties, they can't fire you and immediately say "btw no talking bad about us".
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
Somehow the notion of rights is being expanded as a catch-all of various hopes and desires, misunderstood or expected to put obligations on people or entities that those rights do not apply to. This makes rights soft and hard to disagree with, and actually less clear and less valuable.
You have the right to say something. You can go say it at politicians making a speech, you can write a letter, publish an article in some newspaper that will publish it. Not the right to say it on Twitter. Or the New York Times, or whatever outlet. You don't have the right / specific private entities are not required to enable your opinion.
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 hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now.
I think this is also a great experiment for everyone who either thinks Elon is a genius and the greatest thing to bless this Earth, or those who say he's overrated and Tesla and SpaceX were successes independent of him. I think Twitter has been around long enough that we've all formed impressions of it. Let's see what this single change of replacing ownership actually results in.
Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?
Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he is good at min-maxing, but I don't know that Twitter has a great competitive advantage to build on. It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter. The biggest thing Elon would have to do is build trust with users and partner companies and that certainly does not seem like the direction he's heading. On the one hand I wouldn't bet against Elon, on the other hand the deck seems stacked against him. He'll have to prove he can run a SASS Twitter with minimal staff, which may be possible. But I don't know he does that and goes into al these other areas (payments, advertising, trust and safety) that seem very hands on to build relationships with partner companies, PCI Compliance, handle customer concerns, fraud etc.
Managing people requires people. He wants to make the moderation process more transparent? He'll either have to invent perfect text analysis AI, or he'll need people to process and respond to abuse complaints and petitions.
This TC article sums up the X challenges pretty well: https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/08/elon-musk-x-everything-wec...
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.
Being the elites' gathering place is indeed its biggest advantage, and the fact that consumers can get public visibility on issues they're facing helps companies with their public image. There are many times where I or friends have posted about issues after exhausting the standard support channels, and quickly cut through the bureaucratic red tape and got our problem solved. I think that's a monetizable angle.
I think something similar would apply to other elites as well. Politicians can get direct feedback from constituents, music artists get direct feedback from fans (see the recent Lizzo "spaz" thing), and so on. However, in the current climate, elites are getting skewed feedback, so "more free speech" could actually help, if it's done right.
I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t work out for him because network effects are really hard to overcome.
Twitter was on its death bed until Trump signed on and became the shit-posting President. This is not an endorsement of Trump or bringing him back, but the type of "free speech" people are talking about saved Twitter, made it a pile of money, and made other media/press companies billions of dollars covering the chaos.
He'll either be the GOAT or the goat, but the gamble is clearly on the table, and Musk being Mush will declare victory before the dice even start to roll.
I try to be neutral about him, but as a Software Engineer, he is easy to admire, he is able to work on various tech related companies at once and make it work. That is no small feat. We have discussed on HN before that companies like Amazon having employees peeing in bottles usually those sort of issues come down from the top (CEO tier) and trickle down to the bottom, if that's true, and Elon is awful, it would show in all his companies, but he manages to delegate correctly enough to keep a few large companies going.
I try to separate the visionary tech genius side of him from the public crap that he’s done to ruin his public image. He has achieved the impossible so many times that he’s developed a god complex. I can’t speak to the electric car part but I’m impressed that he was able to will the country into caring about electric cars. He literally reinvented the space industry and made it cool again. But personally he’s a shit show that has gone unchecked for too long.
When it comes to Twitter I doubt his magic is going to carry over to running a social media company. His style works because of the culture he’s able to build and the vision that he’s able to sell. From what I can tell he’s ruining the good parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn’t have a vision. Good luck to anyone working there. The years that I spent a working at spacex were the best years of my life that I’d never want to repeat again.
But my confidence that I can forecast this is low, I'm mostly taking a stab for a bit of fun and to look at this comment in a few years.
One thing I have a high degree of confidence is that Musk will declare victory in almost any outcome, and if it's really so egregious that he can't declare victory with a straight face, he'll find some way to blame everyone else in the world.
In reality... they'll probably move to TikTok because "that's what the kids use these days".
Pretty sure you mean "erring", here.
People will be flipping out the whole time and a few Twitter competitors will rise, which will be great. Each Twitter alike will take on its own culture and the bubbles will now be network wide, much like they are with big press outlets like Fox and NYT. But Twitter will be the big daddy that all the journalists are on and if you want to broadcast something it will be the best place.
It's 'social' and 'media' which are completely different operating environments.
Twitter is long, long established as another company.
The 'user base' of Twitter is entirely different kind of customer.
He has no 'big government subsidies' to rely on, aka neither Tesla nor Space X would exist without major budgetary support from Big Gov.
I suggest Twitter under Elon may be more profitable. Or different in some other way as well, but I'll give it only 25% chance it becomes like you're suggesting.
However good you are, if you pay way too much for something, you're worse than someone who just didn't overpay and made no other changes.
In an environment like that, "rock stars" who can knock out projects in short order are going to see their careers skyrocket. But the trick is, they're going to pull this off by taking every shortcut they can. Code reviews are out, refactoring is out, performance and scalability concerns are out, etc. They will successfully launch the thing and then flee to the next glorious launch opportunity.
This will work very, very well for a while. The thing about taking on a lot of debt is that it allows you to accomplish big things in short order. But the debt will be hidden, and over a year or two, they will start to find that suddenly getting projects done is becoming nearly impossible, even compared to the pre-Musk days. And things will slowly fall apart.
It might be that all of the technical debt they're about to take on will have been worth it. Debt's a tool, and maybe making big changes to adjust their company's heading is worth it. And maybe to Musk, it's VERY worth it, because technical debt doesn't show up on financial ledgers, and he probably wants the company to look as solvent as possible.
But I wouldn't want to be a software engineer there in a year.
Social media just isn't these days, from an engineering perspective. The fun parts (scaling distributed infrastructure) are already old hat and it's mostly a business rules complexity problem. Most of what all these people are doing relates to complicated and boring business details. It's a corporate job. It won't pay, for engineers, in excitement, so it has to pay in money.
So I'm not sure where all these people that are so excited to work their asses off for something that will be boring for them will come from (exciting for the businesspeople, as there are very hard business problems, but not for the engineers, as there are no hard tech problems in this domain anymore).
The only option will be to do what FAANG and hedge funds have always done, and either really overpay to force top talent to care about these boring problems, or just settle for average talent with average productivity and average outcomes.
It's still not obvious to me what they did with 7500 people that couldn't have been done with 10% of that
Feel like there are more and more people here who know nothing about the industry.
I once watched the YouTube video of musk talking about battery prices and buying raw materials on the London exchange, and I thought, wow this guy is so insightful, no wonder his companies do well. It’s not till later that I found out that everything he says is someone else’s idea that he takes credit for.
When you're generating and distributing and moderating multiple TB of tweets in real time every day to billions of people and also feeding other corporations parts of that data... maybe you do.
Public companies typically have growth as a goal. Twitter was not making a lot of money. Some of these people were working on building a future Twitter that would grow bigger and richer. I'm not saying they were on the path to success, just that I expect a lot of the activity there could be described that way.
Five years ago you could say of Uber 'You don't need 5000 people to run a freelance taxi app', when they had hundreds (thousands?) of people working on autonomous driving. Amazon didn't seem to need scores of backend engineers to run a web store, but now AWS is a huge business. Google employs vast numbers of people but has a relatively small number of impactful products, only some of which make money.
Again, not claiming they were doing it well, just that they were trying stuff beyond maintaining what we see.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Twitter had a loss but had been profitable before. Twitter has a huge following/user-base worldwide. The hard part of creating the brand has happened.
He just needs not to break it, trim some fat and appease advertisers. (In a possible recession, so that is the hard part of his job.)
The HARD problem Elon has is of his own creation. He leveraged massively to bring this deal to fruition. During a downturn. So if let us say Tesla stock goes down considerably that might be an issue.
If Twitter does not get called for its debt, Elon is going to make lots of money when he "brings it back to the people," out of pure kindness mind you, and it goes public again or there is a secondary offering. He bought it in bad times at "low brand value."
The other value to Elon is he will increase his brand. Elon's value is in his name. Twitter can help him there, as it does daily.
Edit: P.S. Oh, a bit more related: It will get sued. In fact it already is in the process from my understanding for botching/ignoring California WARN act regarding layoffs. So... good way of spending money. And he can not demand them to waive it off with a severance letter.
"Love to borrow money to buy a company and then saddle that company with the debt so I can lay off thousands of people"
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1587457450311122945
On the other hand, I think Twitter has so much momentum, it will take a lot of time to implode if Musk makes (even a lot of) mistakes.
I'm also curious at the rumblings from US politicians. What would happen if the USA nationalised Twitter? Given that politicians from all over the world use it too. A case for a UN intervention?
So many people I know are leaving Twitter, but the political class seems to need it, so I don't see it dying any time soon.
Myspace still exists in some form.
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...)
I'm not trying to minimize the fact that this sucks for those affected, but let's not also forget that prior to the acquisition, the employees were given multiple opportunities to unionize and/or turn Twitter into an employee-owned company. This is the direction they collectively chose to go in instead.
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 weight is cut, along with some live branches, but we see improvements. More free and open speech, I believe he will follow through on that. Fringe groups have a louder voice and can find people to join their causes, leading to further polarization of politics across the globe, and especially in the US.
3 Years: Quality and use is declining as celebrities and politicians have begun to move away from Twitter due to constant abuse from toxic individuals, up to and including "vague" threats of violence. A minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them.
5 Years: Twitter is dead. There was a political assassination that was formed, planned, and tweeted/broadcast from Twitter live. This may be a state level politician or federal, but it will be someone many people know the name of. Elon Musk blames the engineers for not properly implementing his AI software intended to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Edit: If you disagree, could you tell me why?
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 threat of violence, is not protected speech, it is a crime. Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform?
Also, if it was already happening (up to and including "minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them"), is this the trajectory you see regardless of ownership? And if not how will new ownership contribute to it?
The internet has existed for decades with laxer moderation and nothing like this has happened - seems like you're making some hidden assumptions about how the political climate will evolve that are pretty questionable.
Twitter has no real impact on polarization on politics especially in the US. The problems of the US are first past the post elections, the broken 19th century style primaries, people literally not having enough money to take a day off to vote and/or being too burnt out daily to give a shit about politics.
The result is the extremes get a very very loud voice since they are the only ones with nothing better to do. Twitter suddenly being more "free and open" means the extremes get an even louder voice.
Your average person making up most of the population just wants to kick back and relax from the daily grind. Not go argue on twitter.
The toxic threats even sometimes come from twitter staff and insiders, for example when Coinbase announced their no-politics-at-work policy, Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo tweeted in reply that that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong would be "lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary".
The fish rots from the head.
that’s akin to saying, I hardly drive so I don’t care about the price of gas. Doesn’t bother me.
twitter has influence and reach far beyond what the mDAU implies.
That said, I would think they are axing critical people. Then struggle and either fix it or go under. Whenever I was involved in layoffs, critical people have been laid off (from my perspective).
As a manager I was forced to lay off critical people before M&A. Because they we're critical positions I did rehire the positions after acquisition.
So, here's what I've never figured out...
Once your app is built, and you've figured out how to scale it, and everything is autoscaling nicely, and you've reached the critical mass Twitter has...why do you still need all the engineers? Why do you need to keep growing?
At some point, isn't the scaling solved? Once you have a platform that can handle 400M MAUs, what more is there to build?
Does it really take 1,000 engineers to maintain? I'd think automation could take care of most grunt work involved with maintenance.
Anyway, on this one I consider the chance of failure to be high, from a financial point of view but also because a social network is not an engineering challenge. That said, he seems to seek out such unlikely adventures.
I think Twitter will first take a massive hit before it rises to new heights, if it does.
this is a sign that youve never had to support the scale of a popular social network
Deleted Comment
Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!
If Elon "pulls it off" and shows other tech company leadership boards "you can get by with 1k employees instead of 7k" (or whatever the final number ends up being), what does that mean for the future of tech jobs?
what I hope is that it shrinks to about 1/20th its current size. And then many many smaller platforms spring up. I think one thing that makes social media hard to manage is the sheer scale. It's likely much easier to manage/moderate a smaller social network than a huge one. Also, it wouldn't be as dramatic to be kicked off a platform because then you'd just go somewhere else.
if not that, then i hope Musk moves it from the users being the product to the users being the customer. Charge $10 for 1,000 tweets but keep it free to read. Or maybe charge money for rate of tweets like $10 gets you 5 tweets a day. Make it cost money to engage. Twitter would probably shrink (which is good IMO) but also make more money ( which is good ) and make mobrule, massive information warfare etc cost actual money.
I get the point information warfare, but you may as well just wish for Twitter and other social media platforms to outright die.
That's not how social networks work because the bigger they are the more useful they are to users.
and they are successful by interoperating, until one becomes more popular than the others and turns proprietary. (I just want to get my prediction in also)
Deleted Comment
Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!
If Musk's behavior with exec termination is any indication, there will be no severance package.
He’s going to have to be paying out at least 2 months pay as severance.
1: Profitable
2: More signal, less noise
3: Significantly less misinformation
4: (Maybe) A reliable way to get news
Personally, I'm eating popcorn on this one. I think Musk got himself in trouble for letting his big mouth yap, and he fired the execs as revenge. As a software developer who's seen good and bad organizations, I'm very curious about the layoffs.
Considering day 1 the new head of Twitter posted false information about the Pelosi attack from a site known to publish fake news, I'm going to guess this probably won't be the case.
I can't see a path to profitability. In particular, "cutting to profitability" never works in momentum driven tech companies. I think he's underestimated how many people love their twitter community but hate twitter as a platform steward.
This is VC speak that is gibberish and means nothing.
From the chat log exhibits from the Twitter vs Musk case: https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#47
A VC (Jason Calacanis) does back of the envelope calculations:
Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev / 8k employees = $625K rev per employee in 2021
Google revenue per employee: $257B rev2/ 135K employee2= $1.9M per employee in 2021
Apple revenue per employee: $365B rev / 154k employees= $2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021
Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry standard)
Elon: "Insane potential for improvement"
Interestingly, he’s already tweeting out complaints about a massive drop in revenue. His theory is that this is caused not by his erratic behavior, but instead by activists who hate free speech: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880?s=46...
“Activists groups pressuring advertisers trying to destroy free speech in America ?”
The dude is a conspiracy theorist now ?
More succinctly, Musk performed an activist takeover.
Some dude: "it's totally not them!"
Why would he not think that?
It feel a little bit misleading to take a look at company in isolation, as different companies have different dependencies and depths of integration.
I loled at this. Why redact the name if its in the content. SMH
Given these factors, I wouldn't be surprised if Mush cuts the employee base in half again.
So there might be some philosophical attempt to reduce headcount. There might also be some attempt to hire more later and at a lower price (or at least one that isn’t artificially high).
Deleted Comment
“Maybe we don't talk twitter on twitter”
“Satya: Thx for the chat. Will stay in touch. And will for sure follow-up on Teams feedback!”
“jack [presumably Dorsey]: I'm off the twitter board mid May and then completely out of company. I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes. Twitter started as a protocol. It should have never been a company. That was the original sin.”
Larry [Ellison; Oracle] I agree that it has huge potential... and it would be lots of fun Elon: Absolutely:) [2022-04-26] Larry: Since you think I should come in for at least $2B... I'm in for $2B
The implications would be many -- and I'm skeptical scalability and the user experience would be comparable. Any good writings on this?
Starlink will serve many places where terrestrial wired or wireless access doesn't make sense, including oceans, very rural areas, uninhabited areas, airplanes, rockets, etc. It will never be able to serve 1% of a high density city. It will never control anything on the scale of the world's internet. This is an absurd conspiracy theory.
Example of how musk can blackmail governments at critical juncture. Never ever should any govt depend on this egomaniac POS for such critical infra
Bill gates foundation has made tremendous progress with healthcare in developing countries. He’s probably made as much progress that can made in these countries as the walls he’s hitting seem to be corrupt/incompetent governments rather and money or technical.
Mark Cuban’s cost plus drugs company is making a life changing difference for Americans paying a lot per month in medicine, often saving their customers hundreds of dollars per month, and committed to expanding their selection of generic medicines.
Sorry I may have missed this in the article–was it something beyond being laid off? Being laid off sucks (it's happened to me) but it's a normal part of business operations.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/04/twitter-faces-a-class-acti...
How is this not disgraceful? This not “normal business operations”, this is peoples lives being torn apart while the ultra rich play games with their livelihoods.
what I worry about now is that musk fanbois are willing to bend the rules (in peacetime not covid panic or early days of EVs) for him will set a horrible pressident for workers in general.
If some big event happens I can read an expert’s tweet thread on the matter 30 minutes after the event happened instead of reading an editorialized piece with a bunch of random comments. I was reading tweet threads on the recession 1 year ago with deep analysis from experts. When the FOMC meeting happens 1 hour later I get a thread on the financial implications, another on the economic implications and another on the political implications. You don’t get that quality of information at that speed on any other platform.
I strongly suspect most of these comments about the quality of twitter are actually angry that the people you follow post opinions you don’t like. I see political opinions I don’t like all the time from my finance follows, I just scroll away not sure why that is a problem?
If anything Facebook and YouTube’s algorithm were the most damaging in 2010s because they heavily promoted extremist content to random people. I don’t see that from twitter especially not at the same volume as 2010s FB and YT.
> Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium
And twitter is an important reason that other, more reliable and informative news outlets went under.
Deleted Comment
Recall how various studies on covid lethality, vaccination and masks were wildly different. The Israel study is a quick one. This is exactly what happened when influenza was new in the 1920's.
Yet the "experts" made it sound like everyone is going to die if you are not wearing a mask 24/7 and isolating. This is what "do no harm" ideology becomes - causing mass harm to everyone to potentially protect a few.
The panopticon they’ve build is bigger and wider (sharing data between Insta, WhatsApp etc). I don’t know what would be the “Cambridge Analytica of Twitter” but time will tell.
Twitter’s catching up though.
On which other platform can you directly communicate (or at least listen to, unfiltered) to the worlds dictators, political leaders, and billionaires?
I’m sorry you don’t see that.
Productive and democratic discourse consists of people assembling a community of their peers eye-to-eye to solve local issues, not billionaires and dictators addressing a mob like Mussolini on the Palazzo Venezia with a megaphone.
Checkout Postman and McLuhan.
That’s just to say everyone is in a bubble and people are the problem.
I think this may be viewing things through a bubble - my baby boomer parents don't know what reddit is, neither do any of their friends, but you better believe they and all their Facebook friends are all aware of all the latest crazy conspiracy theories. I think Reddit, while popular for certain demographics, is far less wide spread than some of the other social media.
It did not used to be this bad with the exception of 4chan (of course), and the state of discourse in life has degraded so far, we even see it at the highest levels of government. Every year that goes by I fear we're losing more and more of our common decency and appreciation for our shared humanity. I have seen families torn apart because of this.
I've started going out of my way to meet my neighbors and smile at strangers.
Twitter's nice because it gives you fast and easily available tools to curate your own feed. I could quickly follow a variety of professionals across different disciplines and regions to parse together some useful info.
You have to work at it, but anyone who assumes quality information will passively flow to you is mistaken and being misinformed in some way.
FFS people, a huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current market conditions. Whatever you think of Elon or Twitter employees, its good to be grounded in suffering of fellow techies.
The vast majority of comments near the top don't seem to be of this type, so not sure what you're referring to.
I have a lot of sympathy for Twitter employees who just had to deal with the total shitshow of the past ~10 months, with the media spotlight on them.
But that said, the thing I fundamentally disagree with (and I'm speaking from experience) is that getting laid off if this colossal, tragic thing that many HNers seem to think it is:
1. There will definitely be ups and downs, but getting laid off in a growing industry is very different from getting laid off in a shrinking industry. Many companies are tightening their belts but there are still tons of companies hiring right now, and it's not like most tech workers have the concerns of, say, medical transcriptionists, where the vast majority of those jobs just won't exist in 10-20 years.
2. Tech pays well, and the likelihood of huge layoffs at Twitter have been known for months. While I can empathize with people who were laid off, it's difficult to have sympathy if folks haven't prepared, i.e. saving up a cushion and starting their job search early. It is rare to get this much foresight into a layoff.
3. Tech also tends to give much better severance packages than in many other industries. To be clear, lots of other industries give 2 weeks max, if anything at all.
Again, I have tons of sympathy along the lines of the "man, that really f'in sucks that you had to deal with that" level. I disagree with some of the melodrama I'm seeing that this is something like the worst thing that can happen to someone - one of the linked tweets in the article had a Hunger Games screenshot.
It sucks, we all know it sucks, and it shouldn't be minimized but there's no "other side" to that viewpoint, so what is there to talk about? People aren't "heartless" because they choose to talk about the bigger picture rather than wallowing in sympathy.
Twitter workers are highly intelligent and the current pity party for them is unseemly. Everyone in the industry saw a day coming when the music would stop, whether because of economic changes or automation, but no one chose to act.
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 broad impacts well outside the ~3.5k people who are now looking for work.
Which, in your estimation, are?...
I read elsewhere that they all get 60 days of salary as severance, so I'm not interested in hearing sob stories about being fired right before the holidays either.
If you got laid off in these cuts, you'll do fine. Just find another SV company that's hiring, go in there with "Twitter" prominently on the CV and play up a sob story about how that mean ol' racist fascist homophobe fired you because you wouldn't give him a Roman salute or whatever, and you'll be back to working in an office with bean-bag chairs and free vegan flatbread brunches in a jiffy.
No it’s crazier than that they get paid for the next 90 days but are not allowed to work at Twitter. They’re in a paid but ‘non-working’ status. In addition they will be offered severance. This board is hilarious in thinking that the package musk is offering is in any way ‘cruel’.
Apparently Twitter was too bloated, with some staff not working a lot or doing useless stuff.
In CA this is fully allowed and legal so yea tough luck, but im pretty sure these poor Twitter #OneTeam souls will be gladly picked up other tech companies, they dont have to worry.
At the end of the day, CA is an at-will employment state. Anyone can get fired anytime, and it is up to everyone to be prepared for that. Any person working in any company X can meet the same fate - it's like being prepared for an earthquake, which can happen anytime. I'm not condoning what's happening at Twitter, but the idea that those employees had no way to be prepared for this is false. Though I agree with you that we should show empathy to those affected.
What I’m seeing here, however is a discrepancy between saying that working hard and burning brightly for your employer is meaningful and fulfilling and something to strive towards (as seen in the threads around expectations at Twitter of working 12h days and meeting tight deadlines) and on the other hand the expectation to dispassionately deal with being fired.
That just doesn’t go together. It‘s just a weird perspective. Those views don’t seem to be consistent with each other.
If your work is meaningful to you then psychologically being fired can have a devastating impact. You can’t be at the same time emotionally invested in your workplace and also not affected by being fired.
I know that HN is not one person, but that’s the perspective I’m perceiving.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
(Edit: typo)
The crown prince already owned a large stake of twitter, and decided to maintain ownership stake after the buyout. They are still a shareholder, like before, not a loan holder.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/10/31/saudi-prin...
Like justin.tv/twitch, they might do well to identify the pivot.
maybe he can turn Twitter into a super-app on the console of every Tesla. a plan is not in evidence other than throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. 'move fast and break things' might really unlock opportunities, or destroy trust.
Zuck was unusually good at fake apologies while continuing to data-rape and strip-mine users, but trust is a problem for Facebook and will be exponentially worse for Musk.
it could indeed turn into MuskChan. if he is really going to turn a blue check into something anyone can buy without providing ID it's just a matter of time before impersonation scams multiply.
it will be an incredible distraction from challenges at his other ventures. Saudis and pedophiles are going to use it to abduct people. what is he going to do when people/nations go nuts about something on Twitter and take it out on Tesla?
I'm also skeptical of the weird turnabout between 'get me out of this deal at any cost' and rushing to pay up in full. either a side deal with e.g. Saudis or there was something existential about to come out in discovery.
I was assured Tesla would be "dead" by 2018 and in the 2000s you would get comments about how re-usable rockets were just impossible.
For the record, I think twitter is a different beast but at the end of the day, I think life will go on.
Even Stripe just had layoffs and they are a much more productive, tighter run ship.
Twitter cutting deeper than Stripe shouldn't be surprising. It's not a secret that they were overstaffed and are known for rest & vest.
This goes way back. In 2014 there was a show called Silicon Valley that had an entire character and subplots based on this phenomenon in tech companies. Big Head hanging out on the roof resonated for a reason. Compassion is warranted regardless and productive employees got caught in this too, but that doesn't mean we have to engage in selective amnesia and kneejerk outrage.
That is not to say the layoffs were not needed or justified (I don't know) but the asymmetry exists because it's an asymmetric situation.
Yeah, we've heard of it.
> resonated for a reason
Mike Judge has a gift for exaggeration and humor. I'd be surprised if even one out of 100 so called 'slacker' rest and vest employees even resembled 1/10 of big head's cluelessness and "beach / roof" lifestyle.
Deleted Comment
I think the other 99% would disagree.
Dead Comment