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Comment by tazu | Hacker News Reader

Letting 80% go seems to have worked for X.

If by worked you mean "the site isn't dead", yes. If you mean more "profitable", I don't think that's true, is it?

Setting aside the political reasons for less advertising revenue, it's still running and there are 200M DAU. Many ex-employees swore the servers would catch fire by now.

> Many ex-employees swore the servers would catch fire by now.

They've 'caught on fire' many times, such as the time login/2fa broke, or the weeks/months where you were rate-limited to only a few hundred interactions per day.

Judging by how unreliable it has been ever since, there's likely constant firefighting going on.

Can't confirm. It works for me just as well as it did in 2022.

Not my experience at all. It is faster and has slightly more feature since.

It really doesn’t work well. But it has the advantage in that, if some messages just don’t appear… well, you don’t really notice.

That has nothing to do with letting go staff and everything to do with the owner.

Letting go staff has everything with the owner though.

Wrong. A substantial number of advertisers dropped X.com because it isn't brand safe (for example their ads are located next to racist or Nazi or pornographic content). A substantial number of the staff let go were involved in keeping the site brand safe.

Google also should not show x.com on search engine as its another social media platform, it has nothing to do for ranking

Let go of 80% of workers and 84% of revenue. Brilliant.

Aren't the two disconnected? The revenue lost is a result of advertisers not wanting to be connected to Musk's politics. Downsizing isn't what caused that.

You can't tell easily without informations from inside.

I think it is fairly easy to tell when advertisers publicly pulled out and gave a very explicit explanation.

Musk got rid of the people who owned the relationships with the brands and agencies that drove the ad revenue. Burning those relationships plus getting rid of content moderators made sure advertisers were very skeptical of being on the platform. Then there's the GARM lawsuit causing that tiny org to shut down, suing another non-profit for point out brand safety issues, etc.

It was Musk's actions.

I thought the advertisers pulling out was more a direct result of the tweets he posted or liked. Perhaps those relationships were strained already due to what you've pointed out, but I don't know that those employees could have made a difference in relation to those posts.

Congrats. You completely fabricated a history to fit your world view.

Firing the teams that manage moderation and letting Coca-Cola and Nike paid for ads show along side Nazi and porn content, basically allowing the ad side of the platform to go to shit, is actually much of the reason for the advertiser exodus.

I'm starting to see ads during Great Replacement and Kill The Brown People threads on Twitter. It's not pushing me towards buying a product or clicking an ad.

My stance on this rather is: the advertiser should like it if viewers consider the product advertised to be better than the tweets around it. :-D

(I hope I didn't give Elon Musk a bad idea concerning how to pitch his agenda to advertisers ;-) ).

Twitter is just a relatively simple website, though. They aren’t doing anything particularly complex or innovative and aren’t releasing any new products.

It could survive for years in maintenance mode as long as people continue using it.

Letting go of 80%of intel’s employees and the company is dead in weeks other than a skeleton crew of lawyers, bean counters, and top level execs stuffing their golden parachutes with maximum parachute.

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