twitter fired a lot more % and it's still working
Now one could reasonably argue that it wasn’t due to the firing. However, the burden of proof lies with the people claiming that the concurrent loss of revenue and profit had nothing to do with the firings.
And Twitter being a private company it’s unlikely anyone can ever get the data to support that claim. Further, Twitter’s unique nature as a vanity project for the owner makes even public statements bh thst owner highly suspect, since they have a vested interest in making this look like the right decision and disclosure laws don’t apply to private companies so he can basically lie and still be ok.
> And Twitter being a private company it’s unlikely anyone can ever get the data support that claim
So, only the data supporting your point of view is reliable?
No, if you want to establish correlation or causation, you have to prove it. Don't have access to the data to prove something? Sucks, but then you can't draw that conclusion, at least not definitively.
I can believe, though, that you're at least somewhat correct that the mass firings were responsible for Twitter's decline. But it's plausible that other things are also to blame, and possibly even primarily to blame: questionable product decisions made post-acquisition (Twitter Blue, lax moderation, requiring logins to view, ...), the volatility and offensiveness of the new owner causing advertisers to leave, etc.
> We have incurred significant operating losses in the past, and we may not be able to maintain profitability. Since our inception, we have incurred significant operating losses, and, as of December 31, 2018, we had an accumulated deficit of $1.45 billion. Our revenue has grown from $664.9 million in 2013 to $3.04 billion in 2018. While we were profitable on a GAAP basis in 2018, we believe that our future revenue growth and our ability to maintain profitability will depend on, among other factors, our ability to attract new users, increase user engagement and ad engagement, increase our brand awareness, compete effectively, maximize our sales efforts, demonstrate a positive return on investment for advertisers, and successfully develop new products and services. *Accordingly, you should not rely on the revenue growth of any prior quarterly or annual period as an indication of our future performance.*
Imagine if a company told its investors: “Our growth is guaranteed! Nothing can affect our revenue and margins.” The only companies that give that kind of promises are ponzis (and to-the-moon cryptocurrency projects, which is not categorically too different).
Care to share which measures are those you speak of?
From what I saw, Twitter's revenue went down only due to the post pandemic economic slump following the pandemic bubble, and due to advertisers leaving en-masse because Musk won't purge the platform of hate speech and other content that's non advertiser friendly, not due to the workers who got fired leaving.
However, the site is going through a serious cultural (maybe you could say spiritual) death, and that might have something to do with the lost institutional knowledge of what made Twitter tick at a level deeper than just the code.
I was never a big fan of it, and never used it much, so I can't judge any loss of quality over the past 2 years. And since they now require a login most of the time, and I don't feel like logging in, I don't bother clicking through links to Twitter that people post.
Quality content has disappeared on Twitter and there is a proliferation of Only Fans tweets. However if you love Musk and right wing conspiracies it is still a fine platform to use.
People are addicted to twitter because of FOMO, because god forbid they learn about breaking news an hour later than anyone else.
The only thing that changes is i used to click on those that looked interesting and now i don't because i know i won't see the thread without a login.
That said, Twitter is no longer "open" like it used to be - I bet it just won't handle the public traffic anymore. That is directly tied to cratering revenue but it's hard to untangle from the owner's self-destructive drug-induced behavior.
It's a testament to the quality of the codebase in general. Good code is hard to kill, but it WILL be eroded to the point where it can no longer grow and be better.
Twitter as it runs now is far more locked down. And that happened after it experienced significant, noticeable outages.
Performance is not binary… Twitter is still “up” as a service but with a much smaller public footprint and handling much smaller amounts of traffic.
Also, Twitter had two notable Spaces problems, when launching the DeSantis campaign (into the ground) and the second fiasco, which I actually forget what it was, just recently. The system just cannot handle truly planet-scale traffic like before.
create table users (id integer autoincrement primary key, username varchar(32), password_hash varbinary(32)); create table questions (id integer autoincrement primary key, user integer references users(id), title varchar(256), body bigtext); create table answers (id integer autoincrement primary key, question integer references questions(id), user integer references users(id), body bigtext);
but actually that's just a tiny fraction of actually making Stack Overflow.
Sure, the advertisers say its because of the platform being a cesspool. But I mean anything on Twitter is on FaceBook or YouTube; you might have to look faster or harder. However, that stuff isn't where FaceBook / YouTube sends your ads. The targeting on Twitter is so bad compared to alternatives that advertisers just don't care to use it. This is an engineering problem caused by having nobody to fix it.
Not doomed, but lots of failures did follow. Timeline not loading or repeating forever, SMS auth issue, API performance, going down in Australia, etc. - they experienced quite a few problems early post-change, but managed to recover.
Sure, it has been plagued by the occasional random errors and downtime ever since Musk came in, but I don't expect most companies to remain operational on a technical level when 80% leaves.
An important lesson for tech companies: hire strategic H1B employees throughout your company so when times are real tough, you're sure you can maintain operations with desperate staff that can't afford to leave.
In other words: slavery has only upsides for slaveowners.
Comparatively, it's hard to find information about Twitter now. Most news articles mocks the revenue, but has no information about profit. However, given that Elon said Twitter "will be" profitable in 2024, I think it's safe to assume it isn't profitable yet?
This surprises me, I thought it became profitable from cutting expenses, but the truth is complicated. It used to be both profitable and not profitable at the same time (see the first link), but now it's mostly not profitable.
What also doesn't help Twitter's case is that employees are still fighting to get paid their severance fees. That's a couple hundred million dollars that Elon probably assumes he doesn't need to pay. Other fees on the order of tens of millions of dollars also include the rent that Elon decided he doesn't need to pay, as well as a bunch of other bunch of unpaid stuff.
My guess is that Twitter is banking on not having to pay all of its debts at once, slowly building up a profit and regaining its value so it can have the cashflow to pay back its arrears later, but that's a risky move that may lead to a debt spiral or bankruptcy.
Working in the sense of being a successful purchase that's making a good return on Elon's investment by growing and profiting, not so much apparently.
I was pissed at Musk and his nonsense anyway - but the amount of random spam on there just made it annoying to use.
I mean, no I don't want a discount on a boob job ... but thanks.
- Scrolling after a while, the sound of a video doesn't stop anymore => force close
- A lot of violence, literally. I keep on blocking them ( recently logged in with another account due to a new phone and I had to do it again). It's nuts how much violence it promotes recently.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people who got fired did censorship and I miss it.
It's is currently on a path of slow but steady decline. It is no longer useful for breaking news and it is full with Only Fans tweets.
However, if you want to read about Elon Musk or are into right wing conspiracy theories, it is still perfect.
If I want to enjoy Only Fans, I know where to find it.