Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
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I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars.
It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.
But it's pretty transparent that the cash flow problem is pretty much a problem because the new owner doesn't really want to own Twitter, or believe it can pay for itself; he wants to own a different product which has as many users as Twitter did. No judgement here, I don't necessarily think he's wrong. But why as an employee would I feel obligated to make his choices my problem?
Well, luckily you don't need to buy the premise that cash flow was problem number one—after he bought it, he saddled it with so much debt that it definitely became problem number one!
I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size.
Immediately starts by threatening advertisers, retweets that story about Pelosi's husband, fires people (probably needed to be done) and then this crazy scheme.
The problem as someone else mentioned is that for Tesla and SpaceX those were really the only two places where you could work if you wanted to do electric cars or space stuff. So they attracted very dedicated people.
Twitter is just web dev stuff and these people can work anywhere. It's not a great time to look for a job but when you get a lot of middle aged people who don't necessarily want to upend their life for their job especially when it was extremely cushy before, well, it's bound to be a problem.
I do think he'll probably pull this off but it's gonna be a pretty miserable road.
He really believes he’s smartest guy on earth, god’s gift to humanity and he has moral obligation to achieve whatever he wants to.
That being said I think he is being overly underestimated right now. Clearly he can bring something positive based on history.
SpaceX/Tesla employees work as hard as they do because they believe in the mission of the company. They're willing to just buckle down and do amazing things beyond most people.
Twitter had a lot of normal employees, however, it also already had the true believers in the mission. Those people don't seem to have bought Musk's vision and they're leaving the company. He wanted to get just down to those folks, but I think by and large, they're gone. I don't know that he can recover from that mis-step. He needed to come in, explain his vision and got the true believers onboard before he cleaned house IMHO.
He must know this??
put it on a shirt. twitter is the .01% of web dev. what they do isn't easy and there are no right answers.
... that's the point of the original comment. None of this is unique to Twitter.
WHat I find interesting is the Twitter the business is no more "web stuff" than HN is "web stuff." The real business is on what we might call the product management side, and the central problem to solve when deciding what kind of social media product you have is deciding whether to moderate it, and if so, what you moderate and what you allow.
Even if he miraculously gets enough people motivated work there keeping the lights on and the machine humming, I am with the many people suggesting he has absolutely no idea how to actually run the product side of the business, where decisions like "anybody can rent a blue check for $8 a month" can have drastically negative consequences for the part of your business that sells advertising.
At this moment in time, that side of the business is extremely messy, and it isn't an engineering problem, it's a people problem.
Elon does not strike me as a people person, nor does he appear to be interested in delegating the most important role in the company—the person who decides what Twitter's product is—to anyone with competence in this area.
"Just web dev" stuff is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It's not like Twitter is just some react code on the cloud. It's been around since 2006 and is essentially a massive realtime platform. I don't think Twitter has any unique secret sauce, but the kind of people who can run a large online platform and dedicated metal really don't exist anymore; and under fire they will either need to run to the cloud (increasing costs) or start dealing with outages.
>I do think he'll probably pull this off
It seems far more likely to me that he ends up selling it to Google or something for pennies. So far, publicly, he hasn't communicated any sort of thesis or plan and most of the head engineering staff has been let go. How long do you think it will take to get a new engineering lead up to speed on 16 years of Twitter infra while also meaningfully transforming the company? His only option at this point is maintaining the app on a shoe-string budget to get "profit", but that seems like a very boring outcome that should have been left to a P/E firm.
I guess it says good things about EM that I could totally see waking up tomorrow to the news that he sold it to Google for $75m and a new pixel phone. I can even see the Tweet: “well that was a disaster.”
For all his faults, he does not seem beholden to consistency.
Although Elon appears to be aggressively driving twitter into the ground, this might be one of the few outcomes which actually increases the certainty of twitter getting killed.
I like that you also came up with the idea that elon will sell for pennies when in reality he's basically succeeded at nearly everything he's done. And he's had massive win after massive win. But you think he's gonna fail here.
As an almost ironclad rule, acquisition agreements for big public companies don’t have escape clauses or diligence outs. The buyer does the diligence before they sign the acquisition agreement. His very, very good lawyers at Skadden advised him of this. After it’s signed, it’s really just a question of how quickly the logistics of taking a public company private can be completed.
Musk, for all intents and purposes, bought Twitter back in April. He just didn’t take possession and pay for it until October.
This was not a mistake. He was seeing that his offer to buy twitter was not taken seriously. Understandably the board felt he will flake out. He wanted to show he won't flake out. The way he could demonstrate that was by binding his own hands.
So he went to his lawyers and asked them to write an offer he can't back out from. And then he got what he asked for.
The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Twitter board. They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. The offer to buy the company outright might have been more spite than anything else.
I think he calmed down and realised what a bad idea his offer was (especially at that price), and then spent the next month or so trying to back out.
The second time? Well, he was kind of trapped and was actually forced to buy it.
The twitter board were suing him to hold him to the binding deal to buy at $44 billion that he signed. He only finalised the deal to avoid the lawsuit. It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.
That's certainly looking like it was the right call.
I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. He seems to be very badly advised at the moment. It's going to lead to a elon against the world situation where he wrecks something everyone likes and he's tarnished forever.
He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.
He didn't have that option. That was the fee if the deal fell through for other reasons outside Musk's control. Musk didn't have any out in the contract. When that became clear in Delaware, he gave in.
Of course not, if a company is profitable, its technical debt that made the company money and paid the bills. But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years.
> but it was consistent in experience.
Consistent experience of being spammed by bot accounts. Looking at anyone popular and 95% of the replies are bots, or tweeting the wrong word and being spammed by bots. Is a terrible experience which has never been addressed.
> I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself.
I agree. I think over the years popularity has gone to his head, stroked his ego, and he isn't the same person he was 10 years ago. He may not be the greatest example of a 'good' person but wqhat hes done with Tesla, SpaceX, etc, getting the right people in place and such to build these companies up, hes done well, but in the last 4-5 years hes sorta gone off the rails.
Technical debt is rarely that simple. Usually it is a pile of Chesterton's Fences that only the people who built it really understand why its all there, but if you start just ripping it all down then you wind up breaking something important (think "service which scours databases to ensure that they're compliant with GDPR regulations and avoids a billion dollar fine from the EU" or something of that nature). The code may have grown organically and arguably need to be tossed and rewritten, but most of the time the code in its current state is also the requirements doc for the rewrite (and either the rewrite will take 10 times as long as anyone thinks or else the new system will throw away 90% of the old system without understanding it and now you have to deal with pissed off EU regulators and there goes everything you would have saved).
I'm usually on the side where I think its time to take the hard decisions and spend the effort either cleaning up the existing codebase or rewriting it, but that's rarely the way the business sees things, and they'd prefer to just bolt on some more crap yet again to keep it going for another year because they're trying to boost their metrics, not solve long term problems.
My point is when you're in a small company, even dollar counts, if infrastructure isn't trying to optimize hardware utialization then you end up throwing hardware at the problems. If engineering isn't trying to optimize codebases then you're throwing more resources at the problem (people, hardware, time, more services, monitoring, and safe guards). Then there's issues with marketing, sales, management, etc.
The other day we had that tweet from elon 'apologising' for android being slow and the '1000 requests' which was disputed by one of the engineers and he got himself fired.
But what he said is they have 10+ years of technical debt hindering performance.
Large companies like twitter suffer from the idea they are 'too big to fail'. They have 1000s of engineers and I question, what are they doing, you obviously have enough money and resources, but at the same time why are a portion of those people not sitting there optimizing what exists.
We don't see any resolution to bots, we don't see new useful features, we don't see any attempt to address issues people have been complaining about for 10 years. etc. So we have 1000s of engineers doing what exactly? There's some incredibly smart people working or worked at twitter, but their talents were wasted on effectively maintaining a sinking ship by trying to make it sink slower instead of trying to patch the holes and keep it afloat.
If a piece of code works and only needs changes once in a blue moon… well then it’s pretty good. Even if it’s a tangled mess of assembly.
There's a decent chunk of the population that would be ecstatic if Twitter went away and they never had to hear about it again, so he'd probably gain some fans there.
All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.
When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.
I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.
it's pretty obvious there's a load of sv vultures egging him on
hard to imagine a worse direction for this to go
Let him get distracted with micro-managing whatever cool project is currently takes his fancy, while they do the more boring job of keeping the company running, and making sure the customers are happy. I bet these people are extra happy when he is focusing on projects that don't have customers yet, like Starship/BFR.
Twitter might actually be the first time were he has 100% control over a large company without someone in the background moderating his more wild impulses.
Gwynne Shotwell is the too seldom acknowledged hero of SpaceX, who has played exactly that role of keeping the lights on, moderating Musk’s worse impulses, and managing him into less destructive directions. It’s been evident for years.
There are similar people at Tesla, who focus on the endless operational tweaking and improvement that Musk finds boring, and who slowly fixed all the most critical issues on the Model 3 line while Musk increasingly took to politics and social media.
I’m not one of those who believes Musk hasn’t done anything or played no part in SpaceX or Tesla’s success, because that’s clearly false. But he also hasn’t been the sole genius responsible for all the success or infallible. But too many people have made him believe he was and we’re now seeing the result of that hubris and ignorance.
Offending everyone who matters that runs the product you just bought and terrorizing all your employees is a fast and easy road to completely imploding any company.
Like, yeah, if he did that to well functioning company it would fall apart too, but Twitter wasn't a well-functioning company. And by that I mean "he would ruin it slower".
I was determined to buy a Tesla. Now we placed an order for a VW ID.4.
"Beat up Russia a bunch, make peace and throw Russia a bone by letting them keep Crimea." seems like the death minimising stance to me and in the best interests of the inhabitants of the each region.
Besides that, appeasement has never worked against aggressors in the past. It basically looks like Musk is calling for another Munich Agreement. It shows a complete lack of understanding of history, and of international relations.
That would be like saying "let's throw a bone to nazis and let them keep Poland"...
Except that's not true at all. What he did is saddle it with a bunch of debt and fire of a bunch of really-poorly-considered cosr cutting and revenue enhancement ideas that clearly weren’t thought through or part of a coherent strategy.
He might have and end-game vision, but he had no plausible roadmap to deal with the sucking wounded he inflcted with the acquisition, much less to get to his end-game vision.
If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter.
Engineers not being good is probably not the issue. But I’m pretty sure it comes from higher up.
It’s also evident that Twitter was poorly managed by the fact it’s pretty much never made a profit.
It is not just tech debt per se. In larger companies most middle managers have no incentive to fix things for the long term. And lack of automation means they get to hire more people, which is good for them, as it expands their fiefdom.
I know one company in California which hires H1-Bs by the thousands, many even make it to Green cards. Their work- Somebody sends a bunch of values from the India office, they manually edit shell scripts(written ages ago, by some dude who has long left), run it, get the values and enter those values into some internal application. The thought that all this could be done by web api's didn't cross their mind. Never mind that automating this simple thing could help cut employee count by the thousands. Another place that I heard of, similar things but with SQL. The whole thing could be automated. But somebody wrote a bunch of shell scripts and left shop. Now people need to take outputs from SQL scripts and feed to the next ones. And then cut paste the data into some system.
In the woke world that we live in, where everybody is supposed to be special, and we are supposed to lie to ensure nobody gets hurt feelings. Most people forget, these jobs should have never existed at the first place. Many a times cutting them actually leads to more profits, and saves lots of management effort. Sure people losing jobs is sad, but if you are doing a job that shouldn't exist at the first place, you should likely move before you are let go.
The world is full of wasted effort, it is many times even tolerated for all sorts of reasons. But some times it is not.
That's two figures more than actual. Reportedly, Musk paid Agrawal $42M and spent $120M total on golden parachutes, which is still only low 9 figures. Still obscene. Most employers do not give severance to fired former employees. They were in charge of Twitter while it was losing billions. They should have paid him. He could have saved money right there by giving them the address to the unemployment office.
Pretty hard to fire him for cause with that track record, even if the new owners don’t like it.
And firing without cause triggers the clause.
Twitter was leaking money for 2020 and 2021, the trend looked to be continuing for 2022, they had an OK first quarter, and maybe they were going to continue to do well, but I sincerely doubt it seeing how every single tech stock has performed this year. Q2 alone blew away $344 million loss compared to Q1's $513 million gain. I also sincerely doubt Twitter was being led well by looking at their earnings reports and the money hole that punctured the company coffers in 2020Q2. The middling performance through 2021 continued when that should've been Twitter's best years, all other tech stocks even ad agencies were printing money, why was Twitter not doing the same?
I think Twitter board's best decision they ever made was offloading the company off to Elon, cut their losses for a clearly failing company with little to no headwind coming their way for the next few quarters at minimum.
But I do need to know why does Elon get the brunt of the blame for Twitter's presumed downfall? Seems like Twitter was already a falling knife by itself
Your breathless narration of that data is certainly a master class in spin. Maybe the company was performing far below what would be possible. But it is hard to look at the data and conclude that there was any imminent risk of its demise.
Quarters are only good for forecasting and deciding what to do. Financial year is what matters overall. That’s an indicator of the overall success for the year.
A few reasons
- he's greatly accelerating its decline in a highly visible and embarrassing way
- he got ripped off. $44b is a hilariously bad deal. He could have saved a few billion and used it to run twitter, at a minor loss, for many years.
- and lastly: he tried to catch a falling knife and is standing around pretending he isn't bleeding. Considering the hubris he has put on display over the past 5 years or so, everyone's taking a moment to enjoy the show.
"I've got this old beater that I'm tired of working out of every day."
Your food truck sucks and your food is no better. You should sell churros.
I can fix this, I'll just buy you out for a million dollars.
What do you mean the truck is only worth about three grand? I want out of this deal.
Indented guy above didn't get ripped off.
Insanely profitable. those 2 years had more profit than the previous 8 years of loses.
Jack then fucked it up over the pandemic by massively over hiring but Twitter's profit margins in 2018 and 2019 were insane.
If you go to market and buy a lame horse then flog it into the ground, that's entirely your fault, but it's not like the horse was ever going to race well.
Maybe it could have been more. But a profitable business is, almost by definition, sustainable. There was no need for rash action.
Worse, revenue[2] increased but costs increased faster
By all metrics it was burning money faster than it could increase revenue
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...
I have no idea if TSLA is overvalued or undervalued. I don't know enough about the automotive industry, renewable energy regulations, or batteries to even guess.
Destroying it or disarming it is a win for humanity, I guess.
"elon badly managing it" and "twitter being a shitshow before he took over" do not collide with eachother either
The conversation, leaked: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368/ph...
However, I'm beginning to think Elon didn't get the deep dive he needed to understand what this really means. I have my ears up for the language or relationships showing he is really spending time on this... but I have only seen a dog chasing its tail.
At some level, Elon is characteristically aligned with this version of Twitter, however by saddling current Twitter with so much serviceable debt it is probably more difficult to go back in time than it ever was before.
But only after becoming rich on closed-standard Twitter while also enacting artificial barriers for third-party clients along the way?
> a bunch of ex-twitter folks boot up a crowdfunded mastodon instance.
Don't know about crowdfunded, but this instance is for ex-twitter employees.
https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1586166535592509440
An open protocol isn’t going to help Twitter’s debt load, indeed giving up platform control will very very much do the opposite. Musk knows this. And anyways, there are no engineers left to massively redesign their platform to become less profitable.
My unverifiable prediction: no matter how many users will leave Twitter, the ones left will be more than the ones that would be using a new service after 1, 2, 5 years.
Where will users go - parler?
I mean, there is a model that works, it's Discord. Small self-associating groups from various parts of our lives. TBH that's so far ahead of facebook - humans draw meaning from being in groups where there groups are small enough to know and have repeat interactions with people. You all know bigger discords you're in (gpu drop discord lol) where you're just a face in the sea and it's much harder to maintain meaningful relationships in a place like that, fediverse would be like that too. Humans evolved for smaller group sizes and a group of like 30 or 50 active users is EXCELLENT for social media, Discord nails this perfectly, personal communication breaks down at like 75-100 active users tops.
Facebook is an ocean and it's unstructured (Google Plus or whatever had user grouping, which was an advancement imo - you can say "that's a work person" and interact with them in certain ways) unless you go out of your way to set it up like that. Discord really just works amazingly well for that, I have tons of hobby groups and game groups where I've known people for a super long time and friend groups from whatever community. Kids have the "school chat discords" and if I was in college we'd have had study groups on it I'm sure, we had FB groups then. No reason you can't have a "family discord" too (so uncool, mom!).
Mastodon basically is (or could be) that as a protocol, if you want to treat it like that. Dress it up in a discord-like client and get it onto phones/etc and make the user-story good. People already show they'll pay to self-host discord servers etc, so come up with a cool "Algo" style ansible deployment thingy that makes it super simple, just fires up a server on an AWS account for you and gives you a link you can send to your friends etc. Congrats, you are now the Underwater Basketweaving Enthusiasts Discord Server, here's a random (or generated human-meaningful) link. Not everybody needs to run a server, but, make it easy enough that people can do it. And as a user, just join the discords you like and let the server op run it/mod it, just like now.
https://github.com/trailofbits/algo
What exactly does Twitter do in this business model, though, lol? And how do you get there? Twitter's "broadcast" model is nothing at all like that. I guess they're gonna... throw it all away and start fresh? Seems like that's what's happening I guess.
But I guess I just don't see the value in federation generally, to the end user. Pods aren't authoritative, they're decentralized and human-meaningful (in Zooko's Triangle), so oauth type stuff doesn't really matter, I would never want to "auth against UnderwaterBasketweaving" or whatever, because it's trivial to spin up another instance and make fake users etc. And why would I want to "cross the streams" between my home and work pods, or let Wendys marketing come and mine/advertise my server, etc, if I'm the one running it? Am I paying for wendys to scrape my content? Consistent cross-discord-instance identity is all I really want from social media, at most and that doesn't need to be tied to this at all, you can do that via google auth or some other idp(s) that solves that problem. Where is the revenue stream in this at all?
I don't want "community moderation service" in my decentralized communities... there are places where "work moderation" would pitch a fit and some places where work protocol would be incredibly uncool. But with small communities, O(1) moderation works fine, you don't need it, just let the discord server op do discord mod shit and delegate roles/etc to other mods too. Yes, godmode is fine in self-organizing communities because if moderation drifts sufficiently far from group norms the community will reorganize without you. Crossing the streams also ruins that, it means you have to moderate the firehose or punt it to an authority who will, and it's all just a big "why" when discord mods are fine.
Similarly, want a feed of interesting content? We had an app for that, it was called "mee6 bot", and the server admin asks what twitters/youtubes/etc people want for certain channels. You want a new channel? Ask for it, or make it. I am on a server with 30-ish active members and everyone has basic "add channel/rename/reorder/etc" and "warn" punishments etc, it's fine. If you're constantly being a dick you'd get kicked out but it's never been a problem. Family discord, or work discord, or some other close-knit irl community? just let people do things. social ostracism will keep people in line with the norms, people mostly don't like losing friends.
(maybe disk quotas though, because that is one that will add up faster than users realize. Nobody has solved "free content service" without it being tethered to another business, like youtube or imgur or discord. no, I am not interested in your IPFS childporncoin either. give me a sustainable, "local" method for hosting content... like requiring users to host content themselves on an instance or server hosts providing user-quotas for hosting etc. Define how important you consider your content (indefinite, 30 days, etc) and refuse new uploads if they're past quota.)
And if you just want a service where you click it and it runs in a hosted instance by a cloud provider... well, discord exists, and dropbox remains popular even in a world of NASs, etc.
But none of that has anything to do with Twitter or will have anything to do with Twitter, lol.
- Smaller streams, fewer people, more personal.
- No great feed of everything. You go to a place to read about a thing. Different thing, different place.
If discord had a bit more work that would enable persistent threads like reddit, and encouraged longer, more thoughtful posts like HN and quality moderation, it would be perfect.
Actually, what I want is HN/Discord mashup. Anybody want to fund it?
Facebook Groups is this product - but it's exceedingly difficult to find the small percentage of well-moderated, smaller groups which are specialized/for enthusiasts. Also, the FB sub-comment/response structure is far worse than HN or Reddit and leaves much to be desired. But I've joined a few with good moderation and thoughtful, interesting discussions.
That being said, any group with [thousands] of members or loose moderation devolves into an absolute shitshow of shit posting and scam/spam posters.
human empathy and working set is totally limited by team size and cache level, you need to optimize for facing the same problems/interests as the person next to you.
Families/localities/regions are the cache layers of empathy. And I'm using "family" broadly.
"Contextual communities" I guess.
I actually detest some companies using it as official communication for their product as none of the question answered are googlable so instead of googling "how to do X" and get some forum post, there is nothing and you have to sign onto their discord and ask same question.
Him saying he's working on web5 should really clue you in on the kind of lying clown he is.
Quick explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDZWWFSZUF0
The board predicted this would happen.
He was hoping he’d look like such a mess they’d step in and shitcan it.
But no one took the bait.
The one who is actively threatening to nuke us because we’re sending millions of tons of weapons and ammunition to someone they’re invading while we sanction them to the gills?
What are you smoking? There is no way they’d let him export Rocket engines to them, or cars. Likely for decades.
I suspect the FBI visited him after his Putin talk and reminded him that they could make him register as a foreign agent, or go to jail for that. Not that anyone would say anything.
Of course he’s going to do what he defaults to and knows best to try to get out of a bad deal?
Can you really say edgelording so hard you appear to be a legitimate national security threat to get out of a $44bln deal you don’t want is something that doesn’t sound typically Elon Musk?
But that wouldn't have saved him from discovery in the court case, and I've also heard rumours the SEC were already looking into him for stock market manipulation over this Twitter thing.
If the financing failed to show up through no fault of the acquirer, then yes, the acquirer could terminate and pay a $1 billion break fee. But there have been recent Delaware cases that suggest an acquirer manufacturing grounds for its lenders to refuse to fund will not excuse the acquirer’s obligation to buy the company - regardless of whatever limited termination fee is written into the contract.
They were happy for him to become a director. He balked as soon as it became clear that he'd have to pass the same background check as all the other directors. I wonder why that is?
> It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.
Like... his degrees being dodgy and having been an illegal overstayer in the 90s, which is a documented claim doing the rounds?
In retrospect, seems like a wise decision.
Companies couldn’t prove a MAC in the middle of the 08 housing crash, musk sure as hell wasn’t having screwed every legal argument he had available weeks in advance.
His options were buy now for 44 billion or buy maybe a month later for 44 billion plus whatever the court decided to tack on for hellishly bad faith dealing and arguments.
His legal team tried every truck available and even a lousy “well we said we’d buy it so they should drop the lawsuit “ play. The court saw right through and said “you get 4 weeks to buy and if not then the suit continues”
So they paid up because to claim you’re going to but then to not go through with it would have seen the most wrathfully phenomenal court proceeding in history.
Discovery was just an added bonus of embarrassment and very unlikely to be related at all. Every sound legal mind working for musk was probably screaming at him to shut up and eventually told him he was going to have to go through. The ONLY way this current situation could be worse is if he had continued to try and fight it after his last Hail Mary because that specific court exists almost solely to VERY quickly mitigate multi billion dollar deals and would absolutely make a very clear example out of anyone who thought they were too rich to touch.
Musk may be one of the most wealthy men in the world but Delaware deals with companies with MUCH higher net worth and resources constantly.
I believe the thesis is he thinks it's possible to duplicate WeChat as a ubiquitous everything-app (news, media, social media, payments, ordering in restaurants, shopping, messaging) in the West. Why someone would believe that, I don't know. I imagine thinking you could also be the owner of it might motivate believing it can happen somewhat.
I suppose the other thesis is that Twitter was horribly mismanaged and can work on far fewer resources to do more if he runs it like Space X or Tesla. That seems plausible to me though in this case it's beyond me why he thinks the actions he's taken will get him there.
I’m not sure how Twitter is helping in creating WeChat for the rest of the world.
The thing is with both OS and browser is that they are really long term efforts and I am not sure if Elon could pull that of anymore. For sure Elon from 10 years ago could, but not sure if he has the patience anymore. Same with Zuck, I don't think he has the patience for what he is trying to achieve.
News. Media - social and otherwise, payment processing, shipping, messaging.
The restaurant ordering thing is about the only box they don’t check.
Not restaurant, but they started on delivery marketplace items. I guess the former would have eventually happened.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-marketplace-and-doorda...
Even disregarding the content moderation speed run, the technical problems for Tesla and Space X are fundamentally about four things: physics, mathematics, materials technology and applied computer science. Mostly predictable. Twitter is like any other large messaging or information distribution system. Chaotic. Unpredictable. Highly adversarial.
Think about it. In a cloud of atoms, you don't get a sizable fraction trying to game the rest of them. Materials technology may be cruel, but at least it's not actively adversarial. Lithium batteries are volatile and can explode, but they don't do so out of malice.
With Twitter, EM is quickly learning that people are not that different from him. Awful. And dealing with them requires skills and knowledge that the best engineering can't cover.
Incidentally, I think EM is also finding new peers. He is on course to wreak about 40B worth of economic damage in a month, which puts him in the Truss-Kwarteng category. Quite an achievement.
That would actually make sense somewhere on social media.
I do not considered this fair, ethical or very smart. Just imagine all the tribal knowledge that just vanished. Twitter ought to hope they kept enough of the right infrastructure people around to actually keep the site up.
Yet another one of his relationships burned down and this time his ex is with a trans lady. One of his kids went to court to kick him out of her life while doing the paperwork for her name change. He's been a shitty husband and a shitty father, but instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a decent psychologist he's decided that "woke twitter" are to blame because they kicked a transphobic comedian off the site, and he's spiraled out of control since then.
He'd literally rather burn $44 billion dollars than admit that he has shortcomings. Or face a background check on his alleged university credentials.
He lives off Twitter. His fame and fortune would not be where it’s without Twitter and he very well knows it. You can label that an emotional connection or even personal. I don’t think he out right planned to buy it. One thing after another, he found himself locked into - buying it.
So Twitter of course accepted the deal, Musk (voluntarily) signed the merger agreement, and that was that - he was indeed locked into buying the company (subject to certain conditions - receipt of regulatory approvals, Twitter shareholders approving the merger, stuff like that).
This was not like hitting a lucky streak at the craps table and waking up 12 hours later with a new wife. The decision to purchase was deliberate. Doesn’t mean he didn’t develop buyer’s remorse after - he most certainly did - but the threatened tender offer, the rich, target-friendly merger agreement - this is exactly how you aggressively and deliberately pursue ownership of a big public company.
It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor.
Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website.
Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.
Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue
If your products are just BUILT using technology, well then you may consider yourself in another business. Whether that is a clothing, cars, pharmaceutical, weaponry or social media platforms (sorted by increasing potential for harm ;)
Still, even if you're in the last category, it may be fair to consider it "tech" if the main challenges/differentiating factors in creating the product is scienc/engineering/technological rather than for instance design, marketing or organizational efficiency.
Bingo. Hard-core engineering has been the lynchpin of Tesla and SpaceX's success -- they literally won via designing and manufacturing superior physical things.
It makes sense that EM would blunder by attempting to reproduce that type of success at Twitter. And it will be a blunder, unless: (a) he plans to build one or more new products (or drastically change the nature of the existing product), and (b) those new or drastically changed products will somehow "win" in a big way that Twitter isn't winning now.
But at least to me, (a) doesn't seem likely and (b) seems even less likely.
BMW i4 - 365 miles
Ford Mustang Mach-E - 379 miles
BMW iX - 380 miles
Mercedes EQE - 384 miles
Mercedes EQS 450+, 640km, €106,307
Tesla Model S Plaid, 540km, €140,995
Mercedes EQE 350+, 525km, € 79,850
Tesla Model 3 LR DM, 485km, € 60,995
BMW i4 eDrive40, 470km, € 60,630
VW ID.3 Pro S 5Seats 450km, € 43,720
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrify_America#History
VW only did this because they were forced to. It's no mystery why traditional ICE manufacturers would be dragging their feet to modernize.
https://ionity.eu/en/ionity/who-we-are
Europe has standardized on CCS Type 2 Combo for charging. Any CCS EV can charge on any CCS charging network. Teslas can charge on Ionity, BMWs can charge on Tesla chargers, charging networks like FastNed, BP, GridServe, EnBW, Circle K and friends can charge all brands, etc.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y33AArvMUQ
If I want to go down to John Day national monument in eastern Oregon, things are even worse. Things will get better (oh, and we want to do a trip to Anchorage someday...).
The Mach-E and ix are both a little better than they look though. The ix actually does amazingly well on range tests.
and yet I know more female Tesla owners than male
Beyond that, comparisons get more complicated, but there are still perks to the 3/Y. For example, the Ioniq 5 and EV6 charge faster but have less real world range at highway speeds. In practice, this negates most of their charging advantage.
If you want the best EV sedan for road tripping in the US right now, there is nothing lower price and also better than the 3 LR.
Impressive engineering is always about details.
If you want to argue that there is really nothing superior about Tesla's engineering that's fine, but you can't shove implementation details under the rug when it suits you. For there to be nothing superior in their engineering there must also be no implementation detail that is superior.
Heck, even Audi A.G. that you've mentioned (not close to being the biggest car company) is comparable to Tesla numbers-wise.
In many industries it's not the first movers that get the market, it's the big mature market-friendly solutions (sort of how the iPod wasn't the first commercial mp3 player).
It's not like people want them to optimize for acceleration anyway...
Ten years ago Tesla was much better ride than any other premium segment car.
That said, even today Tesla EV sales dwarf Audi, so the figurative Tesla lunch remains uneaten. That's what you have for playing catch-up.
Right now EVs make up such a minimal percentage of the car market that they aren't making a meaningful dent in ICE demand, but once they hit 10% or more, car companies that don't have a slice of that segment are going to be feeling it financially. I expect there will be major casualties in the car business because of failure to get into the EV market fast enough.
I had a lecture about electric mobility last semester where a tech lead (don't want to dox them) from Daimler's electric truck program and a tech lead from Daimler's electric car program were invited. In regards to electric trucks things seem to be going great but the electric car program had massive problems with Tesla. The person in question was very hyped about the competition but admitted they got beat with the previous gen cars and that they had to completely redesign their processes to be quicker since Tesla is constantly updating their models. They were hoping to be slightly better than Tesla this gen and to get ahead next gen. So in summary I'd say that didn't turn out great for them.
>It's not like people want them to optimize for acceleration anyway...
The many YouTube views of teslas beating sports cars would beg to differ. If people didn't want acceleration everyone would be driving an 80HP hatchback or a 120-160HP SUV.
If they started earlier they would have been able to earn some of that money that went to Tesla, could have ironed out the issues while EVs were still considered in something like an open beta where owners had a lot more tolerance for issues and their processes would have become more agile naturally due to the competition with Tesla. Not to mention they could have improved their image as a luxury EV manufacturer by being one of the first.
You can even see the panic about being late to the game on Daimler's part. Their first gen EVs was made using ICE chassis which logically could not compete with cars designed from the ground up to be electric.
The only one that I dislike within Audi is the Q4 etron. Its too close to the id4, IMO.
Think about all the Chinese manufacturers, that for years were churning out the butts of jokes. How many of those would have survived in an actual competitive market?
I'm not a musk fan boy, but what he did with Tesla is impressive.
Compared to the company they were buying chassis from (lotus). If someone took lotus to the size of Tesla in less than 2 decades, would you not say that's impressive?
Starting a boutique sports car manufacturer is 'relatively' easy. Making a global car company, not so much.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Compare that with VW, how many electric cars they are making, and how long did the biggest auto-manufacter in Germany (not a bad country for Engineering standards) took to get factories ready for EVs?
I personally don't like Teslas that much, I think they got a lot of things wrong, but the manufacturing process engineering really is leading the whole car industry by quite a ways.
Check out MunroLive's teardown videos on YouTube where they talk about the changes to part counts, castings, fasteners, and all the internal details that consumers don't notice.
I’d prefer to buy a Toyota
Tesla may or may not succeed in appealing to the late majority and laggards, but if they don’t, the Toyota you buy in 15 years will still have benefitted from the industry changes Tesla is leading today.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
For example, both Lucid and Rivian use round cells for batteries. BMW is exploring the 4680 form factor. Most other manufacturers still do not use round cells.
Tesla is using large castings for major parts of the frame. I think Volvo is starting to do this? Its not entirely a new trend, but again, Tesla was the first in the auto industry to do it this way.
The way Tesla does the structural pack for the 4680 is unique as well at the moment.
Having said that, I think Tesla people overstate the customer significance of all of these things. The real impact is technically interesting, but isn't really making a big difference in the outcome of the vehicles.
There are other EVs that charge faster and are significantly cheaper too, now that Tesla keeps raising prices.
But sure, how about:
- Model years. Have you seen the 2022 Tesla Model 3? No, because it doesn't exist. Teslas evolve over time. Other manufacturers still have days where the next model year starts being produced and the cars are very different than the previous day.
- Greatly simplified cabin. I hate this, but I think it's the future.
- OTA software updates. Some other makers are doing small updates a bit, but nobody (let alone everybody) is doing what Tesla is here
-
People who like Tesla and people who hate it both seem prone to making declarations about how different it is that seem unfounded to me.
The auto industry underwent a long evolution to regimented model years, and they still make changes in between to this day. Framing a lack of model years as progress rather than regress by ~a half century seems arbitrary to me.
When cars are recalled, it isn't uncommon for the population to be defined as a range of serial numbers. The fact that recalls aren't always based on model years seems like pretty good evidence that changes are made in between, doesn't it?
So, no tactile buttons.
>OTA software updates
So Tesla has revolutionized two things that I think should be illegal in a vehicle. Awesome.
I'll add a very cavalier and dangerous "self-driving" that can't actually drive itself to the list of Tesla counter-innovations.
I appreciate the direction they pushed the industry towards, but I feel like the innovation has finished and I'd expect a lot of the problems to be ironed out.
Toyota on the other hand have produced a car which runs on hydrogen, it is in production and for sale in the USA right now. They also do hybrids and I'm sure if they wanted to, they'd do electric no problems.
American automotive manufacturing became hyper-conservative over time. A willingness to let (non-safety-critical (1)) bugs get to market with the tradeoff of making products you otherwise wouldn't is a market-distinguishing tradeoff.
(1) But my larger concern is that I can't say about Tesla that only non-safety-critical bugs are making it out the door, so I also won't buy one. Because unlike a buggy phone or buggy smart watch, a buggy car with safety-critical bugs can kill other people, so there's wisdom in disallowing it.
Why... unions. Japanese Manufacturers have evaded the UAW problem, where Ford and GM have had to flee the nation to get out from under decades of sunk costs
Tesla was not the first EV sold in the US. Earlier attempts by the established manufacturers were curiosities at best. And now that Tesla proved that EVs can actually be good, and can be made profitable, those established manufacturers are willing to move into that market.
So, no, it's not about engineering, it's about taking the risk and committing to expanding the market.
The iMiev preceded the Tesla and sold better in many part of the world because it was a more decent proposal.
What Tesla did was making greenwashing and wasting energy with electricity dfast and cool. It is probably better than wasting with ICE in nuclear powered countries but that is not what the world need right now or ever.
But he actually did change the narrative today. Yesterday, he had to make Twitter better.
Now, if Twitter doesn't crash and the World Cup goes by without a hitch, it's going to be the biggest win ever for him, is it not?
EDIT: fixed tone.
I won't be surprised if he churns through a bunch of different ideas: Subscriptions, Deals with news companies, short form videos + creator tools, different kinds of ad experiences, the edit button, better spam filtering etc.
There's a lot of potential things Twitter could be doing if they didn't limit themselves to their core product.
I don't think (b) is unlikely. Their current product is already highly valuable. You don't need their short form video product to succeed in a way TikTok did but there's enough of an audience to capture there to improve the company's valuation.
On the other hand, exactly that development towards super-apps makes it even more important that we push for decentralization.
Not to mention that the US is already reigned by mono- and oligopolies in many markets, it is also a privacy disaster.
Many nations, especially in Asia, have little awareness of the concept of privacy. and thus its consequences, so it isn't surprising such offers took off so swiftly there.
I’m not sure anything Elon says about the current or future state of Twitter has any credibility. It seems like the company is now being directed via stream of consciousness at this point.
Giant, bloated organizations (and projects, and other things) can often be helped by reduced-size, highly-directed streams of consciousness suddenly making unilateral changes to them.
One way to term it— and there are many— is crisis restructuring. Whether Twitter was actually in crisis, and whether the unilateral stream of consciousness doing the restructuring is ”divinely inspired,” remains to be seen.
Certainly paid enough for the privilege
Even if Musk somehow learns to stop live-tweeting his trial-by-fire, the damage might be done: natural iterations on business plans and features will play into a by now near-universal stereotype of Musk as some sort of shoot-from-the-hip madman, which will deter business partners from committing.
(Like, if I'm Fox News or the NY Times, do I want to commit to publish on Musk's new platform when tomorrow he might get stoned and decide to offer hosting to the Daily Stormer? Or, if I'm Bank of America, do I want to commit to consumer payments when tomorrow Musk might pivot his "super app" to offering video shorts instead?)
Again, maybe I'm living in a bubble, but Musk's reputation seems like a huge impediment to, like, doing this. At all. Ever.
If you look at Ariane V, Atlas V or Delta IV, they all have some peculiarities and operational warts. Large solid rockets, Russian engine, hydrogen. In some sense, Falcon 9 is the most "ordinary" of the launchers available now.
Well, we generally consider social media companies tech companies. And since they don't really have anything else other than the tech stack (and the users on it, but they don't "have" those), not sure as what you would characterise it.
> ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running
What makes you think that the desired engineering improvements are about "keeping [the] website running"?
It seems to me that what is being sought are engineering solutions to, for example, stop the spread misinformation without censorship. That would be pretty cool, I think. And I can imagine a way of pulling it off, because we actually have such mechanisms in the (non-internet) social networks that make up what Jonathan Rauch calls The Constitution of Knowledge.[1]
These mechanisms use network effects to amplify good information and attenuate (but not censor) bad information. What is good and bad? The network decides this by what information it attenuates or amplifies. Bad scientific papers don't get cited, good ones do. The stories in the National Enquirer don't get picked up by other papers, and nobody believes them to be true.
This obviously isn't perfect, but it's about as good as it's gonna get, and works pretty well in practice.
Internet social media disrupted these mechanisms by its extreme virality, which seems to apply specifically to bad information. It just spreads extremely fast, literally exponentially (not the "very large" meaning of "exponential"). Kind of like a virus.
And we learned recently that to suppress a viral pandemic, completely 100% sterilising immunity is not actually needed. You just need to slow it down enough to get the R number below 1, ideally significantly below 1. That's what I think the "Do you want to read the article first before retweeting?" prompts are for: slow things down a bit.
Of course "slowing things down a bit" is counter to your economic self-interest and fiduciary responsibility when you're an ad-driven company. So getting off ads completely or at least partly is an important part of it.
> Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product
Who thinks that? Why do you believe that anyone thinks this? While I don't agree with Elon's approach, the causation would clearly be the other way around: there is a lot of engineering to do to get to a better product (less dependent on ads, more attenuation of bad information without censorship etc.). And all that has to be done while under a bit of pressure, this ain't a Greenfield project with unlimited runway. So yeah, might get a bit "hardcore".
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Knowledge-Jonathan-Rauch...
Consider where the bulk of the revenue comes from and you’ll find out what industry the company is actually in.
Both FB and Google have really successful systems for this, and it insulates them massively from brand safety concerns. It appears that Twitter never invested in this (which is kinda insane tbh), and hence the large brand advertisers have a lot more power over them.
The stated goal is exactly to get away from that...
Though, whatever approach you have in discovery, or ranking posts, you're having an impact on your users, and promote a certain dynamic, no? I imagine their next approach won't be the equivalent of letting go of the steering wheel, just maybe not mindlessly chasing the same metrics as they are currently.
Maybe that's a little too social psych to call tech/engineering, but I imagine the data science that would support that would be quite exciting.
Facebook and Google are generally considered tech companies.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+facebook+tech+companies&t=o...
And of course the current attempt is to not have advertising be the primary income source.
You can buy a jet or a rocket, but you can't buy a Twitter or a Facebook. You can't even hire part of their stack. (FB has content deals and APIs for advertisers and marketers, but not - so far as I know - direct access to the servers.)
Which is why AWS is a tech company. But Amazon is an online store that happens to use tech.
It's like saying book publishers are really just printers, or FedEx is really an airline and truck driving company.
Some publishers do indeed do their R&D for print operations and logistics. But they're still primarily content houses. Any engineering that happens is a means to a productive end, not a product in itself.
Doesn't matter what you sell, or service you offer, but if you're leveraging technology to add large numbers of users with a marginal increase in cost, I see that as a tech company.
This generally means there is an internal focus on the technology itself as any improvement can have a direct link to a user's LTV.
But maybe I'm talking less tech company, and more tech led organisation..
Buzz. Not only do they "have" them, those users are literally the product the social media companies market and sell
1. Only if you are very sloppy with the meaning of the word "to have", which I wasn't.
> those users are literally the product the social media companies market and sell
2. No, they don't "have" those users. They have some of those users' attention, for as long as they can keep it. Not the same thing.
3. And once again, that is exactly the business model Twitter under Elon is trying to get away from, because it is driving the toxicity.
I really don't think this is an engineering problem. If I was a tech lead and a product manager came up to me with this, I'd tell them they need to figure out what they mean before they start talking to engineers. Software-Development is not concerned with the nature of truth and misinformation, it is concerned with what works given precise goals. Nobody in engineering school or at an engineering job gets taught or learns what counts as misinformation and how to assess it: you need people with humanities expertise for this.
The "Do you want to read..." prompts are actually a good example of what I mean, because the engineering that goes into making those is quite trivial. But the idea of using them, trying to make them effective at their goal, and determining how much they're working, these are all things that fall outside of engineering, and have more to do with product-design and sociology.
Creating a feature is not as important as getting people to use it, and use it the right way.
Based on the features Elon has rolled out so far (Twitter Blue), it seems to me they're putting more emphasis on just building it, rather than figuring out how people will use it and whether it will be beneficial
As someone is reported to have been asked in a Twitter job interview, when a celebrity with 10,000,000 followers sends out a tweet, how do you deliver them all within 3 seconds?
It's kind of tragic the amount of engineering talent wasted on non-problems at social media websites.
Earthquakes are so far outside of my life experience that I'd completely forgotten about them.
It's used for notifying residents of earthquake, tsunami, and other disaster risks. Residents in japan for most immediate disasters will hear an alert through the national system (via phones, TV, radio, etc) and on top of that residents can check the NERV twitter or other sources to determine what degree of threat it is and what the next best course of action is.
IMHO J-alert is for the first second and NERV is for the seconds after.
EDIT: Apparently they did some sort of cross promo deal with 3.0+1.0 after existing for a few years, so Khara is aware of them so they must have some sort of agreement to use that name and logo
Phones have built-in support for emergency messages (that bypass all normal silences and notification hiders, unless you explicitly go into settings and disable emergency message support), and carriers are required by law to broadcast such messages to everyone in range.
Twitter is a niche social network (at least in most of the world) and even of those that use it, a huge number will have various forms of disabled notifications.
I personally am rarely on Twitter but it used to be an invaluable resource when you're in an area and don't really have time for a fully fleshed out news article to come out the next day about what's going on on the ground. Block club Chicago was tweeting and retweeting videos of police beating up protesters that night a couple blocks from my apartment in 2020, well ahead of the articles that came out the next day.
It was also interesting to see in real time an active disinformation campaign materialize and disappear that same day. Up until around 1 AM there were a lot of people posting about how the "Proud Boys" were planning to show up or had shown up and encouraging people to bring weapons, then all initial tweets were deleted late at night, with only screen shots or people who had quoted them still being available on the site. But that was a problem I hope would be fixed instead of the removal of the checks to make it all in to a shit show.
I'm just pointing out a limited fact - that the 3s limit is not relevant even for emergency situations, as no one does or should rely on emergency tweets.
Hire The Flash then it's "just" a traveling salesman problem which is left to solve by the reader.
(celebrity just means subscribed by >X people)
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...
I'd imagine "shard the servers serving the subscription to users, accessing sharded database/queue of new tweets" would get you close. Much easier to do with established software now than when twitter was created tho.
Yes like Instagram and others. It was not tech stack that was sold but community of users. I guess Musk's lenders knows this.
That's not a "tech startup" based on "hardcore engineering", that's a startup based on a social idea and implemented with some trivial tech.
Scaling this to hundreds of millions is not exactly a "hardcore engineering" thing either. Mostly regular engineering with some good practices (like share nothing) and devops. Tons of companies do just the same, today you can even do it from your bedroom by building on top of AWS, GAE, etc, there are even templates for this...
No, I don't.
My point is their initial success years (which wasn't that off the current product) wasn't some hardcore engineering feat: just a cruder-than-average Rails app.
Whatever their stack looks now is irrelevant.
https://mobile.twitter.com/danluu/status/1592774269733601281
This growth impacted every rails app back then, the popular ones more quickly is all..
“How to build a Super App” is not that complicated, from an engineering perspective. It does requires hard work, especially if you want to build it fast.
But the big problem is not really how to build it as much as how to make it successful: how to make people use your app over other ones they already use. There are apps like Venmo and WhatsApp that cover WeChat’s use cases pretty well, why should people switch to Twitter?
Step one would probably be to get people to trust your app. I don’t think the latest developments at Twitter make it seem particularly trustworthy
As for the hard to quantify work, Elon needs people he can trust. Even if the existing people are good, they can not be trusted. Committing to something like Twitter 2 is as good an oath as it gets. The other alternative is to just fire everyone he did not hire himself.
I remember the dread that must be dealing with their process load when I get to a whale page, not when I'm tweeting successfully.
Anyway, the thing here is that since EM wants to enact that much change in a short time frame as possible, and guessing he's likely to make mistakes along the way, he'll need engineering work as hard as possible.
> if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas
And Uber is a tech company because its a taxi service with an app.
And Airbnb is tech company because its a house renting company with an app.
etc.
Have you ever used Twitter?
To someone who has used Twitter in the past weeks this reads like deliberate trolling.
Twitter was absolutely terrible to use and the pace of noticible change within days/weeks under Elon is mind blowing to me. He's clearly going fast with things like getting rid of (shadow-)banning for no apparent reason, getting rid of banning anything of a certain political flavor, making Twitter faster (both in browser as well as on Android), getting rid of fake scammer accounts who deliberately impersonated famous people and companies to scam people, getting rid of bots and spam which where a HUGE problem (still are until the transition to verified is done) and so on.
I mean getting rid of politically flavored sensorship alone will have a massive impact globally for something like Twitter. That alone was obviously very terrible to many people before Musk.
PS: since you said you don't understand what his vision is. My best guess: it's to create a platform that competes with click-bait sponsored propaganda journalism. In the form of citizen journalism on Twitter. I think it could work and I also think there's a huge need for it as traditional journalism is dead in my opinion.
(He thinks this is happening because he reads his replies and a lot of cranks convinced they're shadow banned are @ing him.)
> getting rid of fake scammer accounts who deliberately impersonated famous people and companies to scam people
(He made it worse and the big advertisers canceled their campaigns after their stock falling due to fake announcements.)
All this is really because he doesn't really understand his business - what he's selling is access to Twitter's user's attention .... and he's alienated them all because he thinks it's all about technology
The entire and obvious and openly stated point of Musk buying Twitter was to reinstate Trump, and re-inflict his regular unhinged sociopathic tweets and lies and misinformation and calls to violence and bullying and hate speech and racism upon everyone in the world again, just when we were all getting used to enjoying not hearing from him every single fucking day and the middle of the night.
There's no other rational explanation, and although that obvious explanation may sound completely irrational, so is Musk, and it is still the real reason, and the inextricable consequence, just as predicted by Occam's Razor, and foretold by Musk's own words.
There's nothing bewildering about it at all, so stop acting so surprised, and pretending he changed his mind after what he said so emphatically and unambiguously.
It's not like it's a secret, or contested. He openly announced it. When people show you who they are and what they'll do, believe them.
https://www.voanews.com/a/elon-musk-says-he-d-reinstate-trum...
>Elon Musk Says He'd Reinstate Trump's Twitter Account
>"I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump," Musk said. "I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice."
>Musk added that Trump's ban was "morally wrong and flat-out stupid."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/28/twitter-d...
>Twitter braces for Donald Trump’s return as Elon Musk takes over platform
>Hate speech and misinformation experts are bracing for the return of Donald Trump to the platform, as Elon Musk completes his acquisition of Twitter.
They'll have to go 'hardcore' just to stand still.
Hardcore engineering may be needed to pivot and get to profitability.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/what-is-an-everything-app...
There is no opportunity to "go hardcore" for the kind of devs that build greenfield crap at lightning speed and leave spaghetti in their wake.
Elon appears to intend to slice and dice his way to profitability like a textbook MBA. In order to support that there is opportunity for architects, engineers and process specialists who are skilled at hacking existing stuff together to make square pegs fit in round holes well enough to work and with minimal expenditure of engineering man hours. There are few of these people because it's not a skillset that the traditional software engineering trade really values and pushes people toward and fewer still who fit that category and want to work 50+hr weeks, and fewer still because pre-Elon Twitter isn't the kind of place these people thrive and so most would have self-selected out.
And for the right financial upside. I completely understand going hardcore at a startup in which you have equity. But hasn't Twitter going private removed a lot of the incentive for employees? What is the upside for a Twitter engineer dedicating themselves to the company? Making one of the richest people on the planet slightly richer?
Just one of the wealthiest people in history asking people to work 12 hour days every day of the week, forever, for some nebulous reasons that he can't state, just because.
Such a radical renegotiation of the employment agreement between the workers and the management requires a LOT of study and time. Not two days and clicking a button that says you agree to something.
You'd be crazy to agree to this, and Elon would be crazy to think that anyone that did click is doing anything but trying to find another job while at work.
Haha, can someone tweet this at him so he sees it. He thinks he'll be getting dedicated loyal employees (let's deem them the Yes-clickers), but if he becomes aware of this flaw in his plan, he's going to treat them with paranoia and mistrust as well.
I really munch popcorn hope he twigs that soon.
"a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is"
Part of the deal of going "hardcore" working at a startup is that you get a small chance of becoming rich. I don't think working 80 hrs/wk is worth it when the upside is adding an extra 20% or whatever onto your salary.
"How many people still working at Twitter hated all the woke crap like banning Nazis and were practically begging some conservative billionaire to buy the site, fire everyone, and turn it into an extremely successful free-speech Libertarian playground like Parler or Truth Social?"
Those are the only people who would willingly take his offer. Almost everyone else working there now has a job mobility problem, but the moment that problem gets solved, they're out.
Some businesses do just fine with employees that don't really want to work there, but they typically have enormous hiring funnels running 24/7/365 to handle the churn. Like McDonalds or Amazon's warehouses. Twitter doesn't have that, and you won;t find it at PayPal, Tesla, or SpaceX.
Interviewee: "What's my upside here?"
Elon: "RSUs in this illiquid private company."
Interviewee: "Under what circumstances do they become liquid?"
Elon: "We have to first make money above and beyond paying this crushing debt, then we have to have a growth story to sell to the public, then we go public, then you wait out the employee lockout period, and if you're still an employee, you can sell your RSUs."
Interviewee: "So, like, 2-5 years of sleeping in the office to win Survivor Twitter and not get fired, plus I have to depend upon you to steer us to profitability."
Elon: "Exactly. And when it comes to profitability, my favourite tactic is firing people like you."
I would say for me working hard at startups was mostly because I enjoyed the technical challenge, the culture, and the team I was working with. And I was paid pretty well. I placed $0 value on my equity (and for me that's also what it ended up being worth).
The point is there's other forms of variable compensation beside options you can give to employees of a private entity that are just as good (or even better) than options that may or may not become liquid over 7-10 years. Twitter could set up something similar to entice top performers to stay.
They have no money. It’s not coming in, and only gets worse when the site goes down.
They’re facing employment lawsuits over the last two weeks. They’re facing a discrimination lawsuit for requiring an employee with an ADA accommodation to work from home to work from the office (after that announcement).
The FTC is mad. Congress is mad. Who knows what other lawsuits/etc will pop up.
I just don’t understand how they can survive. Seems like chapter 7. Not “renegotiate the debt and we swear we’ll be fine” chapter 11. Sell every last post-it note and auction off the wall art to pay the creditors chapter 7.
I knew he’d ruin Twitter. I never expected anything like this. I expected people to slowly leave (platform and employment) due to new policies and values.
This was, and honestly is, unimaginable.
Did he really destroy $44B in three weeks?
Source? Musk claimed a "massive drop" but who knows how much that is, if he exaggerated for effect or whether it's permanent ("paused" doesn't mean permanent, if it makes financial sense advertisers will return).
> I expected people to slowly leave
Yet number of users increased faster than ever. These kinds of predictions reminds me of the expectations that Trump would be prosecuted any day now thorough out his whole presidency.
Maybe Twitter will crash and burn, maybe Musk has absolutely no idea what he's doing, or maybe generally outraged people are bad at predicting the future because they're easily misled by their general dislike of someone's personality.
Source on this? I've seen reports that the number of "monetizable daily active users" is up, but nothing about the actual user count.
Someone responded with a graph whose Y axis started at 0. You couldn’t see the “massive jump” anymore.
It was actually like 0.5% increase based on the data in Elon’s chart.
Elon: hold my beer.
In 2017, USCIS unilaterally enacted a 60-day grace period as an administrative rule, which is still in effect today. But, given the current US job market in tech, 60 days may not be sufficient.
Twitter aside, it should also be noted that, being an administrative rule, it can be changed fairly easily for political reasons, since it doesn't have to go through Congress, and courts generally err on the side of executive agencies' judgment on such matters.
based on his actions to date, the only explanation I can think of is he wants to destroy it
This is a death march - no question about it. The book by Edward Yourdon should be required reading for any who are still at Twitter.
One of the things that is in the book had in it that I recall was a four quadrant grid of 'morale' and 'likelihood of success'(?).
There are indeed high morale high chance of success death marches - and they can be fun to be on. The "we will get this done and it will be glorious" type things.
There are also the low morale high chance of success that just drag on and it is a "we will get this done, and then we will all quit." I've been on that one - it was awful. I can only imagine the low morale low chance ones being completely dreadful and people hoping that it gets canceled before too much longer.
Amazon says that I got a copy of this on August 11th, 2012... and that was an order in which the book I got was given to my manager at the time. The project rolled out in October (before Black Friday code freezes went in effect) and I started looking for new employment in January after the company did its yearly bonuses.
Well, we know where we're goin'
But we don't know where we've been
And we know what we're knowin'
But we can't say what we've seen
And we're not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out
"We're on the one road. It may be the wrong road. But we're together so who cares!"
"I'm on the one road. It may be the wrong road. But I'm alone so who cares!"
I am going to use this fixed version for my own purposes.
We, the unwilling
Led by the unknowing
Are doing the impossible
For the ungrateful
We have done so much
For so long
With so little
We are now qualified
To do anything
With nothing
I try to keep the same name/idenity-ish across systems. It was originally a collision of names (three people on the team all had the same first name). One got the short form, one the long form, and the Scoobie Do movie had just come out and for some reason, I got "Shaggy". A bit later, had a coworker who was Japanese and my first name is awkward to say to the Japanese sounds, but "shaggy" is fine - except that it was pronounced as "SHA-gie" which turned out to be much less taken as a user name than the traditional form, so I use it where I can.
That order also had Slack and Peopleware by Tom DeMarco (which I'll also recommend).
These are things that are timeless (though Peopleware is on a 3rd edition).
Death marches are often software projects, but I've seen some lawyers on a "death march" case where its dragging on and on.
The ideas of Slack are applicable to every job - though especially those of knowledge workers (the book is likely as good for building architects as it is for software developers). Similar things about productivity and desk space are also true for architects and software developers.
They're good books and interesting things to read... but they're not books about software development as software.
So he's doing exactly as we all should expect, he's literally said it. I used to delete last Now I delete first.
But then again, it's Elon, so who knows.
Cut it before understanding what it does, I don't think anything good is going to come from this.
Remember, cutting off the MFA microservice ?
I strongly suspect that was a case of switching off something that few people realized was required by for MFA service to operate. That speaks to poor comms, poor docs, and poor understanding of the systems (by the people who were still around.) "Chesterton's Fence" says you shouldn't be turning off stuff you don't understand, but if it looked OK to turn it off, but it wasn't, then that's actually an indictment of the poor engineering practises that Elon claims are rampant around Twitter. Rather than showing Elon to be an idiot it might prove his point.
But we're not in Twitter, so we can't know. What I would say is that if everything was well signposted that the service was critical then I doubt Elon would have recklessly ordered it should be turned off regardless. He's not that bad. It smells of bad documentation to me.
But hey, maybe that's why I'm just an engineer without any interest of making the switch to the "leadership" ladder, and not a CEO.
So it will coast for a while before the wheels come off. Maybe performance will degrade, maybe media stops loading or your timeline won't refresh. Maybe none of that happens and a critical system deep down fails and it just stops. But Musk has all but ensured that Twitter in its current form cannot continue to function.
If he gets himself under control and stops it from downward spiraling (including losing much of their existing advertiser revenue!) then he’s making some progress.
But right now, he seems to be throwing gasoline on it.
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-...
But did he have to be so cruel? Post this picture https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592618665933156352 while 5k people lost their jobs? And all the other stuff... I mean... it's one thing to "tell it like it is", which is a trait a lot of people admire. But he's just doing a bunch of stuff that deep down only abominable human beings would think and let alone act on it.
There's an increasingly blunt divide these days between people who think cruelty is a good signal because it's in some way "realistic", and people who think avoidable suffering is bad and should be avoided. This is almost exactly the "woke"/"antiwoke" split.
This might map with the idea how the military first needs to break a person to rebuild them in something that's capable of doing what society has taught us to never do (namely, kill others), and more strongly to what I've been increasingly hearing lately in the business world which is "antifragility".
In no way I am equating killing with building resilient systems, but I can see a thread connecting them when someone thinks that cruelty can produce better and improved new behaviors or systems.
Word on the street is full teams (including most of infra) have clicked "no". He may be in a state where the site can't even stay up as he coasts on employee fumes.
50% layoffs gets them back to their 2018 headcount.
As far as I can remember, Twitter was functioning fine in 2018 as well. And it certainly didn't grow enough or add enough features to warrant 50% headcount increase in two pandemic years.
Remember that some people willingly put themselves through extremely situations - obsctacle races, bootcamps, etc. 80hrs/week doesn't bother them. Work-life balance isn't something they care about. The David Goggins types.
Elon has built his career seeking out such people. Couple all of this "hardcore" talk with some elaborate BS about "Twitter's mission" (and he IS an excellent hype man) and I can totally see certain type of engineers jumping through hoops just to get in.
Why do you consider that "unfortunate"?
What is 'social debt' and how is it (objectively) measured?
But it’s a real thing. Qualitatively it is the impairment from people not wanting to do business with you. In Twitter’s case, that manifests as decreased advertiser demand, which results in lower ad prices.
And to the extent Twitter is losing MAU, that impacts ad inventory.
Maybe it wasn’t the best analogy. Was just looking for similar “it’s real but not precisely accounted for” concepts .
Some querying on the Internet shows people discussing social debt as a software engineering concept. In that context, it seems to be parallel to the idea of technical debt but revolves around the quality of the social dynamics of a team rather than the quality of the code.
In any case, it's definitionally not objectively measurable (and I'm not sure why that would be desirable), since it's about people's perceptions and subjective experiences with each other. One can, of course, subjectively measure it.
And in general that’s the idea of social debt. That every time you ask someone to change their responsibilities, or do something against company culture, or do something against their morals, or work longer hours for no extra pay, etc: you accrue negativity in their mind associated with you. Do that enough without there being positive things to “pay off” the debt and they’ll be less motivated to work for you, quit entirely, or even sabotage you.
ESG score (Environmental, Social and Governance), it isn't measured objectively but used as a tool for political control and for parading by activists.
For a certain kind of engineer, this version of Twitter is far more attractive than the previous one.
There is a difference between critiquing your employer or insulting your employer. Try insulting your employer on Slack or Twitter and see how it goes.
From https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/technology/elon-musk-twit... :
"Several Twitter employees who shared news of Mr. Frohnhoefer’s firing in internal chats were cut, said six people familiar with events. They were told that they had been terminated for “violating company policy,” according to emails seen by The Times."
Is there a difference between "insulting your employer" and "sharing the publicly-verifiable actions of your employer"? Elon's trying to spin this as "insubordination" when in truth he's just trying to quash any and all dissent, like the authoritarian he is.
Quashing such dissent is good and perfectly in line with his responsibility as CEO. Office gossip and politics doesn't serve a purpose other than distraction and disruption - especially when conducted in private chats.
https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159297764564540211...
this is something that was talked well before Elon, they have thousands upon thousands engineers, for a plafromt that had a fixed set of features since forever.
I don't claim that twitter could be run by the smart cousing from it's basement, but the effort/result numbers seem way off from here.
I think everyone is conveniently setting this topic aside in the ferwor to pile up on Elon (whom actions I don't defent in any way, shape or form) but something in that area was in need of a correction for a while, and apparently the whole stack is politicized enough than steering the ship would have been challenging irregardless by whom would have taken such task.
Twitter was definitely poorly managed, had no vision, and the engineers were probably closing lots of tickets with well written and documented and smart code. The problem is that if the tickets being created are stupid, no amount of "hardcore engineering" can fix that. You can't fix "draw a red line using this blue pen" with better coders.
If you actually care about twitter (you shouldn't), what it needed was a plan to make people hate it less, since even the people who use it constantly seem to hate it, and a strategy to make things more reliable and cheaper, essentially pay off all the tech debt they accrued by doing everything before it was done. But that would have required a massive undertaking, and public companies generally hate that kind of thing, and would rather slowly die over decades than make things better by spending a couple bucks up front.
None of that makes walking in, shitting on everyone's keyboard, pissing off everyone that could be talented, firing lots of people seemingly randomly or off the cuff, and saddling the company with a bunch of new debt they no longer have revenue streams for because your stupid feature idea was predictably stupid, a smart or correct or laudable action.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196
2. https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-re...
I don't think a rational person would try to make any long term conclusions from less than a month of new ownership.
Twitter was built on shaky foundations. From the very earliest days, the "fail whale" was a recurring theme
And as much good a pubic soapbox platform could have been for society, destroying the company seems to me to be the only appropriate karmic justice for all involved, including society because of what Twitter had become and had been used for politically.
And there’s an upside. If the people threatening to leave actually do, it will likely make the platform better.
People talk about like it a critical major industry is about to go under.
It’s Twitter. If it goes under it’ll be missed as much as MySpace.
He was pretty clear. The bar kicked out the Nazis, and he wants them back in.
Thousands of women banned for not agreeing that men in dresses should have full access to women's spaces for one example.
I feel bad for all those who are on visas though and may not have the flexibility to accept the severance offer.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23465274/hundreds-of-twi...
Twitter no longer has a communications department to contact for comment.
He has no STEM degree at all!
The implication is that EM did.
Apparently there was a memo sent to everyone in tech that they have to completely discount his work at Tesla and SpaceX and only evaluate him based on his tweets.
I feel like I'm living in bizarro world where overnight, Elon Musk became a dumbass - at least in the eyes of the tech industry.
I reckon you also think the Kardashian family is "dumb" because of their public persona.
It will be interesting to see how things go now the free money tap is turned off for the casino stock market
That's also a genius, just of another kind.
Absurd to suggest that it was just luck or grift that helped him make multiple $100B companies.
He said several times he wants to make it into a western Wechat equivalent, very dystopian with overall negative value to society and positive value for him and the government agencies.
I know people joked about him wanting to destroy it, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that that's the only rational explanation for what he's doing. Even Dilbert's PHB seems mild compared to Musk. Either he's a massive idiot, or he wants to destroy Twitter without looking like he intended to destroy it, and so prefers to look like a massive idiot instead.
I personally don't like how negative everyone has been since EM took over. The 44 billion wasn't 100% his money, he got funding, so he's still liable. And since Twitter is known for being hated, very few people have something positive to say about Twitter. I think EM making changes is good.
Of course losing your job isn't fun, but I don't think that this amount of negativity is productive or good for anyone.
Don't get me wrong, EM makes mistakes, even if he doesn't address them, like HyperLoop, which is not only practical but also not his idea. But like why not wait a bit too actually see what's his vision for Twitter, beyond just saying that he's trying to serve his ego.
For comparison:
Meta / Facebook:
* React
* PyTorch
* Fasttext
* Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program
Google:
* Flutter
* Go
* Kubernetes
* Tensorflow
* BERT / Large language models generally
* Mapreduce / Hadoop
The much-maligned Uber:
* H3 Geospatial indexing
* Kepler.gl
* Manifold
Even AirBNB!
* Airflow
* Superset
I use most of these products (or their descendants) every day in my work. When I think of Twitter, all I think of is how they arbitrarily shut off humanitarian access to their APIs (and earlier, the Twitter firehose). There's not a single Twitter-supported open product that I use.
Am I the only one? Is there a great Twitter-supported project that I missed?
It’s the only one I could think of but it certainly had a big impact on lots of people, enabling a lot of devs who were bad at design and responsiveness to make halfway decent looking websites.
I'm pretty sure almost all of this team was laid off (certainly the people I knew who worked on it were).
> * Airflow
This is actually a clone of an internal FB tool (written by the same author after he left FB).
That's really sad news. The crew I interacted with (Alex, Omari, Tobias, others) were top-flight engineers who also really understood the problem space and how to navigate the internal complexities of Meta. Hope the laid off / repositioned staff are OK, and if they're looking for new opportunities my email's in my profile.
I agree "fuck him", but sadly I doubt he'll suffer much of a fallout of this.
That said I am riding the sweet wave of schadenfreude and do hope that twitter crashes and burns (and that everyone who works there gets severance)
Yikes.
Single-handedly except for, ya know, all the people that actually designed and built the cars at Tesla
"Twitter hasn’t responded to requests for comment, likely because its communications staff has been included in the layoffs."
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/04/twitter-faces-a-class-acti...
The Verge reached out to Musk for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-elo...
I'd be rather careful with that, and not just proclaim these people were terminated. I see a rather good chance court could rule very differently.
Perhaps you're not arguing termination vs resignation but rather whether they're entitled to unemployment and wrongful termination protection? That's more open for debate, but the former employees are entitled to those considerations (which they would not be had they resigned).
Quitting is a process you do, you give a letter, or you tell your boss, or you stop showing up to work, anything else is termination
But I gotta say, I really hope someone will speak to journalists about what that was about.
https://www.ppic.org/blog/whos-leaving-california-and-whos-m...
There is a lot of tailwind for California's economy. If I were starting a new company, I would stay away from California. Every possible metric is worse except for network effects and access to capital in SV.
Probably because they are no longer competitive to afford them. If you want to argue that there needs to be a more compassionate, less capitalist competition to California then I'll walk back my argument as I would agree that there are tradeoffs there. If you were discussing there needing "to be some competition to California model" and referencing capitalistic model then I will still point to the fact that gdp per capita puts California as the best subnational polity
>Every possible metric is worse except for network effects and access to capital in SV.
Again if you meant to compare this to a non capitalistic market then you have a point, but if this is capitalism vs capitalism that's like saying "if you just remove all the ways they are winning, aren't they actually losing?"
Many stably employed people would answer "no" to that question (if they could be honest) and kept working.
Likely that contract doesn't have a clause that states it only remains valid if the employee clicks on "yes" in death march emails.
So, the contract remains valid until either the employee quits or the employer terminates. Not reacting to an email is not quitting.
I'm pretty sure that legally, the employees that received that email and didn't click/answer are still considered employees. They are only terminated once they received their actual termination papers, not an "if / then" email.
In the USA? Not unless you're an executive (or an actual contractor).
(With that said, "Not reacting to an email is not quitting" is still a true statement)
Obviously employees all (maybe almost all) have employment contracts
Since most states are at will employment, you don’t need a reason to fire someone, just like an employee doesn’t need a reason to quit. Both parties can end employment without cause at any time for any reason. There are some varying exceptions to this, but it’s mostly the case.
Mind blown.
I've had jobs where I kept the software running so smoothly 80% of my time at work was spent with a broom or a rag cleaning because "downtime" was not a thing.
This is in fact a big reason that companies like to use so many contractors: it’s way easier to manage the downside risk for a contractor because the employer’s liability is scoped entirely to one written agreement. Whereas their relationship with employees is scoped to the broad set of laws and precedents mentioned in my first paragraph.
"You work for us, we pay you (salary amount) and you will do everything we ask you to and thanks to 'right to work' laws we can fire you at anytime for any or no reason"
2. "Right to work" laws deal with union membership. You're thinking of "at-will employment" laws.
Besides, unemployment is one thing that is usually very liberally decided in the employee's favor, given that you are effectively paying for it.
I don't really see the "constructive dismissal" argument either that others brought up, as that would require the employer deliberately creating a hostile work environment. Just saying "we're going into hardcore mode" and taking away some perks that weren't guaranteed wouldn't yet fulfill that. There might be of course other shit that twitter/Musk pulled/pulls that may legally satisfy a constructive dismissal. The email, in my laypersons view, wouldn't be enough.
However there is a strong point about the "missed the email" argument, and the non-affirmative nature of the "resignations" it creates. I think that's a rather strong point in favor of the employees. But then again, never underestimate courts ability to render "surprising" rulings.
My guess is though that twitter would not just "dismiss" everybody who did not respond. At the very least HR would get in touch with those people anyway, at which point employees can say "oh wait, what email?". I'd think the email is just meant as a pre-filter to save time by filtering out what people you do not need to talk to because they want to stay anyway.
Last week a tweet said Elon had shut down the microservice responsible for 2FA. 100,000 upvotes on Reddit/twitter and 1000s of shouting comments. The story was nonsense of course. Depressing to see such discourse gets posted here too.
Elon has offered no vision for twitter 2.0, only the promise of hard work towards a nebulous goal.
He then offered no equity in return for that hard work rebuilding the platform.
Why would anyone stay? “Hey, do you want to work triple the amount of hours for me for the same pay?”
I wonder if seeing Chinese companies and Chinese factories work has warped his judgement.
Without a vision of “this is how we’re going to change the world” and the shared commitment of “whoever helps me will get a big piece of the pie!” How does he expect people to stay motivated exactly ?
I finally understand why brilliant people like Karpathy leave Tesla.
Probably even less pay. No more stocks (and if: limited ways of selling ... unless Musk manages to execute a massive pivot and then go public again)
IMO, given EM's antics, he's making the base pay of anyone he hires go up, not down. I can't imagine what he's going to have to pay the CEO he says he's going to put in place at Twitter.
I don’t know. But from what I’m hearing, he offered no vision for twitter employees either.
Here’s an example Twitter thread of someone who saw entire teams fired around him, saw that he would have to deal with systems be barely knew anything about, and had no idea what Musk’s vision: https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458256034275330?s...
So he quit. who wouldn’t have?
But as it is no longer a public company, any such stock is not liquid. Unclear when one could sell it, if ever. So basically worth nothing.
Instead he’s nuked the company workforce? I dunno. Seems a bit reckless to me. Why would twitter be under so much pressure?
This isn't to say that firing so many employees, trying to quickly roll out a change in the blue checkmark system and scaring off advertisers was the right choice of course. So I basically agree that he should have tried to fix the company over the course of a year or two.
I think that’s it too, but I wonder about it’s feasibility. I’m not sure we need a WeChat in the west. I remember a good article shared here about how the Chinese ecosystem is so different that WeChat makes sense.
Reuters reported recently that Tesla plans to start exporting cars from its China factory to the U.S. (Tesla denied the report, btw, but this an Elon-run company we're talking about so that means effectively nothing):
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclus...
Elon Musk has publicly praised the Chinese work ethic of "burning the 3am oil"[1], and dunks on the idea of a 40 hour work week[2]. He's made it abundantly clear where he stands on labor norms.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/12/elon-musk...
2: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-80-hours-per-...
It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought. This may explain an underlying fear driving even some engineers to put their reputation on the line with confident declarations that Twitter is going to fail. Some were saying it wouldn't survive the night. It's now morning. Others saying it won't last the weekend or coming week. We'll soon find out. I would expect some bumps along the way. Twitter Blue was a bump.
Perhaps Twitter is just the first to go lean before the recession. Elon merely the first dancer who is willing to look dumb. Now who's going to be the first follower to transform the lone nut into a leader?
Watch this 2 minute to see how this works, you may have seen this before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ
Now here's a counterbalance to the fear with an optimistic take: This is a correction. A small number of tech companies have been hoarding talent. The talent gets a 3 month severance and made available to the larger ecosystem.
This is just a masterclass in how not to do it. He doesn't look dumb because he's reducing the headcount. He looks dumb because he's going about it like an absolute lunatic.
People constantly underestimate the size of the support staff needed to keep the engineering team productive. For every ten or so software engineers you hire to work on a new product or feature, you're going to need 5-10 QA engineers, another project manager, another product manager, maybe another build engineer, maybe more internal IT staff... You need these people. Software doesn't just leap from developers' fingertips directly onto store shelves. And now that that program's engineering manager has so many more direct reports, that manager needs another manager to split his duties up... And now that there are so many managers, their Director maybe needs a personal assistant to help keep her schedule better organized. All that extra staff eventually requires more HR support, more people working in facilities/building management, more janitors. On the business side, this product is going to need a few more marketers, maybe salespeople to sell it, business analysts to track its effectiveness, and so on. After a couple rounds of this, the company looks up and somehow has 3,000 people and HN sneers about what could they all be doing...
> just the music functionality of Alexa
Seems absurd to say without a link to source
I agree with your general point that a "software team" in a big org requires a lot more people than just engineers developing new features, and that the headcount doesn't necessarily scale linearly. That doesn't change the fact that in a normal business, if 3,000 full-time staff (support staff and all) are working on something, it's probably something pretty big that generates enough revenue or has enough growth potential to justify that cost. Even if a team is working hard and "doing stuff", they can still be grossly overstaffed.
But yeah, for that little bit at the start, everything "looks" fine.
Point being: it's way too soon to say twitter is surviving.
What will be the true test is the world cup. If it can survive the final game (estimated 1.5 to 2 Billion viewership), that will be impressive. Historically, that's been a major engineering challenge for any "public" social network. With 90% less staff, it might not be possible to monitor, triage, test, fix, etc. on the fly.
Consider the FTX news, where the new CEO appointed to clean up the mess called it a complete failure of corporate governance.
There is a huge amount of work that isn't directly related to keeping a website running that is required to sustain a large corporation and keep it legal. You can ignore all of this for a while, but not forever.
From various reports it seems Twitter has fired everyone in security, privacy, media relations, regulatory compliance and we probably haven't heard of everything.
That said, a lean company requires strong leadership, technical depth in management, and specific types of cultures. I don't believe that most companies are up to such challenge.
Now, I need you to consider the following proposition: that eyeballs are to codebases, dashboards and telemetry as floss is to tooth and gum.
Then, I need you to go to your phone and uninstall Twitter.
Also, when you do visit it, visit it in Firefox.
Use a Firefox Container.
I've added https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JackCuthbert/pihole-twitte... to my pihole and flagged this in our security forum at work.
Any APT worthy of the name will be already moving.
Personally? I'd be really worried for folks checking Twitter from Ukraine. That's a whole lot of compromising data and I know who wants it
Check out hacker one and look at what gets disclosed everyday major companies have little issues popping up
I’m terrified!
It depends a lot on what Twitter keeps and for how long, but e.g. consider American soldiers being used to pinpoint nuclear silos, for example.
Imagine being able to map where every journalist is in the world. Now imagine being able to do that for every minute of every day for the past decade.
Objectively, this is an enormous geopolitical risk at just the wrong time, but I have no interest in panicking so aside from mentioning it here, I'm letting it be somebody else's problem
Generally, you try to keep PII (personally identifiable information) and other stuff out of the cold path, but the data still has to be somewhere, right? So there's the hot path.
The overall effect is that stuff that is only logged 'on the hot path' gets effectively forgotten after a while, so you don't have to worry about the management and stewardship of that data.
But you could, for example, force a compromised system to log PII (incl GPS coordinates, radiotelemetry, accelerometer) to the cold path and then come back and get it later.
For bonus points, do stego so it looks innocent.
That is one of the scenarios I'm worried is playing out over there. One of many worries, to be honest, but this one just seems like the kind of breach we'd find out about years later, if at all, under the new regime.
Meanwhile, people in this or that far-off place just... disappear.
Though I'd like to think this was all unlikely, I appreciate the heads up and explanation of why you're concerned. Mensch.
The location of nuclear silos is known. Known to us and known to our adversaries.
You should work more on your techno thriller. :)
> Imagine being able to map where every journalist is in the world.
I do not trust Elon to use my posting history responsibly, period.
The future is much more uncertain.
That's being optimistic. The old microservice was written before GDPR took effect. When data management was "get everything, keep everything, storage is cheap, we (or some 3 letters agency) may find a use for it 10 years from now".
further as GP mentioned, this should provide some protection from unintentional breaches. push come to shove I am prepared to delete the account and ask my friends to follow me on mastodon, its really not that much of lock-in with twitter.
My Twitter friends said Twitter has been having large exodus. CSL(core systems lib?) team, blobstore team, graph platform team, and revenue forecasting team seemed have all quit. I'm not sure how robust and autonomous Twitter's infra is. Hopefully Twitter will continue to function.
What a sudden turn of events and destruction of this magnitude.
Personally, I believe that the crash and burn of Twitter and the rise of a better SM in its place has very low probability, but one can hope.
The idea that they are just going to find dozens of them is hilariously insane.
Surely an outage is right around the corner.
Oh boy.
Surely more resignations are coming.
Hahahahahaha
When I first heard about twitter I thought 1) that’s a dumb idea and 2) it won’t last long.
I was of course very wrong about #2 but feel increasingly right about #1 the more time goes by and the more (IMO) it provides net harm to society and social discourse.
So I’m sympathetic to the employees stuck there but hoping my timeline for #2 was simply way off and it finally goes away.
Because while particular actions he's taken in the past few weeks may be justifiable in certain contexts, all of them taken together can only be interpreted as an attempt to set 44 billion dollars on fire.
>khays@insider.com
She's a senior tech reporter at Business Insider/Insider:
>Twitter loses payroll department, other financial employees as part of mass resignation under Elon Musk
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-payroll-finance-depa...
> How do you make a small fortune in social media?
> Start out with a large one.
We were expecting a collapse in several months, not a few weeks.
There is not one Twitter experience, but a multitude, and expecting to fully grasp the platform just by being on it for a few years is unrealistic.
And what glorious fun we're all having looking at this train wreck.
Bet it stays up and a certain crowd moves on to boycotts before eventually returning as users next year.
If this actually woke you up, why didn't you wake up when he called a diver a pedo for no reason, and instead of apologizing he fought it in court saying that "nononono it's perfectly normal we said it all the time as kids" as if that should make it okay.
The primary reason to not talk much is that it's useless. You can't reason with an angry mob. Sure there are plenty of things to criticize, but the mob is not focused on valid criticism targets. Anything and everything is hailed as a sign of evil and/or incompetence. It is incredibly exhausting to try to provide nuanced reasoning against kneejerk hate.
Overall I thought the whole Twitter purchase was a distraction when it was first announced and I still think that. I'm much more interested in SpaceX.
Hence I favor musk in relative terms. Whether musk destroys twitter or rebuilds it's a postive thing in my book.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593455727611215872
> And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol
> Let that sink in …
He literally cannot distinguish between good and bad attention. He still thinks he's winning this.
You cant take credit for positive outcomes if you done nothing yet.
If the chaos drives away advertisers, as it seems to be, that isn’t great either.
Losing advertisers is a problem in the short term, but less overhead helps and they're pivoting the model. I thought we all hated ads? Now people suddenly support that model? Please. It's all so fake.
[1]he already posted a conspiracy theory, deleted it when called out, and then said he never posted it. That’s his recent behavior, if you trust his statements I have a bridge to sell you
That he deleted that stupid tweet was admission it was stupid. Where did he say he never posted it though? It's highly unlikely he said that and wasn't joking. He knows everything he posts is captured immediately.
No, admitting that it was stupid would be an admission that it was stupid. Removing its existence is just hiding the mistake.
>Where did he say he never posted it though? It's highly unlikely he said that and wasn't joking.
Here[1], and inb4 you say that's obviously a joke. No it is not to a casual observer. He claims he never tweeted what was reported, and the only indication at all that the tweet should be read in a not monotone voice is the emphasis asterisks around not. All that indicates to a casual observer is that he is emphatically denying he ever made the first indirect tweet.
It's true that good publicity comes from amazing turnarounds. Final Fantasy XIV is a good example, since FFXIV 1.0 was widely regarded as terrible and 2.0 was lauded for somehow miraculously turning the company's fortunes around.
But the big difference there is that it was a new management that did it. You don't get points for completely ruining your company's best-known product (to the point where some believe it to be the company's only product).
The reason people are "using" Twitter now is to watch a trainwreck. Most people by now probably have a backup plan.
> [me running naked through the library with a balloon animal on my head]
> The fact that you're talking about me means that I hit a nerve
However the question is for how long he can keep the drama and attention till the thing collapses.
> Elon, there's a bunch of us in SV who will come up tonight to help on the infra side to keep the site up.
> If you need help just ask.
As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight
That's either a level of delusion that I can't imagine and/or someone who has no idea what they are talking about. I also can't imagine carrying water for or "simp-ing" for a billionaire, especially one who treats people so terribly (this "work yourself to the bone or resign" ultimatum was one of the more disgusting things I've seen in tech, I'm appalled at the people defending it as some genius move).
Really I feel bad for the people who have no choice but to stay at Twitter, the H-1B's and the like. The brain drain is going to be (/already has been) massive and all that will be left are the people who have no choice, can't find a better/different job, or are true sycophants. None of that makes for a healthy work environment and isn't conducive to making good products.
[0] https://twitter.com/MichaelGuimarin/status/15934156421110456...
The infra is just too clever for anybody to grok in a million years. These clowns probably don't even have fedoras, no way they'll ever figure it out.
Way better than keeping a person around who hoards institutional knowledge and admin access for job security. In fact that would be the first person I'd zero in on and get rid of, and have in the past. Not only are people like that not indispensable, they should never have been hired, anywhere.
A well engineered twitter has everything necessary to run it in properly documented internal wikis and can be handed off to a small new group of competent ops people at the drop of a hat. Ideally new hires should be able to fix and change things within a day of starting their jobs with little to no hand holding. I'm sure it is very far from that at the moment due to the unprofessionalism of everybody involved, but this is actually the best and fastest way to get it there purely from an ops perspective - usually takes years to convince management to yank off the bandaid because everybody is too scared to take responsibility.
Twitter used to have fail whales all the goddamn time, sky doesn't fall, it isn't amazon they aren't losing money every second it is down.
Whoever stayed on will be able to figure out eventually which things to restart in what order so long as they aren't locked out of the servers.
Unless Twitter is still using Zookeeper. :P
In the process of figuring it out they'll be putting in-writing what should have been documented all along and getting a feel for the brittle bits. Long term twitter is better off.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I'm sure the databases have recent known good backups at worst you'll get a bunch out of prolonged outages and some dataloss - since we are talking about tweets, nothing of value was lost.
I hadn’t thought about what will happen next, but this is probably it. It’s fascinating watching the D-K effect play out at every level here.
It might actually benefit engineers in the long term too, since they can ultimately blame Elon ( after he fires them ) and hopefully learn from it.
Operating a Kafka cluster doesn't make one an expert at anything. Zilch.
The site is still up and in a month or two Elon should cut another 90% of them and it will still be up.
Some people will have to live down the discovery that they were never essential workers but rather seat fillers.
Many companies say that they are like a startup, but I can see Twitter going back to that style. Far fewer people, far faster shipping, less thinking things through, etc. The bluechecks for anyone in a week and undoing it seems very startup like to me. Is that good? Probably not - but it is interesting, and, like I said, high risk high reward.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Has there been literally *any* indication that this "hardcore" attitude will result in more reward?
People here on HN drastically underestimate the value of Twitter’s network and name. Musk could start 1,000 social media companies for 1,000 lifetimes and still not hit on Twitter’s timing and execution early on.
The age of social media is dead. No one is creating a Twitter competitor in 2022+. Either the site completely dies and people flee to existing platforms, or it lives on.
The idea that one can just build a Twitter clone shows little understanding of human nature.
What happened in 2022 that all the doors are suddenly closed? Wouldn't you have said the same in 2016, before TikTok came out of nowhere and became the most popular website (per Cloudflare). I'm pretty sure people spoke similarly in 2006 about how Facebook has no chance against Myspace. The only constant is change.
You might be able to acquire the company from Elon for cheap in a bit Tumblr-style though.
What, is Twitter going to re-IPO?
Is that before or after paying off the billions in debt?
As an ordinary employee what is the potential reward?
A turn around is clearly possible. Social media companies have been tremendously valuable in recent history and might become so again. Musk has had amazing financial success with other companies.
As an employee your potential rewards are what I've already explicitly called out. You can advance further and faster up the corporate hierarchy in the tumult. You can also earn and hold stock rewards that may be extremely valuable. And, of course, you may consider it intrinsically valuable to help shape a tool used by hundreds of millions worldwide, and, as the number of employees shrinks, the per-employee impact increases.
For a mere hobby it is too expensive even for him. 44bn (+continuing operating costs, credit costs, ...) also is a lot to regain via profits. So the logical thing is to either sell it to some other corporation (who!?) or going public. But for that he has to somehow make it an attractive investment, while currently he is doing the opposite.
The reward is deathmarch with Elon holding the whip.
Guy can't even use website generator
People want it all to fail out of spite, and attempt to bring their dreams to life by merely doomsdaying repeatedly and with fervor. We had 4y of Trump and no amount of wishful doomsdaying actually changed anything. The media was full of drama and we told ourselves stories of incredible disfunctions, but at the end of the day the government kept on doing its thing, the country mostly didn't change too much on the fundamentals. Reality is most often more boring than that (save FTX-like events).
I think that's most of the code, at this point
Well that goes the first assumption.
> or scaling events that reach a tipping point
Such as having applications running without restarts for a long time due to deploy freezes?
> Odds are those aren't the bread and butter of problems faced by Twitter _right now_.
Right now, exactly this moment, probably not. But if those were the only worrying events that could happen in the short term, I doubt anyone would need to offer any help to Twitter.
> due to code changes
Well, Musk has said that he wants to do "hardcore engineering" implying there will be a lot of changes coming up. That surely can't go wrong.
But if infrastructure wasn't managed like shit it will probably just keep on chugging
The problems themselves most often have simple short term remedies.
I really think people blow out of proportion the actual requirements to keep things running, probably because they wish to see him fail. But everywhere I've worked, systems were most stable when engineers weren't there to muck with them. There's a reason many people refuse to ship on Friday.
Are you sure you can be effective coming completely cold into a company with massive attrition?
But seriously, how can someone burn down something he just bought for 44 billion so fast and consequently?
The fan boys would say: It’s Elon, he is playing 3D chess and no one is smart enough to understand his end goal.
One thing that’s interesting about this shakeup is that it’s a very clear statement about where Elon sees value, right? Lazy “rest and vest” engineers? Just go home. Communications department? Get out.
Perhaps what Elon wants to say is “look, this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff, and now that the 80% naysayers are gone we’re going to really get shit done”. When I’ve worked for companies approximately the size of Twitter I’ve sure felt the urge to say that. :)
Now, the question is, now aligned with “reality” is this reasoning from first principles? No doubt a lot of haters are gonna hate, like crazy. Is it enough to take the whole company down?
Every place I've worked that had more than 50 staff, 90% of the productive work was done by 10% of the staff. I mean, I can't document that; it's anecdata. But I think it's a pretty reliable rule-of-thumb guideline.
But how do you identify that 10%?
(And my feeling is that a lot of the Elon-hate comes from people who fear that the outcome will be more in line with my expectations than yours.)
Most people don’t bank on all the “dead weight” being able to jump ship and find a new job. Musk also hasn’t outlined what his actual vision is so you’d be signing up for “hardcore” work without knowing if you agree with the goal
That’s my feeling too. But I’m not 100% sure that feeling aligns perfectly with “reality”. We humans have blind spots, and it may be that some of the 80% actually do very important stuff that I happen to be blind to.
Tech companies are growth-oriented companies. It doesn't matter if their current set of features "runs"; it's not the end of the story, it's only the beginning.
If the current featureset runs perfectly, but there is no R&D progress towards the next set of features to keep up with the competition, keep the current userbase onboard, and solicit the next generations of users: the company is dead.
The full quote read “look, this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff, and now that the 80% naysayers are gone we’re going to really get shit done”. “Get shit done” is essentially what you call R&D progress.
Surely, something to be remembered for...
Cutting the burn rate is a clear and sensible part of Musk’s strategy. The more he lowers Twitter’s expenses, the more time he gives Twitter to try new things.
He’s done a terrible job of executing it, but that part of the business strategy, at least, is sound.
But the timescale involved were much longer.. the Nokia losses happened in months, not in days.
I mean, he'll always have food on the table at the end of the day, but there's a good chance he won't have the kind of wealth and influence in the future that you'd need to make a big-balls move like buying a large tech company.
Makes sense that some people had to check that box.
I don’t want people who are sycophants for a billionaire on my team. It shows a lack of good judgement.
I don’t want people who think laying off half the staff, revoking WFH out of the blue, and then giving a hazy ultimatum with neither option well defined is a smart move.
I want people who know their worth, will speak the truth without fear of reprisal, not mindless followers willing to sacrifice everything for a company or a person.
That's a big assumption. Maybe they had a great work/life balance before and they see this current imbalance as a temporary inconvenience that's not worth losing their job over.
> I don’t want people who are sycophants for a billionaire
Another unfair assumption. You could get this information directly by asking a good open ended interview question.
> I don't want people who think laying off half the staff, revoking WFH out of the blue, and then giving a hazy ultimatum with neither option well defined is a smart move.
I don't understand why staying on automatically means that you think that Musk's actions are smart.
> not mindless followers willing to sacrifice everything for a company or a person.
They were not willing to sacrifice everything since they were not willing to quit their jobs.
I find that difficult to believe. But, like I said, you better have a darn good reason when you're explaining having twitter 2023 in your resume. If that is a good reason, cool. I'm betting the default will be you buy into Elon's lord of the flies type management style and shitposting, and you thought you were smarter than all your co-workers are you're glad to see them gone. Add in some sympathy for the nazis that were banned from twitter, and I see a pretty toxic looking mix. Not a good co-worker.
I get what you're saying about the hiring situation in the future, in general, in the tech industry. I would like to posit that the type of engineers we're talking about at twitter right now would be some of the top 5-10% of software engineers working on distributed web engineering, in general, in the world. Is that fair? They might not be in FAANG or whatever series of letters you want to use this month, we prob drop Facebook and elevate Microsoft, whatever, but I've worked with some open source twitter code and I've interviewed twitter engineers, they seem very very solid to me.
If that is true, I also posit there are a lot of second tier companies that would be falling over themselves to replace some of their B tier employees, and replace their existing under performing engineers with these twitter engineers. If the market is what you say, they should be able to get top tier talent on some kind of discount, yes? There are still funded startups as well, and adding a single experienced twitter engineer could elevate the whole team in a startup.
So, I see the choice as: stay at twitter... what does that mean. You're working for this dude who just axed all your colleagues for basically no reason, and it's a coin flip when he looks at you and your work if he decides to fire you. Even if you stayed through these two rounds. You're making way less money, as you don't have RSUs in a publicly traded company, you've got some kind of nebulous options in a fiscally fragile company that the CEO is claiming openly could be headed for chapter 11 + the fact that he's just driven away almost all the ad revenue. You look at subscriptions, 22,000 people signed up for Elon's blue check scheme, so you'd need a dozen million people signing up for that to shore up the gap he's created with the debt. You are now one of 3 people on a team that was 75, and lots of other teams are like that. How are you going to create features that will entice more people to subscribe, when you barely have the people to keep the lights on. So, you've looked at all that and decided to stay? Either you're on a visa, or there is something that isn't financial keeping you there (because... you're making way less money) and I would darn sure like to know what that thing is. If you're risk averse, you see this crap storm coming and bailed to find a new job already.
Add to that that all these people have had their options paid out just recently as part of the sale. They have cash. They are staying for another reason.
but it looks like somebody had their eyes on that issue
Expires: Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at 3:59:59 PM Pacific Standard Time
Not everything is automated. There's a finite amount of time to create new automation, and that time goes first toward the things that happen hourly or daily. The things that happen monthly still get handled by humans. Not everything is in the runbook either, and what is often ends up scattered among many wiki pages and help notes in tools, so it's not easy for a newcomer to find. So those monthly things have to be done by people who remember.
They remember how to clean stuff up when a quota/capacity limit is being approached, and who to call when they need more, and they can expect a response. They remember how to recognize when their service is approaching overload, or about to enter an oscillating state, and they know how to nudge it back toward sanity before the errors start to pile up. None of that happens when whole groups are gone.
Sooner or later, a service will start to run off the rails in one way or another, and the person who inherited that service will either not recognize it or not find the solution in time. Then it's Fail Whale time.
I’d take that bet.
Edit: downvoting doesn’t change reality
Pretty sure a number of AWS and Azure engineers believed the same thing.
Of course, even if it was automated, you still have to pay the bills, and if payroll quit as has been suggested in the thread, I'd be suprised if accounts payable is sticking around
The new one isn’t even indexed on crt.sh yet.
$ openssl s_client -servername twitter.com -connect twitter.com:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -dates
notBefore=Nov 14 00:00:00 2022 GMT
notAfter=Nov 14 23:59:59 2023 GMT
No, the way I think a frozen codebase will rear its head is when things that haven't been restarted in too long start to misbehave. When new updates are being pushed out frequently by a busy team, every machine (container, process, whatever) is being restarted regularly. People don't even realize what they're avoiding each time. Resource leaks, deadlocks, and timer issues can remain undetected a long time in that environment, then surface when the longevity increases. Even worse, some things tend to fail after a predictable amount of time, i.e. across most or all machines at once in a cluster.
I first saw this in 1990 at Encore, when our shiny new SMP version of UNIX became capable of staying up for a whole month at a time. Because of problems like those mentioned above, getting from one month to two took almost as long as getting from zero to one. I've seen the same scenario play out on many other systems since, and there's no reason to believe the systems within Twitter are immune.
Stasis is not the same as stability.
They developed those methods of dealing with JVM and scheduler issues because those problems rose in prominence against the background of a zillion other problems. They became the longest poles, most worth spending time and effort on. But those other problems still exist, with more appearing every day. Yes, even without code change, because environments and workloads change too. Anyone who has actually been responsible for large complex systems, not just in the sense of working at the same team/company and riding the coat-tails of those who actually understood it, knows that they require continued attention and always will. Entropy exists.
I'm pretty sure that that's the plan Elon Musk is executing. It's simple, brutal, nasty, and probably not very well thought through. And yes he's not being very nice about it (to put it mildly). But it's not completely crazy if you can get over how obnoxious he's being.
He's clearly not interested in keeping the current team. He's never going to win them over at this point and from his point of view they were part of the problem, not the solution in any case. He bought a company that was basically not profitable, bleeding cash, and fresh out of ideas on how to fix any of that for many years. And he's now on the spot to keep that train wreck going. So, first order of business is to just cut the cost. That means decimating the team to a fraction of its size.
The Twitter team is basically rage quitting at this point so that's solved. Again, I don't like how he's doing it but undeniably, there are going to be vastly less people on the payroll very soon and cost will be a lot lower. The law suits that follow will be interesting though. But my guess is that he'll just buy those off and that will be it.
Of those that remain, he can cherry pick a team to salvage/build whatever he needs and then re-enforce it with some outsiders. Building a micro blogging platform is not rocket science and Elon Musk is actually deeply into rocket science. So, I actually get his gut feeling that this simply should not require thousands of engineers obsessing about all sorts of arcane software bits and pieces that somehow implement Twitter. It's a micro blogging platform with a fairly simplistic feature set. And he just called bullshit on how that was done at Twitter. And we're talking about a person with a long track record of having absolutely no tolerance for bull shit.
Again, not liking his methods but I can see his line of reasoning here. He has no respect for the Twitter team and he actually wants them gone. He wants to rebuild Twitter in a way that is cost effective and interesting to him. And he is not a risk averse person. So, in his mind that means a small team that can execute fast. I kind of agree with that part.
Will this work? I don't know. I see no technical reason that this plan could not work. But the big question is if the Twitter brand name will be worth anything by the time he's done or if he's just going to shut down the whole thing and walk away from it. He can certainly afford to do that. But letting this thing coast along just never was going to be a thing.
Lol
Yeah, you can do Twitter on a weekend… if you only use it yourself and a few friends.
But we are talking about a platform with millions of users, all of which want real-time access to tweets written from anywhere in the world, including image and video content. Just getting to “no outages” and “low enough latency” parts is going to take a lot of effort to build from scratch. Don’t underestimate the complexity of Twitter.
I bet mastodon doesn't have thousands of very active committers. They are taking a lot of users right now. With a hacked together pile of ruby and javascript. Easy to forget that that is how Twitter once started out as well. The bloated org chart came later.
The scale of Twitter is large but not enormous. Basically a few trillions of messages overall. Most of them pretty small. All of them immutable (well so far). And lots of images/videos with some CDN in front of that. It's a lot of bytes but not a whole lot of complexity. And a couple hundred million users and user profiles. I can think of a quite a few ways of dealing with all that.
What's hard is things like algorithms and good search. But that's a space where you can achieve a lot with a small and focused team with access to lots of hardware. And obviously this is also something where Twitter has maybe been a bit underwhelming and struggling. User growth and engagement stagnated years ago for them. This was not a healthy social network. It's not like they were nailing this. Throwing more people at the problem wasn't working.
But also, how much time did Whatsapp have to get to that point? I'm not saying it's impossible, but that it's difficult and takes a lot of effort that shouldn't be underestimated.
> They are taking a lot of users right now.
And still less activity than Twitter, and with federation, and with some servers already locking new account creation (mastodon.social, the biggest one, doesn't let you create new accounts).
Again, it's not that it's impossible. It's that it's hard.
You did warn us it was crazy
He did.
Jason Calcanis and David Sacks will surely save the day.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/16/23462668/elon-musk-trial...
I love how it says "To protect your account" it can take 24 hours or longer for your data to be ready.
Unless I'm just not creative enough to reason why you can log into twitter from a country you've never been to with no 24 hour verification wait but fulfilling legal obligations takes 24 hours.
It's one thing to show you the last 24hr of tweets. Another to get a complete twitter history for given uid.
{"errors":[{"code":410,"message":"You need to verify your password before you can view this content."}]}
Might have given someone a fright, until they realized what was happening, and that it was dynamic content, of course.
Sr engs: ...
(Because you're an a.h.)
People without equity should refuse to work like indentured servants for peanuts only to be told "they're not working hard enough". It's the only way to teach EM a lesson about hubris. $50 says Twitter will die down to a skeleton staff and be kept afloat by third-rate MSPs. No one will want to work on that creaky, steaming pile of poo for a billionaire jerk.
Damn, same age as Eminem
Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment
Would you capture it, or just let it slip? Yo
I'm sorry but are you reading what you're putting down here? These people are making ridiculous swathes of money doing piss easy work, let's not go overboard with the hyperbole here
I do hope Twitter dies a painful death, however, so I'm with you on that bet
In these large companies, to make changes to a lot of systems, you have to have someone else also sign on to the changes (eg. code review).
If your aim is sabotage, you would have to find a like minded saboteur to work with you. In normal times, at most places, this is risky, because most others would not want to assist you, and would likely report you.
The equation has changed. Musk has turned nearly every employee against him. It is now much less risky to explore your social graph now to find people who are of like mind. The defenses that software companies have are completely inadequate to deal with this sort of situation.
Employees interested in sabotage should not do anything stupid, they should just join the exodus.
Fantasizing can be fun though.
And in general, all these "I'll just say <whatever>" arguments on the Internet will nearly always fall apart when you start backtracking under questioning and changing your story and they pressure you with evidence. Everyone always thinks that they're some kind of perfect sociopathic Patrick Bateman or Heath Ledger's Joker in their mind. You/they are not.
If you are relying on that argument, then they certainly have enough to arrest you and charge you, and the safe bet is that you'll crack.
[Also your argument gets much harder to make if they have you logging in with 2FA from an IP address that can be traced to your house or something like that--very hard for someone to fake that no matter how much fucked up chaos is going on inside Twitter]
But even most people who think they're smart because they watched the video, aren't that smart, and they'll talk.
Some time ago (when multiple accounts tweeted some crypto scam) it was revealed that at Twitter no such protections existed.
Sabotaging by resigning is just perfect and enough.
Or forty-four billion dollars.
There's no need to actively sabotage the site from the staff position. Even if there isn't a single critical disk slowly filling up somewhere, there is a lot of dependencies in there that will eventually have a CVE.
You are thinking active sabotage like git-committing a bug. Passive sabotage is trivial. I recommend skinming the CIA saboteur manual on the topic.
I guess he will use something like - Twitter was broken before I got in and I could not save it anymore.
Being Elon, I would be more worried about the fact that Saudi's are supposed to be as one of the investors in Twitter and they already have trace of killing people. If Elon won't be able to spin the story as somebody's else problem and instead of it will be presented as his managing failure, well could be interesting.
This is no threat, just a very real concern that I have for him. That is not the kind of money you blow.
Where are you seeing $44B of Saudi money?
https://twitter.com/Alwaleed_Talal/status/158597522656711065...
> I guess he will use something like - Twitter was broken before I got in and I could not save it anymore.
So Musk's best defense is that he decided to buy a company that couldn't be saved? Might be hard for him to get loans going forward.
'chief creative officer' sort of thing with a sandbox
always wondered if he bought twitter to boost spacex IPO; for now, good thing that it's private or it would be getting hosed to mortgage twitter fail like tesla is
tesla build quality and self-driving snafus may get assigned to him as well
Short of some legal action forcibly removing him from the companies from breaking a law, he's not going anywhere.
It was the blatant market manipulation for me. This is a nice dose of karma.
But you do you I guess.
There are a lot of people I like to whom I would not hand over $50k+ for a nice product. For that kind of expenditure I want some certainty that the future outlook and mission of a company is on solid ground.
Elon's primary failure with Twitter was joining a behemoth and arrogantly assuming he knew better than the existing leadership, sacked them all and pushed sweeping changes in a nonsensical time-span.
At his other ventures he already has strong leadership in place that he's worked with so he just assumes everything's already great rather than second guessing everything. In practice he doesn't run them on a day-to-day basis. He's more like a chairman with an interest in engineering than a CEO.
This strikes me as a very apt description. Still though, he basically has free rein at those companies and there is always a chance he decides to get more involved. Maybe Tesla or SpaceX hits a rough patch next year and he decides to get more hands on and "fix" the situation. That fear is probably a lot more relevent in potential customer's minds these days.
It’s over. Dead site running. Such a horrible loss.
Glad the stockholders are happy. This was clearly better than the lawsuit. /s
I forgot about the World Cup.
I don’t know what to say anymore.
Instead they took a payout and this happened.
They destroyed their company. I don’t think they knew it would be this bad this fast, but it was never going to go well.
I blame them all.
I don't know that the board had much of a choice though, the best fiduciary sense for all current stockholders was to let him buy the company, what happens after that is of no concern to them. It's the perverse reality when a corporation only exists to make money for the shareholders.
Don't think there was a better financial outcome for them.
This seems like reddit thread.
And again, this isn't about Twitter but about the hivemind and virulent hate taking over a sane discussion.
I'd love to see that the same people overblowing this out of proportion say they were wrong if the tide turns and Twitter ends up being better. Not because I care for twitter but becuase I'd like to think this isn't just foaming-in-the-mouth hate.
It’s a small world here in SF.
This is like the flight crew being raptured. The plane is going to crash.
Actually he'll promise a self-coding website within 1 month.. Another month, promise.. Just pay us 8 bucks now and you'll get it very soon!
Spoken like someone who has never worked on a sufficiently complex system.
the bottom part of this thread is basically reddit. everyone is irrationally angry.
they would gladly let the remaining thousands of twitter employees eat dirt just to see elon musk fail.
and Elon Musk is firing employees to reduce costs, which is something every other tech giant is doing right now, in a different proportion of course.
those commenters would gladly let the rest "eat dirt" out of spite.
Checking that box was agreeing to work “hardcore” and add a bunch of hours to your day. I imagine a lot of people receiving that email guessed that their colleagues would also ignore the box and figured “he won’t fire all of us, right?”.
Hey Elon, how about this: fire employees with long names, because they take longer to type in their login, and that's inefficient!
"We'll send humans to Mars!" is something that I can feel good about working 80 hours a week on.
"We'll help trolls spew hate!" ... maybe, not so much.
Even if(when) we do - what's there? We are progressively failing a perfectly habitable world that even has a magnetic core. Moving to another planet will not solve anything for the humans.
> Edmund Hillary: "Because it's there"
Humanity is innately adventurous. We don't need a more complex reason to explore the unknown.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23465274/hundreds-of-twi...
https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1593154189345316864 [@GergelyOrosz] Internally, there are polls at what % of current Twitter software engineers plan to stay, and these usually point to about 25% indicating to stay for Twitter 2.0, and the other 75% planning to take severance. Don’t forget: this is less than 50% of the original staff.
I think the best tweet on that thread is [0]:
"I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices. Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out."
I'm not sure if it's true or not, but... sounds about par for the course.
Edit: As someone else pointed out, it's a parody account. Amazing that I couldn't infer that immediately.
[0] https://twitter.com/JWeber988/status/1593423235252723715
> Thanks for helping out. You’re a lifesaver! [0]
No one with any sanity and a U.S. citizenship. Visa holders under Twitter's sponsorship are trapped.
They win the war of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th coalitions. For the first time, they find that things are going fine. All they have to do is nothing. Pull back and consolidate. Maybe refine some things, tinker a bit. But it's not enough. It will never be enough. So they invade Russia.
In his life, Napoleon had success after success after success. Every step of the way, critics told him that he'd fail. But he did it anyway, and won 38 battles. 17 at near impossible odds.
How can someone like him be satisfied with sitting at home, ruling France? How could he be satisfied with puttering around in the countryside talking about his code with random farmers?
And so he decided to invade.
People warned him against invading. Armand de Caulaincourt staked his reputation on it, went with him on the campaign, and kept warning him. Warning him against wintering in Russia. He kept telling him to turn back. But Napoleon didn't listen.
They'd been wrong every single time. And he'd been right. Let them babble, his path was one set at a different level than theirs.
Except, that one time they were right.
It seems that when you are touched with greatness, you end up believing that you can do anything. And far more often than not, you can.
Right up until the moment you can't.
He's had failures before. But this line seems unfair. He was neither the first person in electric cars (a few notable failures before him) nor in rockets (e.g. Boeing)... but he was able to lead a team that figured out some of the key tech and the business models to make these things viable. Even with a lot of money, this is no small feat.
Unfortunately we will never know how much Musk contributed to any of these companies.
It is in his best interest to act like he was vital but unless you were there, there isn’t any way to know.
A guy with a vision and a few hundred million, in this context, has what many would have said would be a 0% chance of success. Many people somehow seem to have this view that if you just have enough money you can solve any problem in existence. It's probably just the consumerist mindset taken to its [not so] logical extremes - where literally anything is for sale, even that which doesn't exist.
I don't think he had some nefarious plan to kick them out from the get go. Sometimes personalities and ideas just clash, as theirs obviously did.
And that is the fucking problem. More and more shit if coming up about him (latests I saw today was an 'expose' about his degree and maybe even being illegally in the country, which I don't know if it is true or not) but people seem to believe whatever shit comes out of his mouth over facts. Was he pard of the success in Tesla, yes. Was he a founder/started it? Absolutely fucking not. Was Tesla be able to succeed without the government tax credits/investments, absolutely fucking not. But now that it is in a good path, he even moved state to avoid that 'government' issues. He is a fucking liar and a psychopath, but because he has money, people keep gargling his balls like they taste like candy mixed with wild truffles.
(no clue for SpaceX as I truly don't know).
SpaceX was not the first in the launch business - they were in fact the only one who attempted to break into a monopolized market that no one dared to touch. It's remarkable that they not only fight their way in, but also did it so well that they became the largest launch provider in the country, and in some cases the only one in the United States - SpaceX saved the tax payers a ton of money by reducing launch costs.
You don't have to either hate or love a guy - Elon fucked up multiple times, often talks shit, but give the man credit where credit is due.
Falcon 9 uses a carbon fiber skin over an aluminium honeycomb.
And Wikipedia claims that Starship originally used bog-standard 301 Stainless Steal, and later switched to also bog-standard 304L Stainless Steal.
The only alloys that I'm aware of SpaceX developing are inconel alloys for hot, oxygen rich parts of their engines.
It's typical for SpaceX to use the off-the-shelf material initially, then do R&D to customize it for a material that better suits their needs.
Which ones? The ones where cars would self-deliver five years ago? That Mars colonisation would have begun this year? That Cybertruck would deliver three years ago?
The goalposts are Elons.
Arguably EU regulations did just as much to make EVs viable.
But I am bitter. I was actually commuting with 2 people on the car while rich folks bought their way there (totally on purpose, so the electric cars become more popular, I know)
This goalpost hasn't moved for 14-yrs.
The question is, why would they? Why would they reduce their price if they can actively sell all the cars the manufacture? They in fact had months of wait time until recently. Why would they sell a cheaper car when there is no serious competition cutting their market share? It's no different than apple not reducing the cost of their iphone - they have no incentive to do so as long as they are making money and have no serious competition under-cutting them.
Tesla's pitch is partly 'electric car good for climate' yes, but at the end of the day they are a for-profit company and their main objective would be to maximize profit.
The Tesla master plan was from the beginning to reinvest these profits into manufacturing a cheaper car. They did this with the Model 3, but now it kind of looks like they've given up.
In February 2019, Tesla announced [2] a Model 3 for $35,000.
So if you're looking at the numbers by relative buying power, they weren't doing too bad up until car prices went insane the last two years.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
[2] https://www.tesla.com/blog/35000-tesla-model-3-available-now
Do the tax payers really need anything launched?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge
> national defense
Yeah yeah, I've been hearing that ever since Ronnie Ray-gun 40 years ago.
Don't like endless wars? Thanks for your feedback, now give me 30% of everything you earn so I can pay for them.
His antics were 'sufferable' in the context of Tesla/Space X, but for a variety of reasons, not at all with Twitter whereupon he's essentially going to be perceived a toxic entity - rightly or wrongly.
He needs to find an excuse to get out of there, find someone he can get along with to take over. Put some nice terms in there, probably including that he has to 'not talk about Twitter publicly' and get back to his more tolerable shenanigans.
If Twitter was his only gig, I can see him digging himself out of this hole over the long run, but with other things to do I think it's going melt him.
He's doing 'Operation Market Garden' for no reason; time for an 'orderly withdrawal'.
I don't think Matt would be a bad choice for a ceo.
Musk clearly isn’t successful in everything he does, but he’s not a failure either.
I think that counts.
We all know that he didn’t do that though, right?
At best his skill set includes hiring smart people, raising money, and being a good manager. Which is exactly what you want from a good CEO and nothing to sneeze at.
But people give him way too much credit for Tesla and spacex imo
No. He sits at the top and commands, like a king. And yet he is apparently solely responsible for engineering achievements? The guy who gave "cold gas jet thrusters" on a tesla a legitimate idea for more speed, or using rockets for fast travel on earth, or "humans drive with just two eyes (and a millennia of evolution and experience) so we will replicate that with just two shitty off the shelf CCDs that don't even compare to eyeballs, and oh btw we are removing ultrasonic sensors and I promise it's not because we are cheapskates trying to balloon profit margins to meet our absurd overhyped valuation". Has he ever said anything of actual engineering value?
Like come on. He doesn't even technically run things at SpaceX, they literally had to hire someone whose job is to stand between Elon and any semblance of control of the company.
It would be like if you went to mcdonalds, got a burger, and thanked the statue of Ronald Mcdonald on the way out. That's not how the world works, ronald didn't make your burger.
But the guy also had money to hire talented people who landed rockets from orbit (on ships!). And then flew them again*
His time plan might have failed, but that doesn’t mean that full self driving has failed. That’s like if I said: “I’m going to make 10 million dollars by the end of next week”, and then people would call me a failure for only making 5 million in a week.
Or do you mean that full self driving actually has failed, not taking into account any time plans? I think the full self driving capabilities of Teslas are downright incredible. Not fully ready for robotaxi territory, but extremely impressing.
I don't understand what people get out of this, is it really that painful to admit that some guy has done some pretty cool things with his life? All the effort it takes to research all the negative things about someone could've been spent doing something productive. Being willing to admit that someone did something awesome could've been exciting or inspiring.
And yet people work so hard to think around all the good things, and take the most negative view possible. Ugh, I don't like this part of human nature.
I agree btw, I have watched people go from worshipping Elon to suddenly deciding he's a fraud and a talentless hack and every one of his accomplishments were some kind of fluke. It's so strange.
Everytime, someone comes up with these arguments, I cannot help but to think "Wow, you must be really bent ideologically to come up with this".
We're in a massive ideological warfare and people who perpetuate hate like this needs to be condemned from all sides. It is making a rather normal forum like this into a vile, toxic and unwelcoming place.
I don't know what it is about certain topics here that brings the worst of people.
And you don't need to be an accomplished CEO in order to see that.
And the only thing that we've seen with Twitter is that it's at an all time high DAU at a fraction of the cost. So far so good.
All of the doomsayers are just making predictions that haven't happened.
And what we have seen is >75% of the staff leave including NOC, SREs etc.
That attrition rate is really unprecedented and completely unsustainable.
Update: Payroll and Tax teams have resigned. Cue the lawsuits.
Wow really? You would really prefer to entertain speculative realities instead of just give credit where it's due?
That's impressive.
Tom Mueller, arguably one of the key engineers behind the success of SpaceX and designer of the Merlin engines, was working at TRW in a role not related to rocket engines before he was at SpaceX. He was building the rockets out of his garage for fun, until Musk convinced him to join him in what was considered a crazy idea back then.
Lars Blackmore, the engineer who was key in developing the the control algorithms needed for landing Falcon vertically was working at NASA, where his work was in theory going to be applied on a future space mission of much smaller scope compared to Falcon. He was able to apply his research (http://larsblackmore.com/iee_tcst13.pdf) on a revolutionary reusable system that changed the launch industry only because a rich kid was willing to spend his money on testing what seemed like always failing rockets, instead of buying a new Yacht.
This is what Wikipedia says about Tom Mueller at TRW
>For 15 years, Mueller worked for TRW Inc., a conglomerate corporation involved in aerospace, automotive, credit reporting, and electronics. He managed the propulsion and combustion products department where he was responsible for liquid rocket engine development.[1] He worked as a lead engineer during the development of the TR-106, a 650,000 lbf (2,900 kN) thrust, throttled, cost-contained hydrogen engine designed in 2000.
Who wouldn't?
Most of us here hang out for listening to fellow hackers who have failed upwards.
https://jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-cali...
The main arguments being used to militate against urban rapid transit (i.e., metro systems, regional rail; not inter-city HSR) these days tend to be "automated taxis will make all of this imminently obsolete," although that may have died down in the past several years given that a decade has passed since it was first trotted out.
Tesla and Chrysler both!
No, stop it, that's ridiculous. Tesla is an immensely successful company. It just is.
Multiple things can be true: Musk can be a chaos bully driving Twitter into the ground and the CEO of the most successful heavy industry startup since the end of the second world war. I'm no doubt as horrified as you are at what is happening at the bird site, but I still know my car is great.
How?
Pull back and 'consolidate' as Britain keeps propping up Russia to attack the French from both sides. Meanwhile making use of the aristocrats and their still present economic and political power inside the continent.
That wasn't a viable strategy.
When the revolutionary politicians in France submitted to Napoleon, during his coup (1799) and his subsequent coronation as an emperor (1804), it was under the implicit premise that he would be the one who would be able to militarily keep Belgium, because the Revolution had seized Belgium but wasn't able to hold it.
So Napoleon's power was tied to keeping Belgium, although England would never allow any continental state to be that unbalancedly powerful.
Thus Napoleon has no choice but to subjugate England. To that end, as his fleet had been hit hard in Aboukir (1798) then smashed in Trafalgar (1805), he could not rely on an old-school invasion: thus he tried to subjugate all of Europe and cut commercial links with England to besiege the island at a continental scale. This was called the Blocus Continental, and it was bound to fail as long as Russia wouldn't participate. Thus the desperate attack in 1812.
---
[1] Les conséquences politiques de la paix_, (https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Cons%C3%A9quences_politi...) is a book in which Bainville predicts, in this exact order and in the year 1919, that Germany will annex the Sudeten, then Austria, then Poland, then attack western Europe, and that Italy will be their allies.
[2] In his biography of Napoleon.
As an aside, Napolean is not listed on the the Wikipedia page of Pyrrhic victories.
(example: polls have never been ported to tweetdeck)
I don't think tweetdeck has seen active maintenance in years.
Prior to the Tweetdeck URL, I used the OSX client which I also really liked, mostly for the ability to just copy and paste an image straight into a tweet. So functionality wise, I feel like my experience has actually declined since then.
TheVerge was already reporting on getting no PR access after the team was fired, like one or two weeks ago (damn that feels like a long time in this timeline...)
> GroupM didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department to reach out to with such requests. The internal message seen by Platformer says that Twitter is “working through” GroupM’s requirements with leadership.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459254/twitter-high-ri...
This is not an endorsement of Elon or anything he's doing with Twitter, but Twitter's core product is not complicated. For some comparisons:
Rumble has 35 employees
When WhatsApp was sold to FB in 2014 they had 55 employees.
WeChat has about 1400 employees.
My guess is you could successfully run Twitter with a few hundred employees.
WeChat has always been part of Tencent. It was piggybacking on the infra of what was already one of the biggest tech companies in the world. That's like comparing the number of Gmail employees to Twitter, sure it serves lots of users, but it doesn't have to worry about so much of what a standalone company has to deal with
WhatsApp/YouTube were in the same boat when purchased. Good at getting active users but monetizing takes a lot of employees and they hadn't tackled that yet when acquired
With direct response, even data-naive decision makers can figure the value of.
Because if you did you should know that updates are constantly happening...
The service is identical to 2009 or something as far as I'm concerned, and still appears broken as far as video embeds go to this day. It's one of the heaviest and slowest loading sites I can think of.
IMO there's no way those profits last more than a quarter until everything breaks. But yeah, maybe it is technically profitable tomorrow.
1) Elon will run this thing to ground and site will disappear one day, and entirely stop working for days. Elon will call up ex-employees with 2x overtime pay to help fix it. They might not. It will be a major news event since most politicians these days are on Twitter and Elon's reputation will be forever tarnished. Other CEOs and leaders will join the mocking gang.
2) Elon will show to the world that Twitter can just run fine with 75% less work force and all you need is highly motivated, talented (and compensated) employees. It will be a direct testament to the fact that these woke corporations in SF/SV are totally dysfunctional and they've had a good ride so far from the adtech boom.
We'll have to return back to your comment and see how it ages. Stakes are high.
2) Twitter goes down in flames: This is what happens when a megalomanian billionaire takes over a complicated distributed scalable system. These billionaires have no idea how complex systems work.
So, no cookie for Elon.
"Uh duh ok but I still breath, I don't have cancer until I see them"
It all looks pretty crazy. It seems like he's going to fail.
But he might succeed. You never know.
I'm no industry expert, but I wouldn't trust EM with my mom's bakery.
Elon just phoned me to ask if I could return to assist them in regaining access to HQ after they disabled all badges and locked themselves out.”
https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount/10936375119776...
Maybe he's trying to burn it to thr ground to hide something ... pardon conspiracy theory but it's just weird that someone goes and spends $44 billion and takes negative action after negative action against your new shiny toy.
Though maybe he knows what and who is needed only to run Twitter and all the others were just sitting at home or on the beach working an hour to two a day yet getting paid $150 to 500K a year for a full time job they far from worked.
Are these first signs of erosion?
Talking about this Tweet: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961
It's marked as "unavailable" when I view logged in to Twitter, but it's there in incognito mode.
Edit: Actually I just tried refreshing a couple times and it seems to be stochastic as to whether I can see the Tweet or not. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's "unavailable".
Yes, I observed this, too.
https://careers.twitter.com/en/roles.html#team=careers-twitt...
When you then have a leaner organization then you can go nuts.
Musk acted like an impatiant child, all the while being mostly right.
"just"
The presumption here is that 90% of the staff weren't doing anything useful, and that 95% of the infrastructure costs were wasted, and both of those would be extremely surprising?
Also very non-efficient-markets-hypothesis, that a public company would just sit there wasting almost all of its money.
I've heard so many bullshit work stories from FAANG friends that I'm not sure why you'd expect markets to be efficient regarding these hugely subsidized tech companies.
He's basically a twitch streamer in terms of behavior and pleasure response to attention, so expect him to act like one.
Everyone: "stupid idea"
1 week later...
Paul G: "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961
Elon: "Ok that was a stupid idea"
The emperors have no clothes
https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1593427480051822592?c...
"NEW: The designers leading Elon Musk’s Blue verified project are out, along with the lead web engineer. Many Twitter employees who maintained critical infrastructure have resigned. This is going to look like a very different company tomorrow."
The snowball has gained too much momentum now. Especially with Thanksgiving coming, I don't see how Twitter is realistically going to keep the lights on, quite literally.
- Umm they got to have a steering wheel, there's a minimum crew requirement.
- What's the minimum crew?
- Oh, one I suppose.
I can log in to the website and see no difference; nothing is obviously broken. Maybe he’s right and most people were doing nothing? I don’t know.
This is horrible and destructive. We should be against this on principle. For us to not be against this is making us the ultimate Beta Cucks who are willing to take it WM the throat as long as the pretend Alpha is showing it to us.
This is why the really wealthy own media corps.
https://twitter.com/Alwaleed_Talal/status/158597522656711065...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2022/11/12/qatar...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/twitter-saud...
He should stick to engineering and let sensible, mature, secure adults run companies.
None of us know whether the tweet is accurate, though.
What I've read some say is that it's a strategy to drastically reduce head count and keep only those people on who really want to be there and are not just there because it's a well-compensated position and they've figured out how to appear busy without doing much. Those people might leave when it becomes a chore to keep up appearances ("this feels like work, if I wanted to work I could've just done my job"), they're self-identifying and you're not paying severance when they quit. Of course, you're probably also bleeding out some talented and productive people. I don't know if "it's a mess, but it's the challenge of a lifetime" and the chance to work for Musk is enough to recruit good people, but it might be, not everyone has a family and needs to be home by 5pm and wants work-life-balance.
Trump was elected president riding on a wave of lots of people hating him and the media covering him 24/7 in a constant scream of GOTCHA and it worked out for him. Musk has claimed that Twitter usage is peeking among all of this. It kind of looks like a Wrestling show with lots of crazy things happening, only that not all participants are aware of what's happening or willing to participate. I have no idea whether it works out in his favor.
OK, so everybody takes Friday off and comes back Monday. Then what?
it seemed to me twitter was doing more or less ok, as a business - never heard any talk of bankruptcy until this robber baron came on the scene.
This huge reduction is obviously what he wants.
I’m sure he’d be happy if they hit 85%
* Twitter was known for liberal corporate politics, most employees liberal
* Purchased by center-right billionaire in the name of freedom of speech (modern liberals against freedom of speech)
* Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult
* Billionaire delivers ultimatum, many employees out
* Unclear if sufficient knowledge to maintain systems will survive
It seems like with the benefit of hindsight, the correct play for Elon would've been to avoid major moves at first, let far left employees quit, replace them with new hires excited by working at a Musk company. Then eventually, maybe, deliver an ultimatum once new Musk-enthusiast hires had absorbed enough knowledge to maintain systems.
I think the hard-charging approach Elon took was likely the correct one for Tesla/SpaceX, since employees at those companies mostly knew what they had signed up for, but Twitter was a much different management challenge since the existing workforce has/had an active dislike for Elon.
Where did you get that from? He immediately started firing people, so when should they have done that?
Granted, I don't know this person is actually an engineer as opposed to a troll. And she doesn't claim that she or other employees actively tried to create trouble.
So there was an aspect of me reading subtext into her tweet + Elon's ultimatum. Maybe incorrectly.
I think this comment from you is a bit too high-level to be useful though, maybe it'd be more helpful to identify the bullet point which is most inaccurate and explain why, with citations.
I mostly vote for Democrats btw.
Is there a specific "enriching my media diet" thing I'm missing here? Like I feel like that paragraph ^ is just common sense.
I didn't say you should enrich your media diet - I don't really care what you watch or read.
It's just exhausting, you could have brought up the same issue without having to resort to divisive discourse :)
And every place I've worked at there were people who hated the CEO, it's just natural, it's a position of power and people don't have to like the CEO to work for a company, even less if it's a large one.
I can't tell if you're satire or for real
It's a primary source at least :-)
I also didn't claim to be an unbiased source of information, and in fact actively welcomed corrections...
I guess Elon is a weird combination of being very good at the "visionary" aspects of leadership (inspiring people with "Occupy Mars") and being very bad at the "managing" aspects (creating psychological safety & high morale for employees).
This leadership style doesn't work unless your employees believe in your vision.
I think cutting workforce was the correct move for an acquirer, but he probably should've moved just a bit slower (e.g. using a more sophisticated metric for employee productivity than "# lines committed"). And of course try to make cuts in a way that doesn't harm the morale of those who aren't cut.
Musk clearly thinks of himself as creating a platform for free speech, but when it comes to coups there is really no such thing as a middle ground or neutrality.
In any case, I think you're correct that this is an important subthread.
Can you please give me specific examples of speech that modern liberals are against?
For example, Elon Musk has owned Twitter for enough time to have re-instated @realdonaldtrump, yet he has not. Why is that?
> The argument doesn't depend on these sort of details
I would argue that without details arguments are just hand wavy.
> ... freedom of speech, it makes many liberals squirm.
I think this meme can be quickly disproved by looking at political subreddits. All right wing subs of which I'm aware have rules which filter out speech which does not toe the party line.
I find the reality of the freedom with which I am allowed to discuss my ideas in righty subs to be extremely hypocritical when they are supposedly all about "free speech."
It's the same in Europe with the refugee policy, if you dare question that maybe it isn't best for Europe to blindly accept tens of millions of refugees from American wars whilst our economy is in complete freefall, you are branded as racist and cancelled.
He started firing people day 1 and bragging about it online. Of course his remaining employees are going to shit talk him.
The “ultimatum” sure as hell wasn’t in response to this either, I don’t know if you are implying that or not. He pulled this exact same stunt at Tesla just a few months ago. The dude is a raging asshole surrounded by yes men. If you value your health and your family you should not work for this man
Contrast w/ Twitter ultimatum: https://twitter.com/donie/status/1592859900941852674
I think the Twitter ultimatum is the kind of thing you send if you suspect most employees don't support your leadership / are not pulling their weight. Similar to the Zappos philosophy of offering a generous severance to everyone who quits, in order to have an office full of enthusiastic employees.
> “Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week,”
Tesla is RTO. Quit defending this billionaires psychopathic behavior. This is not a healthy way to run a company
I don't think requiring 40 hours in office makes you "psychopathic". People can quit if they don't like it shrug
I hope you don’t manage a team or have any responsibility for the well-being of others. I’m quite shocked at how little sympathy you have for strangers
However, 7500 people is way too much staff in my opinion. As I mentioned, I worked at one of the world's biggest websites and it had about 1% of that staff.
Realistically, if an unprofitable company is getting acquired, the acquirer is most likely going to cut a lot of positions. One way to do this is to be really demanding and let people self-select out of the company. 3 months severance is a decent period of time to find a new job.
Remember many/most of these people are in the global upper class https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/21/are-you-in-... In the grand scheme of things, they aren't suffering that much
You can say "with the benefit of hindsight" but I would put to you: with the benefit of foresight, lots of people told him exactly what would happen. The problem isn't the management structure, it's that Musk is unfamiliar with pretty basic facts about twitter, such as its engineering architecture, its business model, and its position in the market.
I agree that Musk hasn't been behaving in a way that's advertiser-friendly.
Jack Dorsey is super familiar with Twitter and said Elon was the best solution for it if it was gonna stay a company: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/25/jack-dorsey-says-elon-musk....
I'm sure we can find someone, somewhere who correctly predicted in advance how things could go down, but I'm skeptical that it was a widespread prediction. Certainly feel free to prove me wrong.
But more importantly there's a big difference between how Facebook and Twitter work - Facebook is default closed, people can't interact with you unless you're putting yourself out there - either by friending people or joining a group, so there's a natural barrier against the spread of harassment, brigading and the toxic behaviour becoming public. There is a whole load of toxic neo-nazi stuff on Facebook, but it's out of view, and because ads are highly targetted there's no concern about brand safety. On Twitter it's default open, so if people are going around loudly spreading far right homophobic conspiracy theories about a violent attack on an elected official everyone is going to know about it - that's why Twitter has to be so careful.
There were a lot of people who have been in social media who explained in a lot of detail about how these things work when Elon first got involved. For example, Yishan Wong ran reddit back in 2012, at the time he had an extremely similar free speech maximalist view similar to Musk's current view. He did a very clear explanation of the dynamics of why that approach simply doesn't work - https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440 .
Interesting point!
I'm not totally convinced though, I'd expect there are a lot of neo-nazis on Facebook who make their posts publicly viewable. "Hey look guys, there's this terrible neo-nazi post!" -> some FB users see an ad for their fav brand above the post.
But, they do contain nazi in their own private bubbles, so the risk of your ad being next to that content is significantly smaller.
2.) Musk intentions were not free speech by any meaningful sense. He does not have track record of valuing it. He values only speech of those he agrees it and is super eager to punish whoever disagree with him. The first departments that had to go were the ones where actual free speech issues are dealt with.
Like, human rights team. Free speech is more then just saying n-word or ability to harass your opponents. It is also not giving your details to law enforcement and policies related to nonwestern countries.
3.) Twitter employees making it difficult for him is just not true. The worst that happened was few people disagreeing with him about technical matters. The free speech advocate was unable to process even technical disagreement.
4.) The idea that it ia far left employees leaving or that there was even that many of them is bonkers. Conservative people think about their employment conditions too. They dont necessary like being humiliated, they are not all doormats and natural born yes men.
A Much simpler explanation
* Musk didn't really want to buy Twitter. He screwed up and got locked into a contract he couldn't figure out a way out of.
* Having figured that he vastly overpaid, he panicked and tried to cut down the fat. Problem is that he hasn't spent enough time there to figure out where's the fat.
* Musk fundamentally doesn't understand what he has bought. He doesn't understand that Twitter's business relies on pleasing advertisers, who don't give a crap about free speech ideals and are very risk averse.
* Musk doesn't understand that what he bought is far more about people skills than anything else. Managing an online community is an exercise in cat herding. At Twitter's scale you also have to content with thorny legal issues. None of that is fun. Many forces push things into a familiar direction, and "free speech" is a very tough direction to pick.
* Musk doesn't understand even the basics of the platform he bought, like why the blue checkmarks provided any value. He proceeded to immediately throw a huge wrench into that system, to nearly no economic benefit.
* Musk is trying to have his cake and eat it too. On one hand he wants unrestricted free speech, on the other hand he wants to make money from advertisers that don't care for free speech. You can pick one or the other.
* Musk seems not to understand that Twitter isn't SpaceX. There's few places where you can work on a rocket, but a lot of places where you can maintain a backend. You can sell the dream of colonizing Mars to rocket engineers, but Twitter employees can go most anywhere else and do mostly the same thing.
* Musk seems not to understand that since his employees have plentiful options, he can't strong arm them. They can leave. They're generally well paid, and his takeover provides plentiful options for them to organize, help each other and start lawsuits if he breaks any laws.
Musk does not care about free speech either.
Elon got them to print out their code and pissed off the advertisers that where paying them. I don't think it was the employees that made life difficult.
Musk paid 44B for Twitter.
This was with some loans and some equity sold.
Generously, Twitter was worth half what he paid, 22B at the time he took over, given the decline in the market from when the Twitter tender offer was made.
$13B in loans $7.1B from equity investors (did they have a liquidation preference?)
How much has he degraded the value by scaring away all the advertisers?
You'd have to find some way of restructuring the company to pay the creditors. In the most simplified approach, the most likely the only way of doing that is to sell the company. If the company sold for more than 13Bn (perfectly possible, although not hugely likely given the damage he's done) then anything above that would go to Elon and his equity investors, but we'd be talking about them walking away with close to nothing. But it's also perfectly possible that Elon just steps in and buys the 13Bn debt and continues to run the company.
I fail to see how a networked system with nobody left tending it is going to last.
If you mean something else, how would it differ?
David Heinemeier Hansson
November 5, 2022
Apple fired 4,100 when Steve Jobs returned in 1997
https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-fired-4-100-when-steve-jobs-returned-in-1997-57ed6bc6And, importantly, while Jobs had strong opinions, he was often willing to let them be challenged, and to be convinced to change his mind.
You can see some similarity to Boeing after having MD's management taking over, accounting-wise it's working, engineering-wise it's fallen deep into a pit of issues.
Jørgen Vig Knudstorp was tapped to take control of LEGO when its business was on the verge of failing (in such a way that the founding family themselves did not know they were so close to the edge).
Entire departments and ventures were cut.
Guy Roz does a very interesting interview on Wisdom from the Top about it.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/04/1043122974/lego-jorgen-vig-kn...
It doesn't even look like there will be any advertisers left by the time the dust settles.
It was up to Musk to assure Twitter's biggest revenue sources that he would lead with a steady hand. He hasn't done anything except publicly revel in firing people, then ignore the issue of trolls using his $8/mo. feature to impersonate corporate brands.
Digital ad campaigns have budgets, and they can be shifted around platforms without much hassle. The money will be shifted to platforms that actually listen to what advertisers are asking for, which is basic brand safety.
Twitter had a permanent WFH policy, and staff arranged their lives based on this.
Musk gives 24hr notice to staff (those lucky 30-40% not already sacked) to return to the office for a hardcore 7 day week, or be resigned.
Musk panicked about sabotage and closed the offices.
But would-be-saboteurs still have systems access, as the people would revoke access have, themselves, been resigned.
Twitter and its ilk don't have their hardest challenges in the technical space; they have their hardest challenges in the same space as the SCA. "You rule because they believe."
> What do people mean when they say Twitter is gonna shut down? Doesn't it kinda run itself? I feel like engineers are for changes not to just keep it running? I also don't know anything. Hey @elonmusk wanna do a Twitter space with me? Im confused. - Dave Portnoy @stoolpresidente
> The best people are staying, so I'm not super worried - Elon Musk @elonmusk
Elon Musk is approaching this in a horrible way though. By using hardcore as a default setting, and quiet firing anyone who doesn't sign on to it, he's signaling hard core must be forced thing. "hardcore" itself has negative connotations.
Think of how different the news cycle would be right now if he had said the following:
* "Twitter's engineers have done an amazing job, and everyone is getting a 2% out of cycle bonus in stock"
* "Those who want to do an even more amazing job and enter beast mode with me (crucial that he work the same hours), will get a 10% bonus in stock each year they do, with the first year's 10% after the first month of beast mode. For me beast mode means 60-70 hour weeks, one or more pushed commits per day, and being on-site at least two days out of five."
* "Those who don't enter beast mode are still Twitter engineers, among the best in the industry, and will not be penalized in any way. We recognize that different people have different needs when it comes to work-life balance, and we value diversity at Twitter."
* "We do need to improve our platform in some ways though. To this end I am putting a 3 month freeze on hiring, firing, and new features. Our focus during this time will be improving performance, improving security, and fixing bugs."
It may be bumpy in the short term, but then all of the supremely confident naysayers are going to look ridiculous and spiteful if it turns out that Twitter can operate with 80-90% fewer employees.
Institutional knowledge is necessary to sufficiently onboard any new hire, without that you have headless chickens running around trying to figure out what exactly are they working with. How do you solve Chesterton's Fence when there's no one around to tell you why the Fence is there?
Any engineers capable enough to rescue this trainwreck will likely be able to secure better compensation elsewhere without having to endure Musk's new indefinite "hardcore" death march.
Twitter is going to operate on a skeleton staff of H1B's dependent on their employment for their visas (who are probably already floating their resumes) and whatever underqualified graduates they can hire.
The fact that a site that big hasn't broken yet shows how good they actually were and in the end he did fire good engineers while not even tackling Twitter main problems which none were technical. Bots are still rampant, moderation is gone, monetization is non existant and advertisers were scared away.
Unless things change what you're seeing is not a success, it's a zombie.
There are incredible aspirational aspects to those businesses, and they have massive support from Big Government, and crucially, people mostly knew what they were getting into aka they went to work for him.
It's the opposite at Twitter.
This is looking more messed up every day, and Elon is messing with other people's money and they won't stand for this for very long.
When he says 'we could be out of business next year' as a bit of a fear/motivation tactic, that's going to make his backers uncomfortable.
If this keeps up Elon will be replaced and it's hard to fathom by whom.
I suggest he will use the excuse of 'need to work on Tesla/Space X', but the terms of his continued oversight of Twitter will be interesting.
Much like the otherwise 'normal' people who worked at the White House during the Trump admin, it's alluring for people to be that close to power, even at the cost of having the wrath of toxicity hanging over them. Any reasonable person taking over Twitter will want to have a pretty big firewall between them and Musk.
I suggest it will be better for everyone: Musk can get a few points in for reform which is his prerogative and there's nothing wrong with that, and Twitter will have a chance at operational performance without the constant contradictions between Musk's populism and the basic operating civil culture at Twitter.
There are so many uphill battles to fight before Musk can even try to get some of the reforms that he wants (which are a bit glib because most things at Twitter exist for a reason), and he's going to spend too much time just getting back on the 'right foot' ... I suggest that it's probably a good idea for him to just step down.
1. Twitter was attempting through out its history to tell this narrative and do this: Twitter's core was citizen journalists and verified journalists and being responsible enough to guide the conversation in what was allowed and not allowed as far as hate speech and misinformation.
Elon bought it and had a new vision that the Twitter product should be a free speech conversation and that advertisers should be ditched as product consumers of Twitter.
The problem for Elon is that he did not do enough of story telling about the new product vision and INVITING people on the journey
Its not a type of journey you can crack a whip to get people to sign up for that journey. And certainly his product adviser, Jason Calacanis does in fact know this from his miss-steps with Mahalo.
ps. Pls, somebody, tell Elon to switch to 6/7, personally too...
If you look at Twitter, under Jack Dorsey, as what it provided, I can see the point. If you view Twitter as a business, it should have been allowed to fail years ago. Musk does seem to take the speed run approach to trimming down Twitter, with the risk of killing it altogether. Working for Twitter can't be a pleasant experience right now, but the employees where on borrowed time already.
I might be completely wrong, but my feeling is that in 5 years we'll look back and see Twitter as a novelty of the 2010s. See humor in an old ad with a Twitter handle on it, or watch a clip from a news show where they "jump to the Twitter comment" and remember that was a thing.
There is no good way out of this for Twitter. Regardless of what he actually paid, Musk vastly overpay for for the company. They've been burning a $1B a year for a decade, and now Musk is stuck with the bills for next year. It's not that I think he's doing a good job, but he has to do something. Otherwise he'll be burning hundreds of millions of dollars every year, keeping Twitter running, and that's after having wasted billions upfront.
Well if you've read Jack's interaction with Elon about Twitter (part of the lawsuit), it's because the board was very risk adverse and against big changes. Jack actually supports what Elon is doing now, because it's not something he could do while he was in charge.
Hard to say if I like this idea or not...
I think there's probably a certain class of articles, critical of paulg and hn and the hn community's "accent" that get flagged and downvoted here, by people and moderators. And, a certain class of articles that always get uncritically upvoted.
(well I guess everyone's is)
Last time I looked, Let's Encrypt had one big beefy Postgres database to issue pretty much every single TLS certificate on the Internet. Computers are fast.
Moderation as good as HN would require at least 3 costly staffers, fully loaded cost something like $30K-$250K each, fully loaded depending on where they live.
If doing HN were easy there would be a dozen awesome competitors.
Moderation is pretty much JUST dang.
HN DOES have competitors, lobste.rs is pretty much directly competing, and more importantly, this very concept of "simple board to post links and comment" was borrowed to build freaking REDDIT
I've written a bunch about this in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) read those explanations and end up still having a question which I haven't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.
Your comment may be suffering from the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... We're all more likely to notice shit we dislike.
I mean, subjectively most of those accounts deserve to be dead, but don’t pretend this is something it isn’t.
One interesting thing I heard recently was this idea that even in communities of the most rusted on free speech absolutists, there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why?
It's totally possible to believe that unrestricted free speech is the best policy and to also not implement that policy.
Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them. Generally free speech maximalism is about allowing all controversial speech for various reasons which tend to include the importance of dissenting voices.
Doing it right requires the intellectual honesty to draw a line between these two comments: "lol hitler did nothing wrong gas the **s! 1488 woo!" and "Hitler did nothing but implement some social control policies which would be widely accepted in today's society, if presented differently."
I obviously don't agree with either sentence. But the second one should be permitted and vouched against downvotes while the first can be deleted without a second thought. Honesty required.
I'm pretty sure, looking at twitch chat, that this isn't universally true.
Then the next question is, if this supposed truism isn't universally true, what other moderation decisions and flagging, aren't?
Free Speech absolutist don't put any concern the listener may have on the content, but the fact that the speaker is being prevented from distributing their message. Not to mention, one of the points cited by free speech absolutists is "who determines facts/truth/value" and who determines the entity who gets to do that. That means you can't make a judgement value about the spam being spam and have to treat it as something SOMEONE somewhere might desire.
It's on the front page now, after 100 upvotes.
It doesn't hurt that this episode has brought some friends around to agreeing with my dismal view of Elon :)
I’ve personally been visiting new and flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts I see (i started doing this after getting sick of all the Twitter/mastodon posts hitting the front page).
I don’t want the front page to be all Twitter all the time, and most of the posts boil down to speculation and gossip and the ones that don’t, usually don’t offer anything meaningfully new and interesting.
I suspect there are plenty of others like me.
Likewise it doesn’t need continued speculation about what Elon really meant when he posted ‘blah blah blah’.
Substantive things will get through (this one did).
Yay Elon/Boo Elon drama won’t.
If you really need it, feel free to browse new yourself and vouch.
Nope, it doesn't.
> Substantive things will get through (this one did).
Are you only flagging the non-substantive things? Because that's not what you imply above ("flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts").
If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter.
And it’s not like I have an army of bot accounts continually refreshing and flagging.
I’m just using my one vote to signify I’m not interested in hearing about Twitter drama.
>If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter.
Is just flat out wrong.
It still achieves my objective of less Twitter drama on the front page.
Are the goings on at Twitter relevant to "the industry"? Sure. But, the inability to have serious discussion about it speaks poorly of the those that populate that industry.
Somewhere between the 10,000th iteration of "see how billionaires are evil?", "see how Musk is a genius?", "see how Musk behaves badly?", and "Look at what's Musk accomplished?" nothing new is said. Anything novel or serious that does manage to pop-up gets drowned out in the sea of noise.
I join you in downvoting all of these. There are good discussions on HN, but these discussions are them.
The system tends not to be able to do this without human intervention—either the flags win (in which case the story gets smothered) or the upvotes win (in which case HN becomes Twittermusk News with a side dish of SBFTX). Human intervention is needed to keep the teeter-totter from teetering one way or tottering the other*.
We're super open to feedback. If you (or anyone) want to influence the balance, you should make your case to hn@ycombinator.com. That's the only reliable message queue.
More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667761
(* Unfortunately. It would be so much nicer to just write code to deal with this.)
I think for the most part it's been working well.
i hope the reason is because of the risk of flamewars, rather than YC leadership's desire to protect the reputation of someone who is hagified in SV circles and currently crashing and burning very publicly.
It's been massively disappointing to watch since Musk's behaviour has been abhorrent and has resulted in a lot of unnecessary hurt and despair for innocent employees. The same employees who may end up running future startups.
Not exactly the results I'd expect from someone who really knows how to run a company.
If one of Musk's middle managers had messed up this badly, Musk would have fired them already. But Elon deserves the continued benefit of the doubt for some reason.
So... not the general operability of the service?
And second of all, he thinks Twitter can’t lead to deaths? Let’s say the Iranian government was given unfettered access to DMs and metadata for all Iranian citizens with an account. Not hard to imagine scenarios that end in death.
I'm not even sure what paulg's point is. Are people actually claiming they'd do a better job than Musk, or are they simply commenting on the missteps and bizarre behavior. You don't need to have run a successful tech company to know that spending your time as a CEO antagonizing your employees on social media, and then threatening your remaining employees with an ultimatum is not a good idea.
Then the next tweet says
> In both those companies, people die if the software doesn't work right. Do you really think he's not up to managing a social network?
Thing is, I agree that Twitter needed to be shaken up. But, Musk has made the wrong choices every step of the way. It's like he's giving a masterclass on how to be a terrible leader. It's amazing the miscalculations Musk has made. First, his longest tenure, most experience employees likely just got a huge payday on their stock/options - so of course they will peace out. Second, his antics are driving up the price of hiring new employees. Third, Musk still had a lot of goodwill before taking ownership that he's now squandered. I could go on...
The only thing I can think is he looked hard at the financials and the debt load he saddled the company with and panicked.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I agree that this is a major ongoing topic (MOT) and needs to be discussed. At the same time, so many of the submissions are repeats of things already posted. This is a classic situation that comes up a few times a year (the FTX saga is another going on right now).
Obviously some of the gazillion Twittermusk stories contain SNI [1], and some (most) are just follow-ups [2] or repetitive angerwars, and we have to make a distinction between the two or HN's frontpage will consist of nothing but.
With user flags and the flamewar detector also downranking stories, it's possible for this strategy to get overapplied, in which case a MOT ends up getting insufficient oxygen. That's not good for HN either! It isn't because of sinister plutocracy or anything like that—it's a failure mode of the strategy I just described. User pushback is helpful!
More on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667968
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
p.s. HN has worked this way for a long time - coming up on a decade now: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Some accounts are allowed to submit links frequently, even a few minutes between submissions, while other accounts are being blocked from submitting and can only do so once every few or 24 hours. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." Is this some type of new punitive action?
It also looks very unfair, when applied to accounts that are clearly not spammers (and maybe submit a few times in a day or week) or appears as a punitive action because of some difference of opinion with a mod.
We're happy to remove the rate limit when we believe that an account is going to use HN as intended in the future. However, you just broke the site guidelines badly a few minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33686024. Posting like that will get you banned here! — regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are — so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make sure not to post like that in the future.
Once you've built up a track record of not breaking the site guidelines, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take a look and hopefully remove the rate limit.
Probably won't be, but I can dream.
(Its not like it would affect how much data the govt gets from the platform anyhow)
$4.8B annual revenue, even if every advertiser spent $1M annually, that's 4,800 advertisers who all require inside reps. If each rep can handle 100 clients (unlikely; that's less than 1 hour / month attention), they would need 480 inside reps alone just to keep ad agencies happy.
They ran this website 12 years ago with the same number of users and like 200 people.
12 years ago we didn't have stuff like GDPR or CCPA or any number of data compliance laws that require a full team around to prevent getting fined into oblivion.
And no it doesn’t require a full team, lol. Literally you just need to delete the user data. A single button makes you compliant.
I don't think you ever worked with advertiser directly at that scale, I worked in a company that did on a smaller scale and it was hell on earth, no way to automate that, we had 10 people just for them and they were overworked
Fermi estimates are crude, but the point is there are many non-engineering functions that are absolutely critical. Many HN folks seem to think like Elon, that these roles are unnecessary. I disagree.
[0] https://www.marketingdive.com/news/twitter-increases-number-...
the press and many people in those comments are making a mistake thinking he is a fool and behaved in a stupid way. that is not donald trump. he doesn’t care about people that don’t buy into its vision and he doesnt care if twitter sinks to lower lows in the following years.
for musk, the last years of twitter are a disgusting and corrupt way to deal with democracy and the way business was handled at twitter was totally corrupt. Wether you agree with the democrat agenda or no is a thing. that you want to push your cult into the minds of everyone on twitter while censoring alternative ideas is the problem and does not align with the vision of what a medium of communication should be in a free world. YOU ARE NOT in the side of good because you repeat the woke things that pelosi and its cult are repeating. and your oponents are not NAZIS. mankind is much bigger than your small conflicts and politics and the vision musk has for twitter is bigger than the beliefs of a few corrupt politicians and your voice should not be more important than the one of another human being.
In five years I am pretty sure many of the people that are commenting here will put a lot of money into twitter stock when musk will make it public agaibn.
Elon is about the most capable entrepreneur of the 21st century. He could start from scratch and have something more awesome and profitable than Twitter in a few years. He had an extreme culture problem though it seems. The company had been taken over by ideologues and was losing 4 million a day.
He had to get rid of everyone who wasn't aligned with his new vision. He had to depoliticize the company which meant firing most of the staff. He'll probably have to move it to Texas or make it fully remote if he wants to finish depoliticizing it.
What does depoliticizing even mean? It making the company about maximizing profit, not transforming society based on the political value of its actions.
And I can bet $10 he’ll blame it on sabotage.
> maybe the company culture really is broken.
Well it certainly is now!
I could maybe see an internal group trying to seize it. It is a very significant connector of people, I can imagine how you could believe in it passionately as a product/movement/force in the world. I don't, but it's not a big stretch. And if you did, I think also that from that perspective musk clearly does not care about it in that capacity, and has done great damage to its power and potential. The pieces are definitely there so that a "true believer" could justify a takeover.
Everyone who didn’t click the button has probably already moved on with life, unlike Musk, who I bet tries to back out of the promise of three months of severance.
Mastodon and Activitypub decentralize which means it is a lot harder to proverbialy whore yourself to the attention of the masses and and those attention whores (politicians, journalists,etc... not just celebrities and influencers) can't have the same reach with them or with truth social and other copycats of twitter.
Mastodon should have let server operators flag other servers but not refuse federation with them, letting users decide if they want to avoid content from trash servers but of course user moderarion by server operators is fine. Also, like many ideology-first solutions, it catered to small disconnected communities. It should have created corporation separate from the main project that hosts a public mastodon server that directly competes with other social media (and ffs, it's 2022, no more email for anything!).
On that note, Matrix can replace twitter and a lot more if they weren't chasing seemingly random features. Not just twitter but email also can be replaced by matrix, the api amd federates architecture allows for it.
If I was Kelon (Karen elon), I would compete with tiktok, timing is great with all the talks of banning it. They mercilessly murdered Vine back in the day as they did Periscope. Those are the types of features where you can charge content creators for content types and for advertising in people's timelines. They made those separate products instead of part of the regular twitter experience. Also, be less crass about it and charge for award tokens like reddit instead of upfront cash and high priced awards make it to the top of the reply chain.
I don't blog so let me know what you all think lol.
What random features? https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special... is what we’re working on currently. Pretty sure the Matrix community would accuse us of losing focus if we were investing tine in cloning twitter or email over Matrix at this stage…