The teams he cut are mostly silly teams. A climate team? At twitter? AI Ethics? He has to stop burning money.
He is moving twitter from ad funded (which never paid the bills) to subscription funded (which might pay the bills? $8/mo is nothing. It will certainly make bans hurt more. It will significantly help spam.)
Just saying…
Reducing things like underutilized servers could really make a big difference that won't just shift to somewhere else like fired employees would. Especially storage is something that is pretty energy intensive even when not in use very much. Our SAN systems were by far the hottest things in our datacenters even though the amount of compute capacity done on those boxes is negligible.
See something awful where you had to pay a tenner to post.
Most of non-Western Twitter will vanish overnight if this is a requirement to use the platform. But it's still not clear what it will actually mean and how it will affect the site culture.
Ask yourself that question.
Without that debt Twitter was in much better shape
Twitter's annual debt service cost before Musk took over was an entirely manageable $60 million a year. Now it's somewhere around $1 billion.
Don't know. Perhaps the fired management can comment on why it didn't work for Twitter?
> Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on his own feed/replies/notifications.
Difference is one does not need to follow Elon if one thinks his content is spam. Disincentivizing ubiquitous spam created by bots out of the platform will reduce the noise overall so one can curate the list of those who they follow.
The Ethical AI team wasn't 'silly', it was working on ways to make the algorithms used at Twitter more transparent to users, avoid bias, and potentially allow for multiple algorithm choices.
Subscription funding for Twitter is never going to work as Twitter Blue showed quite clearly. At best it'll result in marginal profit on a substantially smaller and less interesting site, dominated by a few voices and with many of its members leaving to other places. Nor will it block scammers, who'll be able to use stolen cards and other payment methods to pay for access the same way they currently pay for hacked accounts. It'll just be even cheaper for them.
Nor is $8/mo 'nothing' for large groups of people, especially in the developing world, and would result in them being excluded from the platform. Musk made one vague statement about the price being adjusted for different regions but nothing further has emerged on that.
[0]https://www.adweek.com/media/elon-musk-fails-to-answer-brand...
[1]https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921?s=20&t...
[0] https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721?...
Yes, you can still tweet freely, but it’ll effectively be a shadow ban.
He even repeated it in the Spaces chat hosted by Robin Wheeler earlier today, using the analogy of non-Blue Twitter users’ tweets being like emails going to your spam folder.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...