Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring
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Neither of these things seem particularly kosher moves to make. The question is how to figure out which one it is.
It would seem weird for Parag to be following Musk's orders given how Musk has behaved. It also seems weird for Musk to already have the insight into the company to know specifically who to fire. There's not much advantage to making these changes now.
On the other hand, going rogue and making big strategic decisions about the company really has the potential to burn Parag's reputation for wherever he would move next.
I guess there's a third option - that Musk has expressed a specific view, Parag has a different view, but that they both think that this move is necessary anyway so just got on and did it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/sec-investigates-elon-musks-...
For Parag, I don't see it "burning his reputation" at all, considering either a) he's right and will face the tall task of helming a Twitter that continues to disappoint its investors or b) he's wrong and it won't be his problem when Elon fires him next year.
The probability that Elon is margin called by year end is roughly 40% according to option prices.
- 60% chance you get fired either by Musk or investors if you don't turn the ship. - 40% chance you Musk is margin called and doesn't take over, but still might be fired by investors or acquired by someone else who may in turn can him.
His wealth is mostly owning 20% of Tesla, plus some extra few billions from owning significant fractions of SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. Presumably there’s some cash in there as well, but on his scale a hundred million is a rounding error.
I'm not saying this as a Tesla-lover nor as a fan of Musk, in fact, as a lover of gasoline engines and of cars in general I see this as a tragedy (I regard EVs as refrigerators with some wheels attached), but it is what it is.
It's the same reason they aggressively pretend Apple didn't spark the smartphone revolution (when it all very obviously derived from the iPhone and its dramatic impact, right down to the design of the phone and interface being copied by everyone else).
It's the same reason if you say the US invented the Internet here on HN, you'll get confused replies by people from outside of the US that are entirely ignorant of that fact, because of foreign revisionist history and the desperate desire to deny the US credit for its vast accomplishments (the America bad brigade). The same goes for eg the transistor, microprocessor and countless other prominent technologies that revolutionized the world.
It's still a business and it is tiny compared to the big players. Tesla is only a slightly better value than crypto given how insanely overvalued the stock is. If the company had an $80B market cap, it would still be vastly overvalued.
It’s currently undervalued at 10x that price.
Re being small: its operating income was greater than Toyota in Q1, and it has two new factories that are yet to ramp production.
The Tesla Roadster was developed around the same time, yet deliveries started in 2008. By the time Renault got around to actually making the Zoe available to customers, Tesla had been selling the Model S for 6 months. I don't think they were taking EVs particularly seriously if they took that much longer to put out a less sophisticated product despite having vastly more resources at their disposal.
Making the first mass-market EV was going to take multiple years, no matter what. You need to engineer the entire car, at scale, and you need to hit a price-point. Tesla didn't have such an issue. I can't stress enough how much more difficult it is to make an affordable product than one where price is no object.
It is my belief that those "competitive cars" wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for Tesla.
Tesla brought glamour and practicality to a field stymied by boredom and theoretical concerns. They pledged to build an EV people would actually want to use, bringing all the latest tech to drive UX with no regard for tradition. They set to solve consumer problems, and they are succeeding in doing that.
I don't have an interest in Tesla nor do I particularly like Musk, but objectively speaking, they must have done something right - they started a mass-car company from scratch in the third millennium, something very very hard; they popularized a technology that had failed to get traction for decades, and have taken the fight to behemoth corporations that had been bearish on the sector's overall future since the '90s. That simply cannot be just marketing or "gimmicks".
If 90% of the time one can own a median vehicle wherein they never have to go to the gas station, the vehicle lasts 1,000,000 miles, they aren’t emitting CO2, and gas prices go past five dollars…
it might be common sense to use the savings from the situation to rent vehicles to satisfy the other 10% of your needs.
But hey, maybe your idea of common sense is to sit around 16 feet in the air with 120 mph winds blowing against the side of your moving brick.
Everyone else has to buy to cover the 99% pctile or they’re screwed when they need to do something somewhat unusual (long drive to grandmas house, move, vacation, family emergency, whatever).
And for those who say ‘just rent!’ - I’ve tried, and most of the times you’d want to, you can’t get a rental, because a bunch of other folks got there first! Rental companies can’t buy enough cars to handle peak usage a few times a year.
The "supercharger" network is something that no other manufacturer was doing or was seriously interested in doing, and it's an extremely practical concern.
> When the IC companies convert over
... a lot of them they might well end up buying batteries from Tesla. Tesla will also continue to be the benchmark against what EV will be measured, in the same way Ford continued to be a reference for decades after competitors matched them.
EV was, at best, a curiosity and definitely nobody's main focus, until Tesla first showed EV cars are not golf carts (with the rooadster) and then that they can be a desirable higher-class sedan (with Model S).
If Tesla went bankrupt today, we'd still be firmly on the path to phase out ICE cars.
This was totally unconcievable just a few years ago. Tesla did that.
I would say that the advance in battery technology, the laws introduced by state of California and north european countries did more than Tesla ever did.
Also the Renault Zoe, still top selling EV cars in europe, had her first concept car showed in 2005 and was on sale only 5 months after the Model S in 2012. The Leaf also predates the Model S.The 1st generation Tesla Roadster sold poorly like most other contemporary EVs and most of the sales happened in her last year in 2012. It was as niche as all other EVs in the market in its first 3 years of commercial life. The Mitsubishi i-Miev and its Citroën and Peugeot variant outsold the Tesla Roadster by more than a factor of 10. Almost 30000 cars between 2008 and 2014.
What Tesla achieved was showing the wealthy people they could greenwash their way to the same energy wasting life by going EV. A good publicity stunt.
Look at i-Miev and the Roadster and tell me which one do you think a typical car lover would love more. If you think that would've taken over the car market .. then you're definitely not in the same circles I am :-)
Other car makers started paying serious attention only when Tesla inexplicably didn't go under and Model S started to be a success.
>Look at i-Miev and the Roadster and tell me which one do you think a typical car lover would love more. If you think that would've taken over the car market .. then you're definitely not in the same circles I am :-)
The car industry do not care what the typical car lover love more. They have been a dying breed for more than 3 decades. The i-Miev and derivated counterpart sold 12 times more than the roadster because they are actually usable things and not enthusiast toys. It even outsold the Model-S in all the other markets than USA when they were both available.
The Model-S,X,3 and Y success came much later. The automotive industry definitely had a more cautious approach in the upper end segment but they weren't sleeping.
In many industries, you can see these "bar-raisers."
Starbucks didn't invent coffee, but they created a mass market for a more premium sort of coffee in a country that previously didn't see coffee as something more that a thing you chug down in the morning so you can wake up.
Nintendo didn't invent video games, but they raised the bar for home consoles after the "great video game crash" and have repeated the feat several times since despite rarely if ever being on the cutting edge of tech.
And so on.
Tesla did something similar. Previously, electric cars and hybrids were seen as dorky and decidedly uncool by most. Tesla changed that public perception. It's hard to imagine the "luxury" electric car market existing without them. Perhaps another company might have accomplished the same feat, but Tesla was the first one to pull it off.
From a raw innovation standpoint, these advances are huge because by creating new market segments, they ensure a flow of money into those markets. Tesla's expense has paved the way for billions if not trillions of dollars into EV R&D and battery R&D. That matters, a lot.
As to why - ICE dealers didn't want to lose recurring revenue streams and ICE manufacturers didn't want to disrupt the means through which they would service the loans that they took out to build out their present ability to manufacture at scale. The incentives were perverse and in some cases still are perverse enough that the ICE industry has to be forced to help kill itself off, rather than dying willingly because it is right.
At least those were new markets.
At the end of the day you can't explain love and people love Elon Musk. Guys from all over the world are in a sort weird parasocial relationship with the guy. That never happened with the CEO of MySpace and BlackBerry
Worship and bashing/hate are the domain of the crazies/extremists/zealots who are a vocal minority, really a small proportion of the world. Most people thankfully are more balanced and rational in their perspectives.
The Leaf and the 3 basically met in the middle at the same time at about the $45K price point for similar cars.
Tesla was only first in the category of outrageously expensive cars for virtue-signalling rich people who fake-care about evironmentalism. And fake self-driving.
Looked at another way, if the LEAF and 3 cost the same, would many people have bought the LEAF?
Their recharge network still sets them apart as well.
Do you realize how bad that is? People had to adapt to the S limitations.
Then, it turned out, people bought them by the hundreds of thousands, single-handedly recreating the market for EVs.
Then, other manufacturers noticed, and started realizing they might be left behind if they didn't take EVs seriously.
Now, sure, there are many competitors, but even still they have only been built in small quantities.
How long Tesla's edge will last is an open question, but there's no question that Tesla has single-handedly exploded the demand for EVs in the consumer vehicle market.
Otherwise, Nissan would have been Tesla. They have produced some of the first practical EVs, way before Tesla did. Unfortunately, they made them for the Japanese consumer, not for the average american. At least not initially.
I love my LEAF, but a little over a dozen times per year, I have to trade cars with my spouse to accomplish some particular day's driving.
But I don’t think Nissan would’ve been Tesla: they didn’t think people would pay for a full-range EV (and still don’t, looks like?) and didn’t prioritize it. For many Americans that means the LEAF could not be their only vehicle.
The supercharger network also played a huge role in normalizing EVs, in particular in making the Tesla Model S the first car you could convince yourself was a great car that “happened to be an EV”. The S isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t have any huge, obvious EV-related deficits, like the LEAF’s range and charge time.
Tesla created the market for high-performance EVs. They did not create the overall EV market. The high-end market is only a small part of the numbers.
Also the Renault Zoe looked just like the Renault Clio, that is, a normal car.
If “high-performance” means “can handle the daily driving needs of > 50% of the population” then I guess you’re right, Tesla only created that market.
The Zoe also had a 150km+ effective range, which is more than enough for most people (maybe less so for Americans).
Tesla’s chief designer himself: “We are past the idea of an environmentally friendly vehicle needing to look different. People don't want to sacrifice anything, including style, to own an efficient car.”
You definitely had to compromise to own it, on almost everything aspect. Despite everything else, people were buying it because it was electric.
But my point is that could do everything an American expects a baseline car, like a Honda Civic, could do - it worked as a car in addition to being electric, which is more than can be said for the Leaf and Zoe, on range and charge time concerns alone.
> But my point is that could do everything an American expects a baseline car, like a Honda Civic, could do - it worked as a car in addition to being electric, which is more than can be said for the Leaf and Zoe, on range and charge time concerns alone.
Sure, at 100k$, which is too much for what an American expects of a baseline car. I am sure Renault and Nissan could have done it to if they had multiplied the price by 4, but then it would defeat the entire purpose of a practical everyday car. It's like saying that Ferrari makes practical every day cars because of the GTC4Lusso.
Let me ask you this: The Model S outsold the Leaf and the Zoe, and helped launch a new car company that has now sold more BEVs than any other manufacturer. Why do you think that is?
One possibility is that they made EVs that many people wanted to buy, and people bought them. I'm proposing that this is the case, and the fact that the Model S sold well despite costing $100k is an extremely strong indicator of this.
New EVs, even those from established manufacturers, are emulating Tesla, not the Leaf or Zoe.
Without Tesla, we may have had many Leaf or Zoe-like vehicles, but given how uptake of those vehicles went, it seems unlikely that we'd be where we are today -- in California, in 2021, BEVs were ~10% of all new vehicles sold.
Personal opinions of the cost or style of Tesla's EVs aside, one can't deny that Tesla made EVs attractive in the eyes of Californian consumers, and as goes California, so goes the world (for better or worse).
To this day, GM sells that "direct competitor" with a ~55kw charging limit.
Tesla is what made the other manufacturers realize that people were willing to wait 15-25 minutes on DCFC while road tripping electric cars.
Incidentally, these margins are also far higher than those of ICE manufacturers. For example, Toyota in Q1 had lower operating income than Tesla, despite having 4x the revenue.
So... like Apple?
Compare to Jeff Bezos, for example, who owns 10% of Amazon
To be slightly more quantitative, we're talking about folks who make roughly $100K and up, particularly the ones who and don't have kids.
So, roughly the top 15% of earners in America.
Tesla's P/E ratio is currently 106. I have no idea why Tesla is so expensive.
Which is because, his work/impact as ceo is visible on company and industry levels. contrast that with mba shortsighted ceos and/or ceos who sit on their assess waiting for golden parachute to deploy (thats the sentiment, irrelevant if unfounded). Charisma and beeing somewhat casual/releatable person on tv also helps.
If it's just about EVs they should soon be priced below Ford. Even self-driving is insufficient as long as a driver needs to pay attention. Other companies are catching up - who cares if they need more hardware and can't do just vision, it's becoming cheaper.
Tesla's market cap is now 740B. For a while there it was over 1T. Here's a fun visualization:
https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/2022/01/Volkswagen_doub...
Tesla produced 936k cars last year, so VW will probably need to build more than 800k EVs to surpass Tesla in 2022.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38657616/tesla-million-ev...
Because the market doesn't, and shouldn't, value things solely based on a snapshot of current business, as opposed to a projection of future business, based only partially on the current snapshot. A phrasing that gets at the market's thinking looks more like "A car company that effectively created the electric car market, right before the entire industry started making credible commitments to switch primarily over to EVs, all while being the most successful company at getting some degree of automated driving into consumer hands and awareness". Your phrasing implies "pre-Cruise GM, but with less sales"; it's no wonder why you're confused.
Note that I'm not claiming that Tesla is appropriately valued right now, and as someone who works in AV, I think their approach to self-driving is misleading and irresponsible. But it sounds like the bulk of your confusion comes from a significant misunderstanding of what the stock market _is_.
The market is betting on Tesla being "Apple for EVs", with a combination of first-mover advantage and innovative secret sauce. Apple similarly had competitors but an Apple bull in 2008 is a very happy man today.
I was narrowly responding to the parent comment's misunderstanding of what valuation is: specifically, the fact that it includes more than simply the current state of the business, incorporating future success as well.
"Tesla's market prices relies on super optimistic assumptions" is a sound complaint. "Tesla is a midsized car company" is a nonsensical one.
I think OP would not be the confused one in 6 months time.
Stock market only cares about the future when people care about the future. AKA when there is optimism in the air.
The 2015-2022 wave of optimism was quite frankly uncalled for and overextended given the reality at the base level. Especially what happened 2020-2022.
Apologies, but this doesn't make any sense. The OP referred to the current size of Tesla ("mid-size car company"), with no reference to future cash flows, which is what the majority of most stock prices are made up of.
Looking at where tesla will be in six months _is_ looking at the future, which is the exact opposite of what I was remarking on. If the complaint had been "Tesla is overvalued due to irratuonal exuberance that its future revenues are unlikely to deliver on", I wouldn't really have any disagreement.
Elon's is around $240B, so it sounds like 10x the amount.
Even by different calculations, it seems like an order of magnitude is a big difference.
By GDP, they are both worth around 1% of the US GDP, but the US GDP is many times what it was then, particularly post-WWII.
Musk's buying power seems significantly more than Rockefeller's by any metric.
How much money did musk really make? how much of it is an artifact of monetary policy.
PayPal is a $25b sales, $4b operating income giant in the financial sector (payments / payment processing specifically). They have an $83b market cap and have sales equivalent to Germany's largest bank. Musk doesn't own a meaningful part of PayPal, it plays no role in his present wealth (other than he sold his ownership stake in PayPal to fund the early days of Tesla & SpaceX).
Tesla is very obviously overvalued by a lot (by $400b-$600b at least), there's no rational argument against that. However being a major owner of BMW, which is perhaps what Tesla is best compared to in size and profitability now, is still a rather dramatic financial position to have (obviously). If we (when the market does) adjust Tesla to a more rational valuation, Musk would be a lot less rich, but still among the ~20-30 richest on the planet. Owning 16% of a segment-leading, tech-leading, growing car company that generates $12-$14b in operating income, is a very good business to be sitting on.
SpaceX is a lot more than a very good rocket company. Their connectivity business will likely be worth tens of billions of dollars in the future. No other entity on Earth can presently match what they've accomplished in rocketry and satellites, that includes China, the US Government, Russia, or their corporate peers. The connectivity network they're building is exceptional and very, very difficult (and expensive) for others to compete with. The value of their ability to deploy zillions of satellites rapidly, will increase dramatically as more uses are figured out for such constellations (the US Government in particular).
Every rational thinking person sees Musk and his behavior and throws any financial statement produced by Tesla straight into the bin.
They are cooking the books 100%. Musk believes in manifestation, self-fulfilling prophecy and faking it till you make it.
In the early days of PayPal he'd order to get parts of old fridges, paint them black in order to convince investors that PayPal had "supercomputers"
So it's never included in any measure of his total wealth.
(GP's point is that if it were, and also all the past charitable spending was, then Gates works be richer. (
Tesla is a battery-based company, but could also have been a transportation company and included Boring and SpaceX.
And Mastercard and Vida are both bigger in payments than PayPal. And PayPal was mostly Thiel's Confinity, which merged with Musk's X.com bank.
Not endorsing that, not an expert. Just think it's not as absurd as you suggest.
Well, it was either $54.20 or $69.00 (I suppose he could have gone for $44.20 but would that have tempted anyone?)
The margin loans will almost certainly be replaced with outside equity prior to closing.
Do you think more people bought Tesla 5 years ago, or in the past 1.5 years? Because the latter folks are underwater.
First, given the recent precipitous fall in the NASDAQ, there's speculation that Musk will lower the offer (which seems quite reasonable).
Second, I'm not sure there's any reason to assume these new equity investors are paying the share price Musk is paying. If Musk pays $54.20 a share, and needs to raise 25% of the acquisition cost by issuing new equity, he could sell 49.99% of the new company at say, $30 a share to his partners and still raise the required capital.
The way tycoons frequently do this involves putting collars around a significant portion of the margined stock (and for a sizable position like this, the trade would flow through to option prices on tesla and the stock itself via delta hedging or whatever the trade desks are doing as part of the trade)
This sounds like “two more weeks, MOASS, trust me bro” level of analysis. How can you possibly have enough insight into Musk’s financial holdings to make such an assertion? Nevermind the structure of the Twitter deal itself, which doesn’t exactly require him to fork over $40 billion in cash.
It is then easy to calculate 'at this price, the loan will face a margin call'. Options pricing implies a probability of a certain price being hit by a certain time. So they imply a probability of the margin loans Musk has getting a margin call.
Ofcourse, getting a margin call wouldn't mean the loan falls through. Guessing that would require deep insight into Musks personal financials.
How did you deduce this from options prices? IV?
The fact that it's not pegged to the purchase price already shows there is some skepticism that it actually closes.
Granted, this threshold is less than $10M, but it isn't orders of magnitude less
All of which is to say that it is basically impossible to stay in the Bay long-term unless you make an absolute fuckton of money.
Well, you do have two other options.
One is to commute in 2hr or more every day. Which a lot of service workers have to do.
The other is to share a house or apartment with roommates (if you're single) or with another family (surprisingly common, because what else can you do?).
These are both lifestyle decisions that differ substantially from what most people think of as "normal", past your 20s.
What I'm saying is, merely living a "normal middle class" lifestyle in the Bay requires absurd money. So I can understand why people act like absurd money is normal.
Rent is like $3k/mo, so $36k/yr. Say you have modest living expenses of another $34k/yr. Now you're at $70k/yr to break even. That leaves you with $90k to save/compound.
So, ok, you're doing very well as a renter with $5M invested, even in the Bay Area. And, given that you have more than twice the income you need, you'd probably be ok with only $2-2.5M. As in, breaking even with passive income.
Which would work so long as you don't want to own a house, and so long as markets don't melt down. That extra security seems to cost extra.
If you used cromd's figures of $5M in funds and lifestyle expenses of $400k/year you'd have spent ~80% of the principal (although you'd probably have reigned in your spending unless you were mad)
A boat doesn't just need to survive the harbour's average water level - it needs to survive low tide and high tide.
For me, financial security means something more like: money will be low on my list of problems. I could get more money by turning my attention there. I might have to work, but it could be some low-stress job, and losing it isn't a big deal. I could afford extra care for an elderly parent. I won't be knocked out by most random things that pop up, specific to my personal life, though I can't control what happens to my country etc.
For some, it means they don't have to work at all, and can't be ruined by market downturns that last decades. And further for some others, it means they can survive wars and societal collapse.
I think both are valid to wish for, though at a certain point it's a burden on yourself to control things you can't control. If there's a 1.1% chance of widespread nuclear war in our lifetime, and you want to be 99% certain your lifestyle won't take a hit, one needs to save and spend a ton to be able to weather it all.
But it’s a bit ridiculous to get 42 million USD and not be satisfied. And the original comment is ridiculous to suggest that it’s not sufficient compensation.
If you make 25k/year getting 1M is almost as good as getting 42M, because you are not used to thinking about anything you can do with 42M that you can't do with 1M. However, if your salary has been 10M/year, you most likely can easily see many ways to spend 42M, which are not something you think about often when you make 250k/year.
Does this make sense?
There’s nowhere in the world where the cost of living requires $10M/year. To spend that much money you are forced to spend it on high-end luxuries. Of course there are people who could easily consume that amount of money, but most people on that income would put it into investment instead of consumption.
It's a different question how many people actually spend 10M/year - I have no data about that, but I can easily see myself spending that much if my income has been 40M/year for several years. To me personally spending that money would not necessarily mean buying some high-end luxuries. It would probably involve trying to make some changes in the world and influence things. But yes, luxuries and interesting experiences too. If you're interested in this question, try finding more information about lives of famous rich people.
I've seen example of people selling their company, retiring early and stay low-mid budget. One particular example is very wealthy but live in a small house, drive a 10y old compact hatchback car. You wouldn't know his fortune just by looking at his habits. He enjoy more a BBQ with his neighbors than going to expensive places to eat and help around when someone in the village needs an additional hand. He is still probably spending a lot more than I do traveling on holidays and he has nicer furnitures but he is still doing it like most people do, only a few weeks a year when the kids are out of school. What he has is the ability to justify buying expensive but sturdy stuff that last, instead of things that break and have to be replaced on a regular basis.
With 42 million, he's fine. Time to care about someone else.
When it comes to levels, those kind of golden parachutes are offered only at top levels. VPs, SVPs, etc. are help and get normal packages when they leave, at least in normal, large blue chip companies.
TLDR: Companies don't engage in arms-length negotiation with CEOs. Shareholders don't hold companies to account for various structural reasons.
You say "this company turns over 20 billion a year revenue. If I want to I can flush the whole damn lot down the toilet."
"Pay me to not do a shit job."
Latest in executive compensation research. As advocated by expensive consultancies.
Most child prodigies don’t even work in corporate America and a lot of them don’t care for wealth. They’d rather go into theoretical physics or pure math.
It’s just a fun theoretical thought exercise, in which there’s no limit to how much one would accumulate, if their decision making is good to the infinite. He didn’t tank Twitter into the ground, therefore he deserves a good share. In practice, they use this money for themselves instead of reinvesting it into other endeavours.
I would be happy enough right now with an extra $420,000!
If it's unclear, people who don't particularly care for Musk (aka people who know Musk minus people who want to be Musk) may well start from the assumption that the current CEO was right. And if Musk-era Twitter doesn't succeed as wildly as some (one) person predicts, they stand to look even better in contrast.
I'm not saying that Musk will necessary fail––he's had quite a bit of success compared to, well, anybody. But he's been involved with a few duds, as well, and has set rather high expectations. It's an almost classic case of decision-making under uncertainty and I'd guess a Twitter CEO has seen a relevant case study or two.
People who have enough drive to become CEOs seldom want to retire like that.
In the meantime our company actually had to tell the a subsidiary of bigger acquiring company.... to sort of shove off on a partnership we had with them.
This subsidiary was crap and they were not holding up their end of the partnership. It was reiterated many times that "while we will likely be acquired by their parent company our job is to operate in the interest of our current stockholders and that best interest is to no longer work with <subsidiary>".
No word if the acquiring company ever responded negatively. By all accounts they understood (and really had a bigger picture in mind).
That situation seemed pretty logical to me.
Never heard about the subsidiary again.
That said, he is a very large shareholder already, and so if he, as a large shareholder, communicated something to the board, and they acted, then the claim that isn't kosher rings a bit hollow - large shareholders communicate with boards and some activist ones go further.
Internally I suspect there is some concern about Musk. The head of legal was reportedly crying regarding this buyout. They've got their misinformation management efforts around the biden laptop story and other issues (vaccines etc etc) that musk may not back as fully as Gadde did. So they could be moving some deck chairs in advance of Musks arrival. Be interesting to see how it shakes out, may not be smooth - Twitter is HQ'ed in San Francisco.
There are far more possibilities than those two. Here's just one off the top of my head (I assign no probabilities here, just pointing out this false binary): This person is being fired as a result of some investigation or process that began prior to the acquisition process and whose results have only just been reached. There are a whole range of process driving, "my hands are tied" scenarios that could explain this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/technology/twitter-securi...
It's conceivable that he already had a backlog of changes in his mind that he wanted to do at some point, sooner or later. But due to acquisition coming, sooner or later has turned into now or never.
If he legitimately believed these changes were best for the company before, he might still believe so.
In other words, yes, there's a reason, but not necessarily a nefarious one. It could be, or maybe it's as innocuous as urgency.
Because regardless if whether the acquisition falls through or not, this whole thing has underscored the need for changes at Twitter. The top two execs may need to go in order to move forward no matter what.
Your options are reasonable guesses as well, just not the only two possibilities.
If you saw their prior earnings they were over reporting by at least a million users. The people they fired would have potentially known that, or at the very least should have.
Further, due diligence will be done prior to sale. At which point items such as the above can / will be discovered.
Finally, there have been a lot of political decisions made by Twitter (banning a sitting president, etc). If that was done at the behest of government (as some claim) or advertisers (others claim). The result is the same, they made a decision which strategically let Trump start a competing and growing platform. Not good for business.
In any case, I suspect that’s the reason for firing.
> Twitter deal temporarily on hold. Elon Musk wants to evaluate if spam and fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of the platform's users base.
What if the board wanted them out?
There's lots of possibilities that don't have much to do with ol' Musky.
However, it does look better on the balance sheet when you get rid of two of your major cash burning expenses and their future vesting schedules.
CAP rate = net operating income / value of the asset
Basically you can immediately increase the value of your company by lowering expenses without having to justify a lower CAP.
Parag isn't a strong character like that. He's someone who plays by the rules and only says empty conventional things, without any personal opinion or feeling, couched in formal modern US corporate/tech language, with the required progressive veneer. I'm pretty sure he only thinks things along similar lines.
If in his viewpoint (he wouldn't be alone thinking so) Twitter recently became less appealing - booting the Lead of Consumer Product team seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Despite "we know he'll be gone" Parag may as well want to try to keep his chair when Elon takes over and is making changes that would be favored by the new leadership. And if the deal doesn't pass - firing the team leads (possibly) responsible for company's recent bad press and maybe Elon's move itself seems justified.
And in a deal like this where there is no "plan B" the CEO's exit compensation is entirely predicated on their ability to "set the table" well for the incoming executive team. So yeah, Parag is doing what Musk or Musk's team told him need to be done prior to starting there, and if he told them he wouldn't do it then no big package for him.
Clearly, it is biased to Silicon Valley and my experience is probably different than someone who worked in non-tech companies, but if I put it into a rule of sorts I'd say; During a fund raising round executive positions are the most secure and individual contributors the least, during an acquisition these are reversed.
Maybe he already wanted to make those changes but didn't dare to make them. Maybe he now changed his mind thinking: if I don't Musk will.
And on goes the list of reasons you can think of..
It may be that they are fired because Parag and the other leaders are concerned they will (or have already) share(d) information or otherwise cooperate(d) with Musk in ways Parag wants to prevent.
As for the hiring freeze, new funding sources are essentially cut off until the purchase either goes through or officially fails. New loans or lines of credit requests are likely to be reject due to the uncertainty around whether Twitter will be acquired or not, and addition sales of stock would be seen as a bad faith act because it would essentially lose the company funding if the sale goes through. Increased spending could cause liquidity issues for Twitter for this reason. It is a known fact that Twitter is not a particularly profitable business, and given all of these facts those executives may have been let go purely for financial reasons.
Trying to read into this without more knowledge regarding internal motivations is purely speculative and cannot provide reliable information. What's more, every major company would be aware of these likely motivations and would see his actions as ordinary under the circumstances even if it turns out his motivation was to keep Musk from having access to those employees.
In short, there would have be extremely compelling evidence of intentional malfeasance for this to impact his reputation or future career prospects any more than Musk acquiring Twitter.
I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. Content moderation debates have never been so ham-fisted as they are online so I won't try here, suffice to say there's some pretty horrible, disgusting things that are "legal under US law" (and as a content moderator, I've seen them all). If Twitter allows people to do them, it will make it difficult for Twitter to maintain a healthy community, and the platform could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer that only the craziest people on the internet will want to dwell in. To say nothing about whether advertisers will tolerate some of it, or even Apple's app store.
After yesterday's UST/Luna crash, the main Luna subreddit has stopped all posting because of the volume of suicide threats. Only a few of those posts remain and are at the top, with automated messages linking to helplines.
r/terraluna
The average person doesn't realize how manicured the social media experience is. People that want zero censorship are in for a nasty surprise.
Researchers identify bots by anomalous clustering behavior - there's probably some human accounts in there, but bots follow bots because they're a quorum which is optimized for "followers" in order to try and lure in real human users.
But AFAIK there's no data from Twitter (for obvious reasons) on whether suspected bot accounts have ad-revenue activity: and they might. If a crackdown happens the first defense mechanism will be for bot operators to add more human mimic activity.
I suspect at the moment they probably don't - after all why do more work - though conversely this is the sort of thing I personally would implement if I was trying to stay ahead of anti-botting measures.
This is key. If @dang suddenly threw up his hands and said "anything goes on HN within U.S. law" this wonderful virtual discussion forum would die and most of us would sign off forever. I say that as someone whose been here for ~15 years.
I've used Twitter for the same amount of time. Despite Twitter's many faults and loopholes, the things that keep me going back day after day is there is enough good discussion, news tidbits, and photos (for me, mostly local nostalgia, birds, and retro computing) that it's a worthwhile place for me to hang out. I won't stick around if it gets too negative and my people start to leave, as they surely will under such a policy.
I'm not a regular Twitter user but afaik that platform is pretty heavy on politics, more than that, it's pretty heavy when it comes to a certain political spectrum, the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now. I don't consider that as a healthy platform to comment on for the general public (even though, I agree, it might be ok for people who happen to share the same political opinions that have not been banned by the Twitter higher-ups).
Twitter is what you want it to be, topic-wise, based on who you follow and what they like to talk about. Further tuning is possible using blocks and muted keywords.
However, there is bleed because people you follow and Twitter's recommendation features can't help themselves (and not just about politics; anything "newsy" pops up).
What happens when Elon's "anything under U.S. law" approach kicks in is toxic behavior and arguments will get so extreme that it will drive millions of people away, and those who are left will see the quality of their feeds decline. Then many of them will bail, too.
> That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free.
This place holds together because the signal:noise ratio is so high and @dang and the community work to keep it that way. Toxicity and low-value contributions kill communities, regardless of the topic at hand.
I've tried this. It's false. It's a myth that Twitter users tell themselves, AFAICT.
Even disregarding the trending topics and explore interfaces, all it takes is for one of the curated members that you follow to retweet something you're not interested in seeing.
> What happens when Elon's "anything under U.S. law" approach kicks in is toxic behavior and arguments will get so extreme that it will drive millions of people away, and those who are left will see the quality of their feeds decline. Then many of them will bail, too.
But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it?
Because Twitter _isn't_ what you claim it is. Twitter is optimized for outrage-oriented engagement. It _wants_ to show you things that will encourage you to engage, to return, and there's nothing quite as engaging as content that upsets you.
So I have I. I currently have about a half-dozen accounts, each following different types of accounts with limited overlap. So, what I get on the genealogy account feed is limited almost entirely to genealogists and historians posting about those topics and very little else. People that stray too much get unfollowed.
That said, my personal account has overlap with a separate startup/media/tech account because of some shared interests in the tech space. But there is also a lot of very different items I see in the personal account because of local accounts in the city I live in as well as topical news accounts relating to Asia and Europe that interest me. Naturally, anything relating to current events in those areas also touches on U.S. politics, foreign policy, and military policy, so I get that too, despite some muted keywords.
> But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it?
You missed the part in the paragraph that followed:
However, there is bleed because people you follow and Twitter's recommendation features can't help themselves (and not just about politics; anything "newsy" pops up).
And not everyone knows how to filter it, or they only have one account. Those are the most likely to leave.
Not disagreeing with your point about outrage, though. Like you said, there's nothing quite as engaging as content that gets lots of responses/RTs/shares/"likes," and this content tends to be negative.
> And not everyone knows how to filter it, or they only have one account. Those are the most likely to leave.
You're describing how you have general views into twitter, but which are imperfect and require _active_ maintenance on your part to retain utility.
My experience is that _while engaging in that maintenance_ Twitter rapidly depleted in utility and value for me, because the dark patterns that encourage outrage engagement infected all those that I follow. It's simply not possible, AFAICT, to actively filter Twitter for strong content and not eventually either recede into accepting outrage or reducing one's feed to uselessness.
I reached the same conclusion. It’s garbage, and I quit. Occasionally I’ll get a text from a friend linking to Twitter and I regret following the link, every time, within 60 seconds or so.
It's pure monkey emotions and it brings out the worst of otherwise intelligent people. I've lost respect for several highly regarded scientists through this.
Twitter should just run itself into the ground.
> What happens when Elon's "anything under U.S. law"
> approach kicks in is toxic behavior and arguments
> will get so extreme that it will drive millions
> of people away, and those who are left will see
> the quality of their feeds decline. Then many of
> them will bail, too.
But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is
what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it?
Nobody is claiming that Twitter would somehow magically somehow continue "be what you want it to be" if most of the quality contributors leave.
Because Twitter _isn't_ what you claim it is.
Twitter is optimized for outrage-oriented engagement.
I don't follow or engage with controversial crap. My follows are people in my hobbies, and funny people. My feed is pretty close to 100% strife-free.
Either it's really easy to avoid the hellscape of outrage that you describe or I'm extremely lucky/talented.
Don't misunderstand: I've seen that stuff on Twitter. I've reported a few people. And political topics and other controversial topics are absolutely rife with it. I do not excuse it in any way.
I just find it easy to avoid?
It leads me to suppose that you're underestimating how much you're exposed to that you find disquieting.
Your comment is extremely bad.
In its own small way, it is one of the most arrogant and incorrect things I've ever read.
I don't see this happening. I see the opposite. With free reign to post "anything under U.S. law", content on Twitter will become even further optimized to get the most eyeballs. You'll see things that make you so mad that you just HAVE to reply. And on and on it goes.
Surely you've seen those Twitter/Youtube/Insta ads that would show a trivially easy puzzle (like, toddler-level easy), and show a person somehow failing it. "Can YOU solve it"? the add entices. Obviously. Of course you can solve it. It's designed to be brain-dead easy to cast the widest net, and to give you just that brief moment of discomfort while you watch someone ELSE fail (as scripted). And you want to dispel this discomfort, so you click on it (or, more likely, you scroll on, but you better believe that other people click on it).
It's like cigarettes. Everyone knows they kill you in the long run. But boy do they tickle those neurons that make you want just one more.
Completely inaccurate. No one side has been deplatformed in aggregate. A few individuals have been suspended permanently for violating TOS. They should have been removed earlier, but were considered special cases due to their prominence. It amounts to Twitter removing its own inhibition on enforcing its TOS for certain prominent users.
If you want a hard-right-wing heavy experience, you can certainly get that on Twitter today (and two months ago) by following the hard right wingers. Most of them never left. The subscriber count jumps you heard about when the emerald scion announced his Twitter purchase? Very small percentages.
I'm also surprised that there hasn't been more strident push-back against the "conservatives are being banned from Twitter" story from conservatives themselves. If I were right-leaning I would certainly not want to be associated with the q-anon advocates for violence that are being kicked off the platform.
Much worse than just promoting QAnon conspiracies IMO!
1: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
It's weird they would push such a dishonest narrative.
It's only politics-free because it's heavily moderated. There's nothing magical about the people here that make them apolitical. Political posts are often removed outright, and comments that are political have to be pretty fact-based (or at have the appearance thereof) to not be removed.
Influential in what way?
What people mean when they say that is that political topics are usually a side concern to the technical topics at hand, not pure political discussions. The off-topic, angry and/or ad-hominem comments are also quite rare - yes, they exist, but compared to (most of) Reddit and Twitter it's very relaxed. And policy is almost never the primary topic, unless it directly affects the tech field.
I feel like this is a technical definition of political, but that's not how the layman uses the word.
I tend to hear the word political used as a synonym for the current arguments within a society, especially those that professional politicians feel the need to weigh in on and/or there is a significant chance of legislation around.
So, for example, a passionate essay about a Georgism and a land value tax might be political under the technical definition, I don't think it would qualify as political under the layman definition. There's not a sufficient mass of people trying to institute a land value tax for a society wide argument to occur. I don't think the average person would describe aforementioned person as political, I'd say they'd be more likely to be written off as a kook.
Could also be a regional difference. I'm not intimately familiar with all the dialects of the english language.
Orwell introduced the term duckspeak in 1984, and it best describes the way how people understand "politics". “Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.”
People usually don't have a problem discussing societal issues, most discussion topics somehow relate to how we live and work together and is political in that way, but more people have issues with the sort of partisan politics where the point is to score points against the "other team" over all else, painting the other side with vile adjectives, generalizing them, considering your own side as obviously, axiomatically good etc. You know it when you see it.
followed by
>the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now.
This is probably my biggest peeve when it comes about discussions on Twitter. The media has made it seem that Twitter just routinely bans conservatives voices for "a difference of opinion" when that is not the case. Twitter's high profile bans are on Wikipedia, and they weren't banned for simply saying "abortion should be repealed".
Of all the big social networks, Twitter has been the only one to keep the use of chronological feeds. What does "shadow banning" mean when all your tweets are chronological for everyone you follow? Do you actually use Twitter?
>or deleting selected specific posts which is called moderation
Every platform moderates; but now we have moved the goalposts from de-platforming to moderating. Twitter has a few isolated incidents where everyone will beat their chests (namely Hunter Biden and COVID), but those two incidents have failed to signify that Twitter has a systemic issue or bias.
When you actually dive into it; the problem of conservatives being "cancelled" on Twitter comes from the Twitter Mob, aka, other Twitter users. What most of these people want is to post without consequence, "free speech for me but not for thee".
That not accidental, but the result of firm-handed and aggressive moderation. My account is rate-limited because of getting into political arguments on Hacker News.
This is not true, far from it. Why do you think this?
I have to disagree with that one. This discussion -- content moderation-- is one of the most political topics possible. More things are political than most people realize.
However, I do think that the quality of the political discourse here is much better than other places; it is often just based on ideas, and even if they're plainly wrong, they're not usually presented in an inflammatory way. That is what sets things apart, rather than the lack of politics.
That's what right wing has told you via sensational anecdotes. The actual studies I've seen shows that the algorithm boosts right wing stuff more than left wing stuff.
Please. Despite the howls of protest this is far from true and that would be obvious to anyone who's spent much time reading political discussion on Twitter.
I.e., I think dropping all moderation from HN would have a much bigger effect than doing the same on Twitter
And if you're overtly and explicitly racist or sexist, there's a good chance you'll get straight-up banned.
But that seemed to becoming less and less true in recent months. I was often seeing tweets from people I wasn't following because the algorithm was starting to recommend them based on other tweets I had clicked on. I deactivated my account this past weekend and moved over to mastodon - it seems so much more chill.
Considering that, there are also many different ways you can experience harassment on Twitter. Are these ways solvable with technical solutions? Perhaps. But these are people we're talking about here, not 0s and 1s. You can't solve all people problems with technology. And as parent comments have said, anyone who's been in a position of having to guide a community knows this to be true.
The only difference is you don’t see the toxicity in arguments as often, because any dissent is downvoted and effectively squelched. It’s more toxic righteousness, consistently.
Twitter is just a raw society fire hose and I'm fine with that. I think the future is to give SUPER clear power to individuals to manage their own experience. Freedom of speech is both the right to speak, but also the right of the listener to hear (or not hear) as an individual.
I would also love to see twitter evolve to become more substack-ish where communities are more "owned" and moderation is delegated to communities to determine rules based on trust and shared goals vs. just blanket twitter safetytism.
It would make the right-wing less up-in-arms about censorship by unchosen companies. And create more space for various viewpoints.
At the same time, it would create even stronger bubbles.
If a Twitter moderator is anything like a Reddit moderator, good luck monetizing those millions of tweets people post every day.
That's the road to filter bubbles and radicalization because people never realize how obnoxious they are to real society. You can always find a few hundred other extreme fringe and deranged people from all over the Internet, while if you tried saying that stuff in real life, your community would slap some sense back into you. Online you can just block and move on and never face consequences, so you develop this righteous attitude that you know it all and you get validated by other loners from all over the world.
I think the only good way forward can be a return to physical spaces. People will realize this more and more and there will be some sort of hybrid approach. Actual real life communities are important.
Sure, niche hobbies may not sustain a large enough community in each little town, but do we really need to specialize so much? Does that really improve our affairs? Couldn't people compromise and get into some slightly different but still adjacent hobby?
The presidency didn't fix Trump's relationship with his deceased father, and whatever ails Musk won't be fixed by purchasing Twitter and having to deal with all of the attendant headaches.
And it will distract him from Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX can probably get along without him; Tesla clearly cannot.
Unclear what the end-game is. But paying 3x the annual NASA budget for a social media app is clearly too much. Users have value, but it's too inflated.
If he broke the contract (and lost one billion), added another billion to create a new social media platform(that's quite the funding!) that measured up to his standards, spent an additional 6 billion dollars in advertising in the US (putting him in the number one ad spend – ahead of Comcast), it would still be a bargain. Heck, he could pay for people to switch from Twitter to his platform and still be ahead.
Why bother? Torpedoing Twitter (by blaming the deal going south on them not wanting 'free speech') could energize his supporters – and people in the sidelines – enough to switch away from the sinking ship. And he also gets to sell TSLA shares high (ostensibly to finance the deal) and rebuy low. So, win-win?
If the deal actually goes through, he gets the users, but he also gets a huge mess that he has to clean up.
The most likely upshot of Musk's hints is that Twitter will stop censoring or adding warning labels to "misinformation", the classification of which is highly subject to partisan biases.
Twitter is the furthest from a healthy community I've ever ventured. It's full of nutters.
The stated plan is to focus on making the platform more transparent and trusted. Why would that lower the quality?
I'd counter that platforms like Reddit, Youtube, or Facebook grew into institutions with extremely light content moderation, and it's only after they were successful and were targeted by politicians and media panics that they moderated heavily, and with that moderation their growth slowed.
Could this simply be because it’s easy to sustain a high rate of growth when you’re small, and harder to sustain that same rate of growth when you’re large?
See Apple, as another example of a firm who’s growth rate has slowed, as a natural result of their scale.
It is similar on Facebook where people will gather in groups that have their own moderation.
This is different on a public platform like Twitter where everyone can see everything. If users can hate-speech each others within the confines of the law, it will not take long until a lot of people leave.
I use hate-speech as an example because the "groomer" as a slur issue is at a peak right now and is fresh in my head. But the same concept applies to a lot of topics.
The "grooming" remark typically coming from right-wing accounts is very common and as far as I can tell, not moderated. Likewise, left-wing "woke" accounts openly hating whites, men in general or white men specifically is also "just another tuesday".
Mm. I think the problem is that censorship advocates like you try to add words like this into the lexicon of "hate speech" and try to have it censored. It's not, and it shouldn't be, and you should be ashamed of even thinking it.
It is not other people's responsibility to stay up to date on what may or may not be triggering you on any particular day.
It's also generally used in extremely low signal comments. For example, a person might talk on Twitter about how they think teachers putting up posters saying they support gay students is helpful. They'd then get tens of replies with only the exact phrase "Ok groomer".
The problem is, you seem to be intentionally misconstruing the definition of the word "hateful" in order to categorize words you don't like as "hate speech".
There is no other way that the thing you described meets any reasonable definition of "hate".
That's hateful. (I deliberely didn't say hate speech)
We aren’t talking about lectures extolling high marginal rates.
Some parents object to exposing children to inappropriate sexual themes for the purpose of conditioning them to accept the same as normal, i.e. grooming.
In the specific case of the use of "grooming," I can see how it is not obvious that this is hate speech, but once you connect the dots, based on the context, it becomes quite obvious.
For example, teaching books that feature any LGBTQ characters has been called "grooming." What is the usual definition of grooming? Preparing a child for sexual abuse, which is morally reprehensible -- a behavior that is, frankly, deserving of hate.
However, when the only reason "grooming" is brought up is specifically because a book feature a gay character, we are expected to "hate" the "morally reprehensible." Why is it morally reprehensible (hateful), in this context? Certainly not because children are being groomed for sexual abuse. The only reason is that the gay character is in the book.
Now, some people might think that presenting characters that are gay is morally reprehensible. They might think the same thing about featuring Black characters, Asians, Jews, or some other group. It's all hate speech. Even if it's not using the most blatantly obvious inflammatory language.
The only reason it's up for discussion is because it's being used as hate attack against queer communities and those standing up against censoring of teachers, students, and banning of books on lgbtq topics and gender.
The response of the proponents, which sadly seems politically effective, is to label anyone who objects to these laws groomers.
Implying/whistling that queer people exist because they were groomed, e.g. sexual predator turned them gay.
It is aimed at queer people.
* And ironically those of us who are standing up against, you guessed it.... free speech. *
I didn't see the OP advocating for censorship, but for the enablement of moderation for unacceptable content within a community. Do you think LGBTQ spaces on reddit - for instance - should be prevented from banning users that compare them all to child molesters? Is that "censorship" that the OP should be ashamed of? Must all spaces be entirely laissez-faire about all user-generated content legal within the confines of the law? I do not think so.
You may quibble with a segment of our population being derided as "groomers" as "not hate speech", but at the very least it is received as hateful by many. We're not talking about legal statutes in this conversation, we're talking about community moderation.
Frankly, I think you should be ashamed of your own comment. It was incredibly aggressive, presumptuous, and built on a straw-man argument.
----
I can't quite get a clear picture of what you actually believe. Come down to my level and talk specifics vs. generalities:
1) Do you think that individuals or communities creating a content-specific space for user interaction should not have any right or ability to moderate the content?
2) Do you think individuals or communities creating a space dedicated to specific interest, hobby, or lifestyle should have no ability to moderate that content?
3) Abstracting a level higher, should all space for user-generated conversation and content necessarily welcome all contributions? In other words, should everything goes, everywhere, in all communities where user interaction is invited? Or are you just arguing the point semantically?
I truly, sincerely understand the point you are making but I also have no idea what you're advocating for.
This is the same thing. Facilitating and encouraging the use of moderation policies which prohibit speech of users is censorship. I've often found that Americans confused "censorship" with "violating the Constitution." Most of us are not given Constitution protections because we don't live in America. Further, the Constitution only covers some kinds of free speech, not all. Censorship is much more broad than the Constitution, and covers private companies censoring citizens.
You are using "censorship" as a big scary word when talking about generalities. I can't quite get a clear picture of what you actually believe. Come down to my level and talk specifics vs. generalities:
1) Do you think that individuals or communities creating a content-specific space for user interaction should not have any right or ability to moderate the content?
2) Do you think individuals or communities creating a space dedicated to specific interest, hobby, or lifestyle should have no ability to moderate that content?
3) Abstracting a level higher, should all space for user-generated conversation and content necessarily welcome all contributions? In other words, should everything goes, everywhere, in all communities where user interaction is invited? Or are you just arguing the point semantically?
I truly, sincerely understand the point you are making but I also have no idea what you're advocating for.
The internet moves fast now, if there's a growing trend of a slang-word to get around hate speech laws without actually breaking any, and everyone reacting to it understands it... then it's hate-speech right?
"groomer" is only used in the context of hatred towards a particular group without technically violating any hate-laws. It's quickly becoming a way to say "fagg*t" without saying it...
And what "hate-laws" are you referring to, in regards to speech, that people are "getting around"? You do know Twitter TOS is not the actual law right?
Good point, that's a bit of an extreme though and context/intent does matter.
> And what "hate-laws" are you referring to, in regards to speech, that people are "getting around"? You do know Twitter TOS is not the actual law right?
True, I meant the Twitter TOS I guess. But Musk wants to model the TOS as anything within the confines of the law right?
I'm not sure what a good solution would be, as anything that interferes with the speech of others infringes free speech I guess...
It's hateful and a disingenuous political argument to use that cast that term on anyone who objects to DeSantis' banning of discussions of LGBTQ topics. Which is why we are discussing this.
Not knowing that is triggering is gross.
If you have certain distasteful beliefs, at least have the respect not to say it in public.
It's the same as racial epithets.
Literally no one said this. Maybe you need to think about where you perceive this to be coming from.
You should see the comments we get on FB. I run ads for political campaigns. It's insanely effective how much this has seeped into that electorate. And very very sad.
It is not words that need to be banned, banning words would be useless. Users could simply call people "gr00mers". Another way people use to talk about trans people in a hateful way is "troons", which is defined on Urban Dictionary as:
Troon, Noun. A transphobic slur referring to a trans woman. The word Troon used to mean "an ugly woman who looks like a man." However, over time the word has been co-opted and turned into a particularly nasty slur against trans women.
This word was quickly identified in groups and people would get removed from groups for using it in an abusive way by setting that word to trigger an moderation warning. The people using it quickly adapted, proving that banning words is useless. This changed to "trains", which was added to the watch list. The little dance kept going on, right now the way it is written is by using a train emoji. So you would see "Look at this filthy[train emoji]".
Banning words is useless. Words are not hardcoded constants that cannot be replaced, they are descriptive and evolve in meaning. Banning "groomer" would simply lead to people using another word. Most slurs are just that, words that are borrowed and then infused with hate. Just take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs, you will find that a lot of the terms are harmless when they are not weaponized or used in a hateful context. Even one of the oldest word used to indicated an intolerant position toward transgender people was simply a way to write "[a car's] transmission", or "bundle of sticks" towards homosexual people. This list is not exhaustive at all and only community websites such as Urban Dictionary is able to track slurs as the list grows constantly.
What I am talking about is seeing through the thing veil of false politeness and banning harmful actions.
Adding to the previous example: people often come ("raid") in private Facebook support groups. To enter those groups, you need to answer several questions. For example, "Are you transgender?/Do you understand that this is a support group and that confrontation is frowned upon?/Do you agree with the rules of the group?". Every single day, people lie to those questions to enter. Upon entering, they quickly drop all false pretense to quickly find the most vulnerable of users and spam them with hate via their inbox (where moderators cannot keep a watch). On threads about depression, they leave comments encouraging the person to end their lives through words that are absolutely legal. Imagine the worst 4chan has to offer but directly in your inbox. Many users are not web-savvy and this type of content will be absolutely crushing. Worst of all, trolls gather in groups where the only purpose is to list the profile of the vulnerable users they find. Some of those groups that I am aware of have up to 25k members. This is worrisome to me. Since they only contain links to profiles and are worded using legal ways, Facebook does not shut them down. They result in users receiving hate and thinly veiled threats from up to a hundred users a day. Since those message are worded in a way as to avoid reports from sticking.
Trans issues are a hot and controversial topic, so let's take a step back and use another community as an example.
Imagine you ran a community of people with anorexia gathering to talk about treatments, solutions and review doctors. One facet of anorexia is body dysmorphia where the person sees themselves as very overweight even when dangerously underweight. The hateful person or troll can find someone on door's death and convince them that they are fat. Is it ethical? Not at all. But if worded by someone skilled at trolling, it can be done in a legal way. They can send that person image of fat people and tell them that they look the same. Another way they go through that is by undermining the authority of doctors and hinting towards false and often dangerous treatments. This kind of trolling will go on for weeks, even months. With people advocating strange concepts under a false account with a false profile photo. Some of them even staying undercover for so long that they manage to gain a high standing in those community only to then use the insider information they have gathered to nefarious purposes.
Often, the trolls do not even hold a grudge or hate towards the targeted communities. To them, it is a game. Many are very young teens acting under the impression that they are great hackers for managing to infiltrate support networks and destroying them.
We can all agree that those behaviors are not only hateful, they are dangerous and target the most vulnerable of individuals. Worst of all for the corporations running those websites, they result in huge exodus of users. One I can think of is a 40k strong Facebook group that moved to Discord due to the constant abuse their members received.
Can Twitter decide to accept the behavior described above? Absolutely. It is a private entity. However this kind of "everything is allowed" at all cost mindset comes with a cost. Often, this cost is the migration of users to other platforms. What happened to Tumblr is a great example.
Aren't subreddits public, too? You can also ping people; T_D famously enraged /u/spez enough for him to start editing the comments of other users. I don't think anyone argues that filter bubbles don't exist on Twitter, either. Now, Twitter groups aren't as clearly segregated as subreddits, but I still don't see visibility as a big differentiator, to be honest.
But even the public ones, usually they are so distant from each others that they might just as well be different websites.
People interacting in a right-wing one will not encounter the posts of left-wing users unless they directly seek those posts and vice-versa. On Twitter, you could be scrolling your feed and see "The far left hates everyone, themselves included!". As a left-wing user, this could be distressing and put you off.
Meanwhile on Reddit you would have to go out of your way to go on a specific subreddit. This lessen the impact of having people at different extremes of the political spectrum being together in the same platform. I think of it like a house. If I do not enjoy my uncle's political speech at Christmas, I can simply move to the living room and gather with people who share similar beliefs as me. However if I feel like having a debate, I can stay in the room where the uncle is and talk through our differences (similar to going on the "all" page or going directly on the subreddit of the opposite party). On twitter, it's a single large room.
Facebook used to have a strong social cost to being a dick. Then as photos started to explode, they stopped nipples pretty quick.
in 2009 they had a fully formed photos policy and moderation system.
Moderation has been there since the start and its there to stop normal people getting barraged by niples, pictures of dead things, and spam.
Self moderation doesn't really scale when you go over 400 people in a group. After that its drama, then after that it turns into 4chan.
These two things don't seem compatible to me. The leadership created/perpetuated the twitter that didn't work well for you, so getting new leadership seems like a potential positive.
I also follow a bunch of artists and creatives see their work.
So I'll stay as long as that continues.
But a shitload of those creatives I follow are trans. More, now that a lot of them took the dead times of COVID shutdowns as an opportunity to transition in private. And if Twitter abandons its policy of blocking users that engage in hate-speech, I think a lot of those trans artists will be exiting the platform.
Animated depictions of humans having sex with animals is (probably) legal.
Saying "I hope someone kills misiti3780" is legal. Saying "Next year I will drive to misiti3780's house at <insert correct address> and kill them and their family " is (probably) legal.
i weirdly dont care about hypothetical death threats as much.
People making life-sized dolls of you, then filming themselves shooting it in the head and posting the video is legal. Them doing sexual acts to the doll, saying they're practicing for when they break into your house, filming it and posting the video is legal.
A lot of things that are absolutely terrifying are fully legal. Sites don't allow them because having subsets of users scare away other subsets of users is bad for business. If you have to pick between one set of users and another, usually the one posting hateful, threatening content are the ones to (rightfully) go.
Generally any unpleasantness and lack of civility needs to be moderated out in some extent, or the platform gets completely taken over by trolls and normal people leave. That’s just the end result. Anyone who’s been involved in online communities know this.
I see this in subreddits. The subreddit of my own country is poorly moderated and virulent in trolling and insults. But you look at something like AskHistorians and you see academic level content. NeutralPolitics is the only politics subreddit that isnt instantly toxic. Why? Moderation and rules.
It’s astonishing how far you can move the content with moderation.
A rule I’ve learnt recently and really loved is - every community can be judged quickly by how comfortable women are in it. The first sign of lack of moderation is male sexual harassment - because that’s the first thing male assholes do. You have to deal with the assholes. Assholes exist and are relatively common. If you allow assholes, women leave, and when women leave, you can tell something went wrong.
Musk claims to be all about freedom of speech. Moderation and freedom of speech are not antithetical to one another. You can downrank or make trolls more convenient to block and not stifle their ability to say something. If you solve the bot problem you make a lot of other moderation problems much easier to solve.
Essentially my point is that we don't know what Musk will do, exactly, and any speculation proposed as an understood fact is simply spreading FUD and it makes me question (not a strong concern, mind you, but a concern none-the-less) if your concerns are sincere or if you have an agenda.
This aspect of the discussion around Twitter constantly baffles me. They have no obligation to offer service to anyone, and they have no obligation to ensure freedom of speech, balanced representation, or any other thing you can think of that would ensure everyone gets a voice.
General, universal freedom of speech in the US is not a right we have. We are protected via the 1st and 14th amendments from Federal or State governments (respectively) passing laws restricting our speech, which is not the same thing. Even with those amendments, some speech is restricted (hate speech, etc.). There's nothing preventing Twitter from moderating someone off its platform.
Musk wants twitter to be a platform for free speech, that does not mean he or anyone else is legally obligated (or in my opinion even morally obligated) to make their platform a place for free speech.
You start by drawing a line between moderation and what Twitter has done, which is ban the former President. You then point out that he was democratically elected and that the US is influential, neither of which are relevant to the discussion but are often brought up as reasons why it's astonishing he was banned (with the implication being that he should not have been).
You continue by stating again that moderation and freedom of speech don't have to be at odds, and describe a scenario where accounts you would normally just ban can continue to post, instead.
You then finish by suggesting that another commenter may have an agenda, when they were pointing out the need for moderation.
So. I am definitely open to the idea that I just don't understand what you're trying to say, or even that I don't understand what anyone is trying to say. If it's the former, perhaps you can help me by restating your concerns more clearly. If it's the latter, I suppose there's no helping me and you can just ignore this reply.
Twitter is not legally obligated to allow free speech but there are other reasons to do something than legal obligation.
I don't agree that this should be expected or required of businesses, because the dangers and incentives are different. Twitter is not going to have you arrested or killed for criticizing Twitter.
I agree that it's reasonable for Twitter to try and get as many users onto its platform as possible, because that earns them more money (I guess?), but if they are faced with having to choose between two groups of users to support, and they like one group better than the other, they should be able to choose to withhold service from the other group to keep the first. Even if it means a group of users loses the ability to speak via Twitter.
You didn't say why. You restated the law. There are all kinds of arguments for free speech. I'll quote Mill:
> First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
That has nothing to do with required and there's no mention of a government, federal or not. People should be allowed to say what they think. That used to be a bedrock of American culture and I continue to find it sad that we're living through its recession.
Come on now. It is clear what you believe, and it's fine that you believe it. I'm just personally tired of reading people whack Twitter, Facebook, etc. with a stick that doesn't exist. When we pass laws or ratify amendments requiring the Twitters of the world to platform everyone, the people crying about free speech on Twitter will have a legitimate gripe. Until then, they just won't.
And I'm tired of reading comments written by people trapped in a legalistic fiction where the only thing that people are obligated to do is follow the law.
Also, what is a "solid" reason? Is it just a reason you agree with? Does it have to be a purely original reason no one has uttered before? What was the right answer, so I know for next time?
I'll remind you that you specifically asked whether I thought the 1st amendment was "good." I answered that, but you didn't like my answer, so you asked me why while pivoting to free speech in general (which I've already asserted I don't believe is granted by the 1st amendment). Then, when I provided a why to the original answer, you followed up with this. You've moved the goalposts, basically dismissed my answers as not good enough, and now you just want to I guess unmask me as some sort of anti-speech person.
The United States is not a monarchy, theocracy or autocracy. The President of the United States is a citizen like any other, with rights equal to any other. Being "a democratically elected leader of arguably, the most influential nation in the world" does not entitle one to a Twitter account, or to carte-blanche rights to endanger and undermine the legitimacy of the peaceful transfer of power of one's own nation, which is why Trump was banned in the first place. Not because of his beliefs, or his political views or because of some radical globalist agenda, but because people were legitimately afraid he was going to trigger a civil war.
The President having to play by the same rules as everyone else, even to the degree that he can be banned from social media like anyone else (even though Trump was still given far more leeway than most people,) is a feature of American democracy, not a bug.
> “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
and
> “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
Now let's contrast that to a politician tweeting just a few days ago that isn't banned (and likely won't be banned)
https://twitter.com/LoriLightfoot/status/1523844510735908864
> To my friends in the LGBTQ+ community—the Supreme Court is coming for us next. This moment has to be a call to arms.
> We will not surrender our rights without a fight—a fight to victory!
and believe me, I wouldn't have to look hard at all to find much worse examples of things that could be interpreted as calls to violence from heads of states.
The LGBTQ tweet is from the Mayor of Chicago. An important person to be sure, but at ~150k followers, does not have nearly the reach as Trump did (~88M followers at the time). And I don't really know what to tell you about the tweet content; I can read that and realize she's not actually advocating for armed violence, and more importantly, I don't believe the people she's speaking to would interpret her tweet that way.
I know for a fact the people Trump was speaking to have interpreted things that way, because a lot of them showed up and trashed the Capitol on January 6th.
And a beautiful thing about America is that we can build systems and institutions here where even the most powerful person in the world can be excluded for inappropriate behavior.
I've thought about this rule for many years. It applies equally well to offline real-world communities.
Bring your average woman to a Richard Stallman meet-up and then to a UFC match and ask her which setting she found most uncomfortable. I can guarantee you that Richard picking his own nose in a room full of sweaty needs will be more disturbing to her than being close to thousands of jacked-up men cheering while two combatants almost kill each other.
Lots of women will feel uncomfortable at a UFC fight. We're talking about communities, not some random event.
You just sound too red pilled to understand so.
But, also, I have faith that most women have a very good intuition about which strange awkward men are harmless and which are not. If you're not a women or haven't talked to many of them about this, it's hard to really internalize how profoundly important it is for women to be able to make those calls correctly many many times throughout their lives.
Interesting how some of you make it sound like a drug.
I deleted Twitter just fine over Covid period.
This isn't (necessarily) true. While buying Twitter seems like a stupid investment if you want to make money, it's financials[1] very obviously point to streamlining which would make the debt serviceable.
In 2021 Twitter spent USD$1.2 billion on "Research and Development". Think about number - when did Twitter actually substantially change the platform? In their financial report this is recorded as essentially all salaries, and is separate from their server/operational expenses and salaries.
So right out the gate, the roughly $1 billion interest payments you take on buying it the way Musk is can be handled by essentially dropping that department which observably seems to have produced nothing Twitter needs to operate (you can even keep 15% of it to have some R&D). Stories like this tend to support the idea that their R&D is a drag and should go: https://twitter.com/n8agrin/status/1518860754757189632?s=21&...
Now, all that being the case - it's still a bad purchase, because every single one of their user acquisition graphs show that Twitter is very near saturation - their user growth has been slowing in a conventional looking sigmoid curve where they've probably hit the maximum market size. This is not a company you'd want to buy, because the purchase price doesn't justify any reasonable expectation of future growth (Twitter's 30 million US users are pretty much all they'll ever have).
Except: it's probably not a bad purchase if you happen to own a vastly overvalued car company which represents a huge amount of on paper wealth, and would like to liquidate that somehow. And this is (I suspect) Musk's actual goal - or part of it. Twitter is well-established and not going anywhere - I'm embedding tweet's in this very post! It's just not growing. But if Musk were want to sell say, 40 billion of Tesla stock, the likely outcome would be that it would turn out to be worth half or less of that number and the valuation would collapse. Whereas using Tesla stock to buy Twitter - key to supporting Tesla's valuation anyway via it's memestock status (price goes up based on him, personally, tweeting about stuff).
Using Tesla stock to buy Twitter doesn't look like you're selling out of Tesla because you think it's overvalued, it looks like a crazy billionaire buying Twitter so he can keep posting and "oh lol how funny". But buying Twitter, saying you'll "fix Twitter" (which you can - firing a 1000 people suddenly means other then the debt, Twitter looks profitable now) - and then liquidating your stake in Twitter, let's you cash out without necessarily burning Tesla (as it is, Tesla holders are concerned anyway - acting/being crazy has its own drawbacks).
tl;dr Musk tends to look crazy, and might be crazy but his actions have plenty of rational underpinnings.
[1] https://investor.twitterinc.com/financial-information/annual...
But FB is forced to be worse too so maybe they'll gain some.
Yeah, I feel like this theory has been repeatedly tested. Anybody remember when Voat was going to overtake Reddit? Turns out people actually don't want to read a forum for people who were so noxious Reddit was embarrassed into banning them.
> Parag is on his way out too. Why is he firing his product leaders during his lame-duck period?
Or at least, that would be a good explanation if we weren't talking about Musk.
With that track record, one must assume his head will be one of the first on the chopping block.
Also, he was recently promoted to CEO, which would be strange if the common opinion at Twitter was that he failed as a CTO.
That we can see. Either the entire leadership is stupid and promoted a dud, or maybe there's more going on than meets the eye?
In the enterprise, if someone high ranking is going to be replaced, they're never fired unless there was company-hostile bad behavior.
If the organization is trying to move in another direction, they reorganize and reduce the role of that high ranking leader- maybe to a position where they're alone! and give that high ranking person time to make their next move comfortably.
This goes double when the person is on leave.
What? Perhaps in shitty companies that are incapable of making tough decisions, but this is definitely not my experience.
On the contrary, for most cases I don't think there is much "shame" for being fired as a senior exec because a lot of times it's just that there are disagreements among senior leadership about where to take the company, and so it's better to have people leave who aren't on board with the company direction than to have those disagreements fester.
> the enterprise
At least now the guy can 'extend' his paternity leave freely.
ICs follow the lead that executives set. A chilling effect like this will cause folks who most _need_ the leave — single parents, people with family in need of care, or those struggling with their own health issues — to second-guess their choice, while those who can just walk away w/o any real risk can go ahead and try taking time away.
It also puts the lie to the idea that employer-subsidized leave beyond the federally-protected time window is an entitlement rather than an easily-canceled perk. We all know that rationally, but a BigCo obviously exploiting that trust is a good reminder that the company (any company) is not there to help you, they are not your family, and you have to be ready for this kind of “switcharoo” whenever the numbers (or politics) justify it.
It is my experience that people taking time off to be parents also take time off from the machinations that will lead getting promoted (at certain levels), thus hampering their advancement, but they are usually not fired, in tech anyway. Now the treatment of women, who already get a pretty bad deal even if they aren't mothers, is another matter altogether...
A business can't just stop because someone is on leave. I would expect them to be treated fairly, and the same as if they were not on leave when it comes to personnel decisions. What would not be fair, to both the employee and all of their colleagues, is to say that when someone goes on leave that there is a moratorium on any changes to their status for 5 months.
This sends a horrifying message to employees.
> This sends a horrifying message to employees.
Yeah, as someone without kids, your proposal certainly sends a horrifying message to me.
The message should be just as horrifying whether or not you have kids. The message is: “We made a commitment about your terms of employment. We are willing to break that promise openly and publicly with one of our leaders. Do you think we won’t do it to you?”
Anyone at twitter right now should see this as a red flag at a time when everything is in flux.
Management is in chaos in the middle of a politically contentious buyout, and doing things like firing people on parental leave that will necessarily read badly in the press.
If I were at twitter right now I would be getting everything in writing, and lining up a new job that starts the day my RSUs go liquid.
Yes, its true, legally you can not, and should not, be penalized for taking parental leave (a point I made in my original post). At the same time, you should not get some guarantee that because you are on leave you can't be treated the same as if you were working.
If this guy would have been fired had he been working, a parental leave doesn't act like some sort of "get out of jail free" card.
That's strange, I always thought that the point of it was to allow parents to spend much needed time with their newborn child.
The ‘benefit’ part is that you get your job back after a few months.
Don't be fooled - the guy is quite rich.
I think he'll be able to weather the financial impact of a recession and having a kid.
[0] Note that this is Twitter only, and wouldn't include any other form of diversified holdings.
A) spend paternity leave enjoying your newborn, but in the second half gearing up and remotivating to go back to work, getting back to work and being let go with a “we didn’t want to dismiss you while you were gone, thanks for coming back, here’s the door”
vs
B) you’re on paternity leave and the company lets you go, but still your leave is fulfilled (I.e you get the payout and time off). Now, instead of investing energy on the return to work, you can just move on with a “best to quit while your having fun” attitude.
I fully support paternal leave. As a father of four who despairs at a fatherless world around me, anything we can do to strengthen fathers (and equally mothers) is a great thing.
But there is a sad reality to extended leaves as well. We hire people with 6 month probationary periods, but rarely are people filtered by this. But I have been in meetings where a person on extended leave (medical, parental, whatever) and it becomes group apparent that the individual hasn’t been missed for a variety of reasons, and the consensus emerges that this “individual not being here” is actually a net win for the company and its aspirations. Do we know that that’s not what happened in this case?
Remember, “My Job” is an oxymoron.
Psychological effects notwithstanding
I’ve accrued some experience with newborns. It’s a very tired time at times. It’s a time of wonderment. Especially with your first, it’s surreal, after 2 weeks you can barely remember “what was life like before this again?” But despite its otherworldliness, it’s also a lot of downtime. It’s different than normal downtime, because you’re tied to this growing little life, but it’s there. And I did indicate that it is in the latter half where having this project to work on would be ideal. Guess that’s just me and apologies if that seems insensitive. It worked for me.
For all the hype AI/recommendations algorithms get I don't think it works well on a platform where you already choose who to follow.
Otherwise I've always wondered what the thousand Twitter employees do besides keeping the site running and advertising sales/development. Although I've never worked at a giant tech company before.
Yes, there is COBRA and he is probably doing just fine financially, but significant unplanned changes in income/costs are never fun
I assure you, my guy isn't worried about COBRA.
Edi: Kayvon says he was "asked to leave" which is not the same as fired.
The sheer amount of equity, cash and packaging going into Kayvon's severance is going to be princely. Additionally, he's a founder of periscopeco, so he's not without direction.
It's pretty hilarious to see the pearl clutching of techno-bourgeoisie over something like this, pretending other tech-lords are getting mistreated over some supposed breach of decorum. The mere fact that he gets to take parental leave puts him head and shoulders above most workers in the country.
Parental leave, high salary, severance... where do I sign up for some of this "truly awful" treatment?
People can disagree on whether paternity leave is a good, bad, or indifferent thing, but it didn't even exist as a concept for most of humanity's existence in an official capacity. It went from being an idea, to a right, to something roughly comparable to "fired while undergoing chemotherapy" in a generation. It's odd.
I assume it's yet another consequence of social media's effect on culture: being as hysterical as possible has suddenly become heavily rewarded. The downstream effects on broader political culture (and culture in general) are utterly fascinating to me.
HN: "Firing a millionaire on paternity leave—and by "firing" I mean continuing to pay for the rest of their leave, plus probably a bunch of severance—is horrible!"
99% of the rest of the US: "WTF is paternity leave? Is that when your boss generously lets you use some of your annual leave for part of the week in which your kid is born?"
- Welcomed a new child into the family in the past 12 months through birth.
- Paid into State Disability Insurance (noted as "CASDI" on most paystubs) in the past 5 to 18 months.
- Not taken the maximum eight weeks of PFL in the past 12 months
Insinuating that 99% of the US lacks paternity leave is disingenuous.
These are people that get taxed at 55% (top california income + top federal income + additional taxes). Not the ones with multiple orders of magnitude more money that get taxed at 4%.
Their boat is so similar that its embarrassing for you to fall for the division.
Sticks, stones. I'm rubber, you're glue. Et c.
I'm well aware of the problem of false divisions distracting from the very real and much more important class war, but the level of concern on this one's still kinda silly, considering the broader context. Besides, I'm with the faction that'd rather get this news during paternal leave, than on the first week, or even month, back. Provided any pay for the leave—assuming at least some portion of it was paid—continued, anyway, which I expect it will unless they really want to risk a lawsuit for little benefit.
Since income taxes are graduated, there is literally no one that pays 55%. Instead, you just approach that rate as your income rises (and never reach it since your front income is taxed at lower rates).
you can have many dollars at the top tax rate. wouldn’t recommend.
I would say that in the US labor market having no job security is the norm rather than the exception, so it seems peculiar to couch it as "part of the trade you make for gigantic compensation".
Companies are having to hold the line on what we value in this country, as legislation from environmental to health is not keeping up.
Twitter is specifically of note because the CEO recently had a child and rightfully took paid leave himself.
Whatever your personal opinions are on Elon Musk, he is very influential.
The man has six children and a varying track record on how he has communicated his views and personal use of parental leave and the role of the father following the birth of a child.
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/59806585473604403...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/12/elon-m...
The culture and policy Twitter matters. It doesn’t matter if the individual experience is that a janitor or senior management.
- Part of the deal with being an executive is no job security. It's part of the trade you make for gigantic compensation.
- What would be preferred, firing him the first day he's back?
This is the case in any at will hire.
> It's part of the trade you make for gigantic compensation.
This trade is made by people regardless of the compensation amount.
> - What would be preferred, firing him the first day he's back?
Yes, optics matter and it would send a better message and set a better example.
Does Bottomless offer parental leave?
I thought the comp packages were more in the single digit millions range for these folks, and stock oriented. My guess is they've taken bigger losses on just the general stock market decline than most, though for those who hold twitter I personally think Elon is wildly overpaying (as usual, see solar city) and they will make out like bandits as a result there.
That guy combining with his wife is worth 70-100m range.
His startups with like 10 people was acquired by twitter for 100m.
I don't see any issue firing them during paternity leave.
Obviously not fire in any way related to parental leave, but if it's to be counted as work then it should be consistent.
You can't, and shouldn't, be fired for taking leave, bit obviously there are a million and 1 reasons for there to be changes in Twitter's exec leadership given what's happened over the past month.
I've seen normal employees take such leave, only return to find others have taken over their work, and by all means they are no longer needed and they have start working their way into the team all over again.
Paternity leave is more or less a kind of paid short term temporary severance already. Sometimes the company does make it permanent.
If you are gone for weeks/months and no one feels any difference, then sometimes its an indication you were never needed at the first place.
- Kayvon Beykpour, Head of Consumer Product (3 years, 11 months) [1]; and
- Bruce Falck, Revenue Product Lead (5 years at Twitter, 3 years and 11 months in this position) [2]
Kinda weird that both people were just shy of serving 4 years in their current roles. When I see moves like this my immediate thought is always, it's to save or make money. For example, there could be an options pool in the event of a change of control. Well, you've just fired a couple of people right before a huge vest (probably; I have no concrete information) and increased your share of that options pool.
It just reminds me of Skype firing executives at the Microsoft buyout to avoid payouts [3].
Otherwise making these moves before an acquisition has closed doesn't make a lot of sense. My money is on this having everything to do with money.
EDIT: Updated comment as the link was updated from the original Twitter thread by Kayvon Beykpour about his firing.
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayvon-beykpour-2b264b4?original...
[2]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brucefalck?original_referer=http...
[3]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/skype-fires-executives....
This isn't some junior developer waiting for their 1 year cliff, even in that scenario options usually vest on a monthly basis after that.
It’s very scummy yes, but option plans are always a bit of a disguise trick, as it’s seen as part of your compensation, but in reality should really be considered a retroactive bonus you get after staying with the company for N years.
Skype was particularly scummy. Not only were executives fired to avoid a payout, their options/shares were bought back at a low price (called a clawback agreement) and the company was incorporated in the Caymand Islands (IIRC) so suting them was going to be incredibly difficult.
Mark Pincus of Zynga fame decided a bunch of people didn't deserve to get rich on the IPO so went to some people to get them agree to a smaller options package than they had in exchange for not being fired.
These two fired suggests they didn't have clauses in their contracts for acceleration in the event of termination and/or they possibly had clauses that would give them a big payout. Or maybe it was just the timing to avoid a final vest (assuming a 4 year vest, which isn't a given).
The two may even have grounds to sue so Twitter may have settled with them prior to this announcement for less than they would've had to pay out. This avoids litigation, the two exxecs get something and Twitter has to pay out less. Win, win, win (sort of).
Similar to college students, same thing, we're talking about harm to youngest adults, the 18-22 age category and ongoing if you get cheated out of your career. Those kids. So I tell college students that if they live on campus they're homeless unless they have a second place to live when they get evicted, which can happen at moment's notice with no accountability[1]. So practically every college student is homeless and might end up on the street unless they suck up to the numerous people around them that have them by the balls.
Obviously they're homeless if they have no idea where they'll sleep that night!
So Stanford in practice has a gigantic homeless population, everyone on campus is homeless, no tenant rights. It looks like it has a small homeless population but really it has a similarly small non-homeless population.
[1] Did I say no accountability? Let me read this shit I wrote. Yeah, it says no accountability. Surely I fucked up saying that, oh no! Famous last words then. There's no accountability! I've been waiting for my trial since Friday, February 6, 2009, well I guess that trial could be called into order on Monday, or on Wednesday, maybe I'm speaking too soon and it's in the pipeline. The dean of freshman verbally swore I'd get a trial, as a guarantee after telling her I had to drop out without one. She gave me girl scout cookies in that meeting, surely it wasn't a lie if she gave me cookies!
Any day now. Older adults always say to be patient and humble. Saying so is an act of impatience and arrogance on their behalf, it's arrogant to call people arrogant, asking for patience is impatient. Just like it's selfish to accuse others of selfishness. To the extent I'm a fucking arrogant guy, and I am (slave of GOD, the last shall be the first), I'm not also giving self-serving advice too.
[2] Oh a new memory came back, at 17:24 May 12, "vicious cycle." A magic word came back to me as I wrote this! Maybe it's a vicious cycle and I'll be getting cheated, told the magic word, lobotomized, and repeat, forever!
Being promoted internally, they might not have pushed as hard, but it is very normal for anyone at Director+ level to bring their own lawyer in to negotiate employment contracts. Executives aren't signing the same employment docs you are signing.
Secondly, it's the employees who would have the incentive to leave, not the company to fire them. Assuming a typical 4 year vesting period, it's right at this year when their compensation would have _dropped precipitously_.
Thirdly, the second individual had been at Twitter for more than 4 years, and unless they left and came back (doesn't look like they did), they'd still be vesting their original equity grant. The amount of time they've been at the company isn't even common between the two, so I don't see why you'd use it to establish a theory.
I would not be surprised if his next move is to publicly extol the virtues of Free Speech and the First Amendment.
CEOs typically don't apply for jobs, they can't walk into a company's Career page an apply as a CEO; they are headhunted by specialized headhunter.
Yes, CEO is desperate to keep their job because if they were to let go, they won't score a much higher profile job than their current; they'd be gone to a lower rank companies bidding their luck.
But we do know:
1. The acquisition is imminent but not closed;
2. Executive contracts often include bonuses on acquisition and/or accelerations for change of control;
3. There are numerous examples of companies cleaning house to avoid payouts prior to an acquisition closing;
4. Generally a company on the verge of a likely acquisition just keeps the lights on and doesn't make any big moves so things like hiring freezes make sense; and
5. The circumstancial evidence that both executives just happen to be shy of their 4 year anniversary (in their current roles).
Conclusive? No. Kinda sus? Absolutely.
An established/relatively healthy org like Twitter will likely not be penny pinching at the risk of more fallout/attrition. In fact, I'm sure the convo went something like "if you leave now, you will keep xyz/golden parachute".
This has at least been my experience based on limited experience of being part of a few acquisitions and working closely with execs.
> At Twitter, RSUs are subject to a 4-year vesting schedule: 25% vests in the 1st year (8.33% every 4 months), then 25% in each of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th years (6.25% every 3 months). Every year employees get a new grant that vests over 4 years to bring them up to their target compensation.
it's Twitter, hundreds if not thousands of their employees post detailed compensation information.
Or just overfitting two data points?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2018/06...
I think your timeline is off, wouldn't executive hires have a much longer timeline from inception to close such that the "event" predicating their hires could have been 5 years, 6 years out?
They are about to transform the company - and they need the talent to do that.
It's difficult to tell, but it could be that these guys are scapegoats, or they are going to be stumbling blocks to the 'new approach', or they company wants fresh blood there, or might have fresh blood lined up.
Whatever this is - it's in the domain of 'strategic', not likely to due to someone's equity package.
Kayvon was a huge driving force behind all the interesting product efforts of the last few years: Spaces, Fleets, topics, etc. Twitter went from not iterating on product (remember when Twitter's only change in several years was to change the star to a heart?) to starting to take some shots. Behind the scenes he was often pushing against significant headwinds that resisted product change (not the least of which was the internal 'sacred cow' that all things must be built with Scala and only run inside Twitter's on-prem datacenters).
Topics, in particular, are actively and significantly harmful to the quality of my experience on Twitter. If there was a way to hide them permanently, now THAT would be a feature!
But I would liked an anonymous 'join to listen' feature. Random people stalking your account after they see you in the space is something I find creepy.
* Spaces => Clubhouse
* Topics => Instagram/Reddit
* Fleets => Instagram
Twitter should focus on its core value product: the tweets themselves, and manage that better. This means easier thread displays, better spam control and user management, better algorithm for displaying relevant tweets.
The main diff though is that Twitter for a moment in time started taking some shots. Not that they were all the best shots. But for my first two years there it felt like the company took nearly 0 shots. That shift happened with Kayvon.
Honestly not sure if you're being sarcastic. Fleets were killed within months of launch because they were awful and no one wanted them. Spaces will die when the nft bubble finishes collapsing. And topics are just a way to shoehorn crap no one wants onto their timelines without asking first.
Off the top of my head, there is a big trial going on, and people are discussing details and commentary on that (with competing spaces for the defense and persecution sides). Stuff that you don't have the time to convey using traditional media.
It has gotten big enough to have politicians show up and do special shows. Thing about 2+ hours of interacting directly with the public.
Maybe this person is absolutely amazing and is just constrained by the crazy realities of working in a very large and political company. Maybe they did the best possible job under difficult circumstances. I'm not the insider and can't easily judge that.
But as an outsider, what I can judge is that it's easy to perceive the Twitter platform as basically doing nothing truly noteworthy in terms of design/features to improve the platform other than feeling like a slower and slower site, while at the same time it's increasingly hostile to the open Internet (stuff like blocking viewing Tweets unless you login), and has some significant and growing freedom of speech issues until Musk came along. The stuff that outsiders can judge doesn't feel too good.
Lol wtf, why should a product person have any say in programming languages?
Twitter under-performs in every aspect imaginable: financially, product quality, product innovation. Nothing ever gets released and whilst this pace has improved in recent years, those "innovations" don't really deliver. They're barely used, copycats from other apps, and so on. Meanwhile, age-old problems are never addressed, like bots and the extremely hostile mob mentality on the platform.
They're ineffective and lack accountability. They need a reset and mentality change.
See above comment thread from another discussion, first reply is from me.
Limited space to express your intent, and the quick response cycle it engenders are not conducive to productive discussion. It's hot-takes and terse replies that people interpret as hostile even if they weren't meant as such all the way down. Take that out and what makes Twitter any different than every other platform? Though, maybe they're large enough and popular enough they could weather that change.
There's many good points here. This is the best. They need to assume the content kinda sucks and let people control as much as possible, instead of thinking that AI is doing a good enough job for them.
Couple of questions:
1.Normally when you report something as a violation of the rule and the moderators determine it is not a violation that might not be objective. "Hate Speech" for example is not objective even if you provide examples.
- How would you prevent people from being punished unfairly.
- Right now a false report has no consequences. Wouldn't reporting go down since people would want to avoid a punishment?
2. In detecting mob patterns how would you determine if it's not just everyone getting on to tweet about a current event and if you rate limit it doesn't that mean some people would be censored and others not simply based on time?
3. Related to the other limits you mentioned, such as number of retweets. What prevents people from opening multiple accounts or bots?
4. Assume the above three are solved wouldn't this put the business at a disadvantage due to both decreased ad revenue and competitors who don't have these rules?
They shut down Vine. TikTok is now a billion dollar industry.
As far as I'm concerned, every product manager involved in that decision shouldn't be involved with Twitter anymore, because they display an astonishingly level of incompetence.
The fact that it was shut down when it was is testament to how badly Twitter misplayed their hand with it. Every single creator flocked to whatever platform would take them at the time.
—Twitter PMs, probably
Twitter is filled with extravagantly paid Product Managers with thoroughly mediocre (at best) results. Vine is a great example, but think about the complete lack of imagination when it comes to Musk's idea of charging users $3/month. I would absolutely pay that to be on a Twitter free of bots. And wow, how bad is the data science team at Twitter that they can't spot the OBVIOUS bots all over the site? When you see what they get paid, that's what makes it pathetic.
It was an incredibly intimate experience to write something, and see people in the video you're watching, react to it live. Seems normal now, with so many streaming apps, but periscope was the first I saw on mobile do this well.
Eventually, the big apps implemented it too (Facebook, Snapchat... Instagram). Which killed Periscope...
I also might suggest that the buyout offer has prompted some very hard thinking internally and strategic changes.
But yes in a way the paralysis that Twitter is in is interesting in a world where everything is being changed always all the time in agile cycles. Twitter feels like it just exists and this is the way it works.
* Bait and switch. Now replies to the original tweet will be out of context
* Everyone will edit their tweet and put EDIT: <Comment addressing all of the replies> at the end. This is what happens on Reddit.
I used to think this could be a problem too... but Reddit has had an edit button as long as I can remember, and bait and switch doesn't really seem to be much of a problem.
Perhaps it'd be more troublesome with the concept of retweets or quote tweets?
Anyone who does it enough to be irritating (instead of funny) will just find themselves banned by subreddit mods or otherwise they're doing it in a subreddit where it doesn't matter and no one will care.
The same community controls don't exist in twitter, so its plausible that it might be more damaging there. But so what? Many of the benefits are clear, the risks speculative. They could mitigate with a history button.
Wikipedia lets arbitrary users edit other users posts and gets by just fine-- not just the encyclopedia pages but the discussion pages too. Part of that is because it has a history so funny business is easily caught, but part of it is that if you give people more way to behaving unambiguously abusively if they intentionally chose to do so, some people will take you up on the offer and you can just remove them from the platform without regret. In that case everyone will be better off than if they didn't have the option to shoot themselves in the foot to begin with.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/56cdgm/ama_im_really...
The comment Rick Astley is replying to was originally something like "please swear at me!" ... quite a bit different than what it is now.
Twitter has huge monetary potential, and adoption potential (beyond the niche audience it current has), but if the status quo is kept them that potential will likely never be realized.
I see things differently. The number of customer-facing feature releases in recent years has been significant.
Yes, some are irritating (GIF integration). Others miss the mark (endless iterations of topics/explore/algo changes). Still others haven't been attempted but are sorely needed (editing tweets, clear verified account policies).
But a few innovations are trying to solve real problems identified by subsets of users (Twitter Professional, Twitter Blue) or help everyone a lot (photos, doubling tweet length, improvements to RT functionality, reporting tools).
Another thing to keep in mind: When discussion forums try to shoehorn too many things into the feature set, often to compete with other platforms, the results can alienate existing users. I see this with Instagram bolting on TikTok-like features, to the detriment of everyone who just likes to share photos.
(I am thankful most of HN's feature improvements have been restrained. Slashdot tried to do too much with new features, and it hurt rather than helped the community)
There isn't a solution for these two.
I'm always surprised at how well dang manages this, although he definitely receives his share of critic from all sides, too.
They are pretty good at banning external services...
There's no allegation from the person fired that taking the leave is why they were fired. But the mere PERCEPTION can have a chilling effect. And I have worked with many people who worry about taking this type of extended leave for exactly this reason.
The deal can still fall apart for a number of reasons. The risk of this happening is far from remote. This is evident from the current stock price of about $46, which is significantly lower than the $54.20 Musk is offering.
As far as I recall, they agreed on a break fee of ~$1bn if Musk walks away. But if he can lower the price to $40 a share (which is still far higher than market would probably be, at least in this market), he gets Twitter at $31bn instead of $42bn.
Right now it's down 26% this month, more than twice the general market drop, and shows no sign of slowing.
Musk has already started trying to ditch the margin loan.
With that in mind, special situations are clearly still a valid strategy.
That's why the price is never on parity.
Putting everything on hold until the merger closes is a severe dereliction of duty.
If you're 100% sure the deal goes through then that's essentially a free 6$ per share guaranteed right now.
EDIT: Actually it could go higher because of people covering cash-covered calls that are exercised or closing shorts that existed before the announcement - see below.
--
It looks like Twitter actually did go higher then 54.20 on April 5th to 54.57~54.92 [1]
The reason why it did IRL is several factors. One is speculation it could go higher due to volatility/inefficiencies. The biggest reason is most likely hedging against sold call options and closing short positions - which are both essentially positions that the deal won't go through. If somebody sold a share of twitter for 50$ thinking it would go back down but now wants out of the position they must buy the share which increases buying pressure and thus the price. Similarly if somebody sold a cash covered call and is exercised or hedge against it to limit losses they must buy shares at the current price (which is 100x per option). Again this increases buying pressure and thus the share price.
I swear there's a few other reasons I can't think of right now. It's basically from market inefficiency factors. Speculation (of the share value not future company value per-se) and hedging are the main ones in this case. In non-acquisition scenarios other factors include portfolio rebalancing, margin-calls, market orders, and poor order-book liquidity.
[1] I'm seeing different numbers from different sources but they're all around there - I'm not sure if they used sale price or the quote price etc, quoting a stock is a whole can of worms in itself.
Disclaimer: I can't claim to be any type of expert - some of this may be incorrect, and I'm a bit rusty
Musk loves attention, but dumping his Tesla holdings to keep getting it may be too much for him.
Knowing Musks shenaningans, it's likely he wanted to sell his Twitter stock but wanted to pump it first with a semi-formal offer. Same he did with Crypto/Tesla.
Not surprising that Twitter board would call the bluff. Even if Musk tries to renegotiate to save face, the Twitter board will look better to shareholders by saying no to even lower offers.
Baseball fans know of Wally Pipp, who was a solid first baseman for the Yankees for a decade or so. One day Pipp had a headache and was replaced in the lineup by a young Lou Gehrig, who turned out to be one of the greatest hitters in baseball history.
I have no idea if Jay Sullivan is a Lou Gehrig talent, but he's been doing the job while Beykpour is on paternity leave. If you're the CEO of Twitter and you believe the temp guy is doing a better job, why not make the change?
Well, it's a big lawsuit, for one thing. Firing someone on paternity leave is not a great plan in the US.
At this level, a company may just accept that as a cost of doing business. But this is at least an answer to your question.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jaysullivan/status/15138653219411...
TSLA's stock price may be $1000 by then, or it might be $500. If its $500, Musk may not have the physical money to finish this buyout offer, even if he wanted to.
This entire deal was made when Tesla was near $900 or thereabouts. But then the stock market started to change severely, the bond market changed severely, and now there's a lot of uncertainty if anyone really has enough money for everything to go through fine.
---------
Twitter's board has to keep both possibilities in mind. If Elon Musk's buyout offer fails (either due to Musk personally, or because of changing prices which rekt Musk's networth), Twitter will still need a plan for a Musk-free Twitter future.
I think it's somewhere between possible and likely that Parag ran this change by Musk. Who is already on record as wanting high-level changes. So this could be just as easily read as the CEO honoring the board's acceptance and getting started early on the changes. Or it could be both: Something that both the current and future CEO saw as in the bests interest of Twitter.
1. The tech market right now is a shit show, Twitter has only been saved from the general market trends because of the Elon offer. Once the Elon offer closes or falls through, Twitter's stock will correct. While Twitter is healthier is the time to get set up for that inevitable correction. The current market is driving fairly drastic action in the Tech Sector, just ignoring it because you're, potentially, a lame-duck CEO would be irresponsible.
2. These firings and changes may have been in the works since Parag took over so this is a course of action that predates the Elon offer.
Elon is proposing to buy all the shares, not just a controlling majority. Twitter would no longer be on the NYSE.
So twitter can be saved from general market trends indefinitely, as long as whoever is bankrolling it can continue feeding it cash whenever twitter operates at a loss.
Both Nvidia and ARM definitely needed "hands on wheel" regardless of what happened.
any company at this size needs "hands on wheel"
One guess (albeit not one of high confidence) is that the outgoing head may have expressed some reservations about whatever balancing-of-concerns Agrawal was expecting, or even mentioned a firm intent to leave if/when new-ownership arrives. In that case, it'd be very reasonable for the CEO to say, "I need someone here who at least has a chance of, and can earnestly simulate an intent to, stay through the change-of-ownership."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/06/business/elon-musk-tesla-...
He's currently trying to ditch the margin loan: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-12/musk-seek...
What do you mean by "have to"? Do you mean there is a legal obligation?
Strictly restricted? Of course not. But for what it's worth I've been told by numerous Europeans that they perceive casually throwing around extreme hyperbole to be characteristically American behavior. I guess it goes with waitresses pretending to love you.
One definition for "insanely" is [0]:
> to an extreme degree.
Everything is awesome, amazing, radical, insane, great, gnarly, not to mention sick, ill, righteous, dope. Californians just love superlatives, use them constantly, wear them out, and need new ones.
This spreads like a fine coating of mold over the rest of the country before going on to annoy the Commonwealth, and then we repeat. It's pretty cool.
So you have a politeness continuum from very, to hecka, to hella, to fuckin'. Which is dank.
And when every superlative has been watered down like this, you need to pick a word that's completely over the top to express anything with any strength of feeling. It's good, it's great, it's awesome! It's fantastic! It's incredible!! It's insanely unbelievably wonderful!!!
"Insanely" is just the latest entry in our internal linguistic arms race.
In the past few years there's been a similar but opposite degradation: the only adverbs anyone uses are "super", "super not", and "not super". I think it came from the infantilized condescending culture on Twitter.
I was curious what this was because I don't think I've ever heard Zuckerberg say anything that was either remotely or intentionally funny:
Mark Zuckerberg: "Twitter is such as mess — it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in."[1]
It's seems to be largely anecdotal but a funny comment none the less.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/zuckerberg-twitter_n_4256014
As long as there are no follow-up questions...
SV hubris is its own thing.
It's failing hard to users and on the business side.
The decision makes sense...
This is extremely personal matter, beyond the Elon hate, I can't imagine why anyone would think its a good idea to make a public show about all this.
Good luck to him though. Would be awesome if he can prove Twitter (and the world) wrong and not be a one-hit wonder with Periscope. Or, not..
Time will tell.
I'll never forget letting go of staff in France and Italy. The employees were overjoyed we were letting them go and got into fights over who would be taking the packages. I learned that they received 1 year of salary upfront tax free with a bunch of additional benefits to help with job training and placement.
An average middle manager friend has had this happen 3 times, each time after a US acquisition. He now has a chateau in the south of france and is very happy with himself.
Second of all, for the question "why now?": Twitter's CEO Parag has to "run through the tape": regardless of what he thinks might happen, he has to keep to the plan and in fact can't talk to the potential acquirer. One reason is that perhaps the deal won't happen, but also he's just not allowed to.
If that sounds strange, consider CNN+ which was launched and killed within a couple of weeks. The buyer of CNN couldn't tell CNN what they thought but planned all along to nuke it; the CNN people either didn't understand that, were fanatics, or just didn't give a fuck.
* We don't know the whole story so it's possible he was actually doing something bad. But I think that's very unlikely, as these days those things are usually mentioned rather than being swept under the carpet.
If an executive is gunning for a rank and file employee, there is no defending yourself except through wrongful termination lawsuits, etc. Being sat in the office when it happens won't help you save your job from an executive that wants you gone.
that said, in this case this guy's likely a millionaire so it's less of a big deal... kind of rude though
LOL, that's why you got the boot, pal.
Having said that, firing someone on paternity leave is terrible and would be rightly illegal in many countries.
She is great at her job so we have no reason to think she would have otherwise been laid off. But plenty of people who were great at their jobs got laid off due to Covid. So it’s hard not to wonder.
It’s that he was fired when he happened to be on paternity leave.
But at the end of the day, isn’t it another form of paid leave?
So if he was paid out in advance for that time off would that fulfill the company’s obligations?
Genuinely asking, I am neutral on this since I don’t know the intents involved.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/14/6196042...
if your boss or board wants numbers, no product will ever end up good, no matter the people in the product teem
Pair that with their actual consumer product being a chaotic scattergun of failed sub-projects, terrible client UI relaunches and the apparent inability to ship anything meaningful given years of time and resources and frankly if I was a large enough investor I'd have been wanting wholesale firings and reorganisation years ago.
If he was paid through it, which I would assume-- any kind of senior dismissal will come with months of severance, what would the problem be?
Well, for one: PR at a critical time, obviously.
And, general employee morale.
I'm a systems guy. I'm into straight up logic. Emotional intelligence scares and confuses me.
I interpreted that as he was asked to resign. Which in practice most people consider the same as getting fired. At this level it's rare for someone to actually get terminated though, you would have to do something illegal or highly inappropriate. It's almost always that you're asked to resign and you get a generous severance package to go with it.
These moves seem odd given that Elon isn't even the owner yet and still has some ways to go to get it all done.
I am getting the feeling twitter will be dead in a couple of years. End up like Tumblr or something. It will still be there, but it will have lost it's place in the top 20 social media platforms.
Interesting: as a casual Twitter user since 2008, I am completely unaware of Spaces, Communities, Topics, and Creator tools. Probably because I use Tweetdeck (desktop) and Tweetbot (mobile). I never see trending posts or ads, either.
My experience with Topics was really bad, I followed the "web development" topic and it just surfaces tweets of people who took a coding bootcamp and posting the thread emoji a lot. I tried for a while marking tweets in the Topic as not relevant but it didn't change anything.
I am sick of woke fascism and Twitter was up until now the prime breeding ground for new age radical left fascists. If the deal goes through the world will be a better place for it.
https://twitter.com/arctictony/status/1524813920514482179?s=...
Don't be surprised if a new company emerges though. There's always some truth behind what he does – even though it doesn't necessarily aligns with what he says.
I'm not saying this is right, but it makes a lot of sense.
Stay classy, Twitter.
If so, good riddance, as that is an incredibly hostile user pattern.
BTW, maybe it's purely coincidence, but after refreshing my browser cache it seems to have gone away today.
Good thing hardly anyone uses their website to read their website
Someone at reddit said, hey we can't be honest with users that we're trying to force them to use our app, we need to lie to them while we're doing it!
what's there to buy? :)
Yes I am using a website from 2005. And it's superior in every way.
If you don't like it the best thing you can do is to bounce and never use the product again. Users doing this en masse is the only thing that will get companies to do anything differently.
You can either remain the central forum hub of the internet, or be replaced when the next big thing comes around. Just think how many major websites came and went during those last short 20 years.
Notably in the context of this conversation, Digg.
They’re doing pretty good… at driving away users. I rarely ever look at Reddit now, particularly compared to a couple years before the change.
There are also front-ends for twitter and instagram but these seem to be most faulty - sometimes it takes a while to reach a stable instance and extension tends to overwrite manually selected instances.
Edit: seems there's already a fork of mentioned extension but it's available for manual installation [2]
From the second Tweet in the thread:
Twitter’s DAU has grown by over 87% since Q2 2018 and our team has shipped bold and exciting new evolutions to the product
You can't measure DAU precisely without logged-in users! So... yeah, that's probably a big part of how they got their DAU metric to grow 87%...
So twitter is dead to me.
A low level IC would not be called while on leave to be fired. But when the company needs a change of excecutive leadership, they aren’t going to wait months because you had a baby. I’m sure he’s being paid through the end of his leave period and besides is compensated in the millions.
Absolutely toxic workplace.
or better yet, use Nitter
With Elon Musk's hand up Parag's jacksie and pressing all the buttons he chooses.
Tweeps? Is that really a term of endearment they refer to each other as? Really?
Is this a thing most people refer to other employees as most of the time? No, but it helps corporate create an image of a fun, playful workplace. I think it's utter bullshit, but you know, to each their own.
It’s like peeps, but more Facebook-y
Nah, all of these corporate 'pet names' are applied unilaterally, by the executives to the workers. Condescension is the point. The application of such a nickname is a show of power, meant to remind workers of their place in the system.
If your culture involves calling me anything other than an "employee", I'm not a fan. Personally, I will always think of myself as a "Mercenary" regardless of who's signing my checks currently.
Lol