Twitter lays off 1000 California, primarily San Francisco, employees | Hacker News Reader

Twitter lays off 1000 California, primarily San Francisco, employees

mercurynews.com

47 pointscrhulls23 comments

The more interesting and less reported question is the influence of David Sacks and Jason Calcanis in some of these decisions. We know that David in particular has form with coming in and cutting headcount early:

https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/804922277842272256

We also know both are right-leaning and I wonder how much of that factored in to the firing of the human rights, ethics, accessibility etc teams. The teams they may not appreciate but advertisers absolutely did.

Sacks and Calacanis both come across in their public and private communications (https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/jason https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/) as relatively ignorant and uncurious but incredible Elon ass-kissers. (Seems like Elon in general surrounds himself with such people, and is extremely sensitive to the mildest criticism.) While ideology could also contribute here, it doesn’t seem like the fundamental problem.

These text logs present an incredibly bleak picture: a small group of extraordinarily wealthy and powerful men who have convinced themselves that they are the arbiters of our natural and legal rights.

There are endless legitimate criticisms of social media, moderation, the companies that dominate our online landscape, &c.. But nothing in terms of opacity and sheer unaccountable power compares to this.

Sounds like David Sacks will rundown twitter just like he did with Zenefits.

Very few seem to have noticed that Parker Conrad built Rippling after Zenefits and David Sacks ran Zenefits to literally nothing (Valued less than what they raised even in 2021).

Rippling: valued at 11B (Raised 700M)

Zenefits: valued at 200M (Raised 600M).

Edit: Added numbers. Grammer.

Twitter's CPM is absolutely pathetic [1].

The advertisers clearly didn't really care, or the impression price would have at least been comparable to Facebook — infamously a "brand safety" disaster, yet somehow far more effective at getting advertisers to pay.

[1] https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-statistics/

FB knows a lot about their users and they have boat loads of them up for grabs; look-alike audiences can be very effective. Actually, I'd say that they're the only thing that makes FB worth advertising on, without them it's just a pit to throw money in. I don't know if the same can be said about twitter.

That used to be the case, but much less so today. Look alike is at least 10x less effective in my experience since more than 90% of clicks are mobile, and most on iOS.

Sometimes I feel like I'm brain damaged: Why does is the iOS popup so damaging? Users have to log into the FB App to use it right? Then once logged in, FB knows who the user is, and voila, personalized ads. Where is the loss? It honestly doesn't help that when I try to look it up, all I find are FB press releases or various surface-level articles.

As I understand it the Facebook analytics sdk that many other apps used allowed them to track user actions across applications and Apple made it significantly harder or impossible to do so.

Twitter conversion rates are terrible however they do offer something that other platforms don’t or at least not easily and that is sentiment analysis in response to ads and direct engagement.

Retailers, CPGs and other brands as well as many ad agencies and data science companies in the retail use the Twitter APIs to data-mine tweets for analysis often hand in hand with the promotion, ad or engagement campaigns that they or their clients are running.

On other platforms you often only get a binary match with a certain level of confidence to a sale as you can’t easily get what people are talking about.

With Twitter being primarily a public platform you can get much more than has a person bought an item within X hours/days of having an ad served to them.

So the “marketing” spend on Twitter is split often between servings ads and consuming the analytics API, and the latter is used more often however it’s only valuable as long as brands advertise and directly engage with users on the platform.

This is also why advertisers dropping Twitter as a platform is worse than just lost ad revenue since it also harms their only other major revenue stream.

Twitter has always been a second-tier advertising platform behind Facebook/Google and its percentage of total ad spend reflects that.

It's why Musk's actions (or more likely David/Jason) have been so incompetent. Because now those advertisers have nothing but reasons not to come back.

I don't intend to argue whether Musk will or will not destroy the platform further.

I just don't want people to pretend that pre-Musk Twitter had any idea how to competently sell ads. They didn't.

take that entire thread of his with a MOUNTAIN of salt, i certainly wouldn't be quoting it as proof in relation to twitter actions.

(source: worked there a long time before Sacks entered, til after he left.)

> We also know both are right-leaning and I wonder how much of that factored in to the firing of the human rights, ethics, accessibility etc teams.

From HN guidelines: Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Whatever happened to Bezos with all that Amazon drama? Is he now in the clear? These discussions are so strange for people in third world countries. We're tired of all this fake outrage.

The amount of media attention to the layoffs seems disproportional to the number of people actually laid off no? 1000 people? There's high schools with more than that. Local to twitter yeah that's a big fraction. But compared to the economy? That's peanuts.

What am I missing?

The context makes the news: the world's richest man offered to buy a company that was very obviously unprofitable for much more than it was worth, tried to back out, was compelled to honor his contract, and is now callously cutting every cost he can in an effort to redeem his ridiculous mistake.

Besides, this is no longer receiving front-page attention by national newspapers. The first wave of layoffs did for the reason above; this follow-on article is by a city newspaper in a city where Twitter has lots of employees. It's an obvious story.

The article title is strange but this Is just the number of California employees right, so still 3700 / 50% globally

How many of them actually lived in San Francisco?

Who were probably all working remotely…

And you were working 84 hour weeks, burning the midnight oil, in the office right?

That’s the problem with throwaway accounts. They’ve got so much conviction they won’t even dare use their real handles.

Don’t feed the trolls.

I can see why I was downvoted for this but my point was actually these were not really Californian jobs lost if these employees were remote (and twitter allowed remote for everyone as far as I know). How do they calculate 700 San Francisco employees? Is that number based on office or residence?

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