Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announces major reorganization | Hacker News Reader

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announces major reorganization

washingtonpost.com

48 pointscoloneltcb37 comments

I'd like to see Twitter unwind the recent requirement to have an account simply to read linked tweets and threads.

This is such a horribly hostile requirement, Twitter should be ashamed of the mockery they are making of the web.

Especially when it is a public square. Lots of officials and government agencies to your local fire department uses Twitter to communicate to public exclusively.

Unacceptable and despicable. It has unbelievable to me that we are using a for-profit platform for communication between governments and the public they serve.

Fuck Twitter.

> Lots of officials and government agencies to your local fire department uses Twitter to communicate to public exclusively.

Speak to policy makers directly and demand they publish directly into publicly owned infrastructure.

we live in a world where the interoperable social web exists. Gov bodies could shoehorn those protocols into their content management systems and bypass commercial social media directly. no ponzi blockchain necessary either.

> It has unbelievable to me that we are using a for-profit platform for communication between governments and the public they serve

The internet is a for-profit platform

Every communication platform is. Radio, internet, TV, even the telegram.

Isn't the internet, at its core, a set of protocols we've all agreed to use? It's not for or against profit anymore than a hammer is.

Yes, but nobody is running servers with those protocols for free

No one voted for our governments to exclusively use it to communicate on Twitter. It kinda just organically happened. Even Iranian officials use Twitter.

We had government websites and official channels, but hard and inaccessible.

I think the problem I have is the need for phone numbers and identification to access government comms through Twitter. No one asked who I am to listen to radio (even though some were commercial for-profit ventures).

I’d like to see GSA offer a US gov official Twitter of sorts for instant communication. No ID or Phone required, funded by tax payers.

Twitter can even provide GSA the software and managed hosting.

What's going on? First Dorsey steps down, then massive new rule/policy changes are unilaterally applied and cause chaos, now a reorganization?

Anybody who works at Twitter around to comment on what the heck is happening?

It is pretty standard to have a new CEO change up the previous lieutenants. Helps cut down on people who are still entrenched to the "old" ways. If the new people are actually better or not isn't really relevant. Loyalty is the only thing that matters at that level.

Still less than a week after the previous CEO steps down, especially unexpectedly, is incredibly fast.

sometimes a CEO is elected/employed only to execute these kinds of changes ...

And for good reason. The new incoming CEO would have little to no relationship with any employees. Right now the CEO, quote

> Two executives, head of engineering Michael Montano and Dantley Davis, will step down as part of the reshuffling.

Reads to me more like power play.

The guy was CTO, so it's not like he doesn't know the people involved. Is it surprising that he may've already had a plan in mind?

I once had a leader come in and commit to not making radical changes, that he was going to listen and learn and then make adjustments accordingly. That was so refreshing and I really respected him as a result.

It feels like more often than not execs who come in and immediately change things are just pattern matching approaches they've seen previously without actually understanding what they're trying to change. A classic example is Marissa Mayer's attempts to Googlify Yahoo. You can't change a business model or a culture by doing a reorg. It's literally cargo cult behaviour.

It's not about changing the business model or culture. It's ensuring that the CEO can survive and has allies he can work with. I hate to break it to you, but execs who come from the outside (i.e. non founders) rarely care about the long term future of the company.

What do they care about? The stock options they were granted. The notch in their resume. And of course the money. Relatively short term plays. Surrounding themselves with familiar people cuts down on the tremendous political burden the job bears and allows them to get to those short term profits in an easier way.

Parag has been a Twitter engineer for the last 10 years.

Reorganizing away from a functional structure is a weird choice, though.

Perhaps. Or perhaps over those 10 years he was keeping a list and had some scores to settle. I've found execs "in the game" (so to speak) rarely forget.

…or perhaps he’s coming to the situation with a deep and accurate understanding of what is broken at Twitter?

I admire that as well, and would work hard to provide that kind of person with a lot of information, but there are people who would take advantage of the bought time to work against the eventual decisions, and that approach also doesn’t curry as much favor when urgent changes are perceived to be needed.

what was the new rule/policy change? I must have missed it.

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/private-i...

Thanks.

Why do I get the feeling these new policies will not be enforced evenly...

Cryptocurrency

web3/Web 3.0

Also, no joke: watch Mr. Robot.

Jack Dorsey Out At Twitter: Did He Quit Or Was He Fired?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/11/twitter-did-jack-dor...

An interesting read - thank you!

Relax, this is looks like a standard new boss shake up

Hostile political forces are present.

Parag may as well be the fall guy, i.e. Dorsey knew something bad is coming and wisely excused himself.

I think Dorsey left because there is no web3 angle to Twitter. Instead, he renamed Square to Block and focuses all his energy there.

Come on. There is still plenty of potential for Twitter regardless of whether or not it has a “web 3 angle”.

My personal conspiracy theory of all this is as follows.

Some interesting events and their timelines:

One of the activist investors from Elliot Management who was on the board stepped down in April earlier this year. [0]

Separately, Twitter got some bad press earlier this year in August, mainly around Dantley Davis[1]. Dantley Davis is also leaving as per [0] but back in August/September Jack, in the face of the bad press around Twitter and Dantley specifically, stood up and backed Davis.

My theory is that the board was trying to replace Dorsey earlier this year, and struck an agreement for him to do so by end of year or early in 2022. Part of that deal included the activist investor from Elliot Management to first step down.

In August once the NYTimes story broke about Dantley, the board sought to accelerate the plan.

Now we see Dorsey and Dantley leaving - along several other executives.

I'm convinced there was a big fight for control over twitter at the board level and that it was a fight that Dorsey lost first in April, and again in August. I'm sure there were several other issues not publicly reported that pushed the board in this direction (poor company performance, outlook, management etc).

[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/11/twitter-did-jack-dor...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/technology/twitter-cultur...

I've been doing a bit of #birdwatching over in the Twitter subreddit. There've been a few notable departures today. Seems interesting.

They've restructured how their divisions are reorganized.

You cannot do that without firing some top leaders.

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