Twitter owner transition: Temporary ban on product updates after Elon Musk deal
bloomberg.com
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Their major problems in many fronts have remained unsolved for a long time (e.g. spam bots, readability of long threads, functional bulk block lists etc.).
They aren't even that good at the one thing they seem to be passionate about: censorship.
Twitter on the other hand has such an extreme political bias that bias is written right in to the (current) rules for the platform
To compare the 2 is laughable
"Twitter Inc. locked down changes to its social networking platform through Friday."
I have only personally been through one acquisition personally but I do follow the game industry acquisitions. In those cases the companies have continued to largely operate as if nothing is happening until it actually closes.
If for some reason the deal doesn't close it is a huge risk to the company to not continue to operate as normal.
There's also the underlying idea that perhaps Elon has said he has big plans, but no one at Twitter knows what those are and if they even exist. Better err on caution with Fickle Musk.
No major changes in product direction, yes, obviously. You don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. No changes at all - and only for a week - is pretty clearly a sign that Twitter management fear emotional kneejerk extremism in their own employee base. The fact that they have to do this speaks volumes about the problems inside the company.
> Indeed, this is reporting standard practice as if it were newsworthy.
I think you're confusing "newsworthy" with novel. You might know what "standard practice" is for an acquisition and can infer a change freeze from that fact, but a lot of people don't know and may still be interested in knowing the implications.
The dream is to always work a couple years and get laid off with severance - even better if you smell it coming.
A question I'm curious about, what happens to RSU based compensation after the company goes private?
Clearly RSUs that have vested will be paid out at the $54/share, but what about unvested?
Additionally, like most tech companies, roughly half of Twitter TC is RSUs. Will this end up being a massive pay cut for Twitter employees? I can't really imagine Musk matching with cash, especially given the notoriously low TC for Tesla/SpaceX SWEs.
Options in the money at 54.20 will be converted to cash for the difference between exercise price and 54.20.
Options underwater are cancelled.
So wouldn't even surprise me much
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-former-twitter-employees-...
If new leadership takes over a publicly traded company, then it makes sense to reveal past failings so that investors can gain new found trust in the new leadership. But I don't see any reason that would benefit Musk in revealing anything damaging about the company, past or present.
https://twitter.com/cbouzy/status/1518953731961802752
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/151900201165147751...
So an employee revolt would neither be unexpected nor entirely unreasonable.
Note: not to imply that SpaceX is profitable, they certainly are deep in the red due to Starlink and Starship. But that's by choice.
It's not just about profitability, it's a bloated, ineffective, behemoth.
- They killed Vines, and then proceeded to lose on short videos to TikTok a couple years later with no response
- Their Substack competitor is a joke that nobody uses, and also took years to produce
This is not an organization which ships products! You don't have to be a Harvard MBA to evaluate the output of this organization. The ratio of employees to product development is not in line with any other major engineering organization.
You read on here: it is just tales of giga, 10x programmers...I only work at companies with sufficient technological prowess, 7 figures, I expect my workplace to be staffed with those of similar intelligence to myself, Ivy League PHds only, send me full resumes of everyone who will be on my team, I only deal with problems that are world-changing...on and on.
You read financial statements: inept management, no controls, massive staff expenses, development budget is usually totally out of whack with revenue, growth in staff faster than revenue, struggle to develop new features (despite a relatively simple product), over-engineered, bloated maintenance...on and on.
Financial statements don't lie (the consistency between these two stories is: most engineers are massively overpaid, they aren't good at doing useful things, many tech companies have monopoly products, they then hire lots of engineers who do nothing but bloviate about how influential they are).
In the case of TWTR, comically mismanaged company. I don't know where the bloat is but Dorsey isn't someone who should be running a listed company (and has crashed and burned several times at Twitter alone). The guy who he appointed was an obvious stooge who was clearly not up to it. If nothing else, hopefully Musk will put them back on an even keel (I don't Musk is a good exec either, but this job is far simpler than Tesla so hopefully he will bring them back to an even keel).
The purpose of my comment wasn't to suggest how to remedy the situation but your answer is indicative: there is no separation between money-making and non-money making (engineers' viewpoint, as with everyone else, on who is making the money tends to vary quite significantly...when it is pay discussions, they are responsible...when a product has gone wrong, I can't believe these managers did this to me), if you work at a company your job is to make money...that is where your salary is coming from, customers. The precise problem is that so many engineers are paid for specialising in arcane knowledge unrelated to any revenue or consumer demand. In my experience, companies that move this responsibility over to engineers do better (indeed, companies that don't, won't survive at all...the only reason these jobs exist is because some tech companies happen to have monopoly products and choose to overhire...if banks had a monopoly product, you would see a profusion of very over-educated people specialising in some arcane area of finance with no consumer demand but which get hired for cultural reasons).
There is no-one else to blame. The distinction between product and engineering is a function of dysfunction.
Curious to know why you think so?
But he also gave the impression consistently of someone who was in the wrong job. Communication is an important skill for a CEO, the least worrying interpretation is that he was making choices about PR with no reference to his PR people...least worrying...if PR actually was involved, that is worse.
I was hearing credible stories back in 2014 about them having way too many junior devs with nothing, or very marginal amounts to do.
They had the excesses on the spending side covered without the insane growth or profitability to go along with it. Can be a great business if it's hugely downsized in headcount
In addition, those who are let go are not tainted as underperformers, just unlucky.
I don't know what 7,000 Twitter employees do but it does seem like a rather high number to me.
I won't comment on your first sentence. But your second makes it seem like you believe that everyone is motivated primarily by money. A good amount of people just want to make the world a better place.
As SpaceX is privately held we don’t really know.
They are definitely not profitable now, but by choice.
This gives their business different performance characteristics from Facebook (mass market social-media and ads), Amazon (mass market sales and logistics), Apple (which is at least slightly luxury, but contracts out its manufacturing, and does mass market hardware — look at that iPhone sell), Netflix (mass market entertainment), and Google (mass market search, mail, advertising).
bigger question is why was microsoft not part of it? mainly because it didnt form a catchy word.
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google
Everything else ... not so sure ...
There are only so many letters you can use to make a word and some companies had to be dropped.
The original meaning was a term to describe the big tech companies.
But FAANG folks self-select as low-variance people in general, so it's best that they seek low-variance outcomes. Happiness is in indulging your true nature.
FWIW I wasn't insulting anyone. Evidence that I'm not a hater:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30980395
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30960680
Low-variance outcomes are just that: low-variance. If you're a decent FAANG engineer, you're making in the $500k at least by your 5th year, if not earlier, which puts your net worth at 50 at around $25 million. Pretty good outcome and quite certain.
Is writing better spam filters / bot detection really so fun sounding? I don't get the fascination, it just seems like one of the most boring websites in the world. (Not being sarcastic)
It is up and running for a long time already, written and rewritten and rerewritten.
You want to work on the adtech side of it there's quite a few of those exchanges similar in size around, they just aren't house hold names. Where is the fun? I'm genuinely asking.
WhatsApp: 0 public posts a day.
This might be comparing apples to oranges, as one is more like a global town square, and one is more like a postal service.
It is going about as well as you can imagine.
Sears CEO Eddie Lampert was so ruthless in his cost cutting he would pit his own divisions of sears against eachother for bonuses an even continued employment. he declared a moratorium on any in-store livery updates for 25 years and played the company off its stock to increase its value. the guy bilked sears for personal wealth hovering around 2bn and left shareholders holding the bag.
Al Dunlap, former Sunbeam CEO, was so ruthless people called him "chainsaw al." he was notorious for massive layoffs, factory shutdowns, and threatening physical violence against board members. the guys famous catchphrase was "if you want to be liked, get a dog." he died in 2019, but is really only remembered for massive accounting fraud nowadays.
https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/tesla-fires-hundreds-of-wo...
Tesla arguably chose to fire 1200 people to avoid paying their severances.
https://electrek.co/2019/05/24/tesla-cost-cutting-effort-toi...
Teslas 2019 cost cutting effort included basic hygene products like toilet paper, arguably an inconsequential operating expense. Employees had to bring their own to work.
Reddit apparently has 700 employees today, and they haven't done anything significant since they had far fewer employees. Scaling these services just isn't nearly as hard as it used to be, especially given how many more experienced engineers and good technologies exist today.
Twitter should re-build the product to be almost purely software driven, with as little employee intervention as possible. Give users the tools to self-moderate content however they want. For the good of their users and long-term success, they'd be wise to make self-moderation easier to do in a "healthy" way even if it's worse for short-term engagement and revenue. Again, Reddit did this fairly well for years without a huge team.
What Twitter lacks most of all is someone with the guts to risk breaking the product in order to fix the product. The team at Twitter has been visibly afraid to make significant changes, which has left the product weak by modern standards. It's a lot like Apple was before Jobs came back.
Sabotaging your company by secretly pushing code because you suspect a layoff is coming isn't unreasonable?
(toosoon?)
Edit: This just in, he just defined it and says he will rely on the law.
It is not practical or desirable to rely on the government to set the bounds for speech on giant social media platforms.
Same with UN Treaties, it literally not possible for the US to enter into a treaty that violates the constitution, the US Constitution overrules all laws, treaties, agreements, state laws, everything.
No, they won't.
> 1st amendment trumps anything CA would try to do to curb speech.
Technically, no, the 1st Amendment as such, has no effect on California. The Supreme Court has, however, found that the among the restrictions imposed on the Statss by the 14th Amendment are protections essentially precisely equivalent to those in several parts of the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment.
But that doesn’t make California and federal law identical, it makes the outer limit of what federal and state governments could prohibit generally similar (because of the different interests of federal and state government and the way the strict scrutiny test is applied, even the actual outer limits on the two are not identical.)
hmmm
>>The Supreme Court has, however, found that the among the restrictions imposed on the Statss by the 14th Amendment
So then, technically, yes it does apply.
>But that doesn’t make California and federal law identical,
Exactly, CA can only allow MORE speech, it CAN NOT have a more restrictive speech law than is allowed by the 1st amendment, which is pretty expansive prohibiting only actual defamation and true threats.
Technically, the First Amendment doesn't, the due process clause of the 14th does.
Practically, the effects are indistinguishable, since the Supreme Court has found that 14th’s due process clause protects rights essential to ordered liberty, and the Supreme Court has found that those rights essential to ordered liberty include (but are not limited to) rights coincidentally identical to the entirety of those protected against federal encroachment by Amendments in the Bill of Rights whose numbers are integer powers of 2 (though to my knowledge no actual case has used that particular description), plus subsets of those protected against federal encroachment by the 5th and 6th amendments.
> Exactly, CA can only allow MORE speech
California can, and does, restrict content in ways which the federal government does not. It can't allow less than the First/Fourteenth Amendment freedom of speech mandates, but the federal government doesn't prohibit everything that could be prohibited under those restrictions, and a rule that only prohibited illegal conduct would apply differently if it applied California law (or law applicable in California, including federal law) than if it applied only federal law, and differently if it applied the combination of federal and California law than if it applied the combination of federal law and the law of some other state.
A few illustrative areas:
1. Violations of the California Right of Publicity (Civil Code § 3344).
2. Libel (Civil Code §§ 45, 45a.)
3. Violations of California obscenity law (Penal Code § 311 et seq.).
All three of these are laws that have been found enforceable and outside of First Amendment protection, but which impose civil or criminal liability for content which is not (inherently, though there may be some overlap) unlawful to create/distribute under federal law.
The first is pretty special to California, the other two are things which are generally viewed as “illegal in the US” in broad outline, but which mostly are a matter of state law, not federal law, with different precise statutory boundaries (and even more differences due to case law) in each state which has a similar prohibition.
Twitter operates in many places with different laws, does it apply the law of the jurisdiction in which the reader is currently located, the law of the jurisdiction of the readers nationality, the law of the jurisdiction the sender is located in when the tweet is sent, the law of the jurisdiction of the senders nationality, the law of the jurisdiction in which the particular server handling a particular API request is located, does it just apply the law of, say the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to all content?
And, once a law is chosen, what is the mechanism of ensuring and providing transparency that all and only those cases where content is prohibited by the identified law are blocked?
(I mean, while some have a problem with what Twitter says it prohibits, IME a lot more people have a problem that what Twitter actually does has no identifiable relationship to it's stated policies, with things clearly not in violation receiving sanctions and things clearly and flagrantly in violation being tolerated.)
Just because you hate the speech doens't make it hatespeech.
>He can't rely on the law, because people are free to say all kinds of awful things without breaking the law
When did things change from technocrats advocating for freedom of speech and expersion to being worried about someone tweeting mean words?
Growing up I always heard: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.". Now I hear about deplatforming anything and everything that doesn't support status quo.
I really don't think this is as good of an argument as you think it is. Yes, 4chan is moderated to remove illegal content. Then of course there are topic boards and SFW boards which are moderated to keep off-topic and NSFW threads at bay, but then there is always /b/ where everything goes.
If you don’t like your employer, change job or organize and change rules. But you should work for your company best interest while you’re there. Only then it makes sense to work there at all.
Sometimes I think that our industry is full of kids that need to grow up.
Update: sorry, I’ve misread your comment. If what you mean is that current management wants to hide something, then yes, this might be a good idea from Elons perspective.
You mean like smoking a substance that the federal government says is illegal on camera while the feds are one of your most important customers? It's not exactly rare...
https://rumble.com/v12k266-twitter-insider-leaks-audio-recor...
Great week for liberty, though.