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Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

>why aren't we seeing the jobs come back?

It was only just reinstated, so it's probably too early to see the effects.

I also expect that despite the restoration of Section 174, companies realized that they not only overhired during ZIRP, but also that they don't actually need that headcount, given the outcome of Musk's Twitter layoffs. There were so many prognostications that Twitter would imminently implode after downsizing from ~8k to ~1.5k employees, and when these claims never came to pass, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the industry [0].

[0] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musk-fired-80-p...

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I also think it’s fashionable to have a smaller headcount these days. Historically, the dynamics of businesses encouraged rising headcounts, as ICs weren’t as valued as managers (salary caps basically, as impact for ICs is hard to measure unless you are in sales), and managers generally view headcount as a metric to career and salary growth.

So there was just this general pressure from the middle up to grow instead of paying more to existing staff or finding some other way to spend the money. After all, investors generally want you to spend the money you have access to, otherwise they’ll put it to use elsewhere.

It seems that there is external pressure right now from investors, and on to executives, to push headcounts down as there is a general feeling that good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient, and higher headcounts just burn money and bog things down. Whether or not that’s true is another question, but the perception exists.

I’m not sure if this is a fundamental change in the dynamic, or just a temporary push against it that will eventually lose steam.

> good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient

I feel like this should be a “both and” situation. AI is not a panacea. If your company has 10 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, and my company has 100 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, we are going to move considerably faster.

Until someone gets an exclusive contract with AGI, it doesn’t change things.

This isn't how it practically works though. You hit a saturation point where there's no more work to be done. There's only so much software to write, only so many ad campaigns to push, sometimes you just need to maintain, stabilize, and not iterate. If you have a problem that requires 10 engineers, 100 isn't going to speed it up. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month and all that.

I don't think many people really doubted that Twitter could keep itself up and running.

But that "everything app"? It hasn't happened. The money transfer app ("Twitter Payment Platform")? Still MIA.

>I don't think many people really doubted that Twitter could keep itself up and running.

Oh, they sure did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964

Even in that thread, a lot of people were saying "it's only been three months, give it a bit more time."

And they were right, I think. Twitter's UI has degraded. I can't see this tweet linked from the thread: https://x.com/Grady_Booch/status/1620720537805922306 - it gives me an error. It might have been deleted, but Twitter just says "something went wrong". And I don't think it's even possible to view threads anymore without logging in?

But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years. And I bet that it won't release anything new for a while, and anything they _do_ try to release will be laughably broken.

Existing features are also suffering and going unfixed. If you browse any tweet with more than a few dozen replies, loading replies takes a notable amount of time, and X very conspicuously does not load all of them. Sometimes changing reply sorting algorithms loads entirely different batches of tweets.

Besides that most basic functionality, many times notifications are not sent when the notification settings would suggest they should be. And of course, moderation has fallen by the wayside, although that's more of a policy shift than a technical failure.

Incidentally, those defects would be good for censorship with deniability.

(Occam says deficit of institutional capability is the most likely cause. But that could also turn into a feature.)

> But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years.

Just on top of my head, there's the ability to write longer texts, the AI integration (that seems fairly popular in there). There was also some revenue sharing scheme where accounts can get paid for engagement. And from the point of view of management, making it impossible to view threads without login would also be a feature (as in "something we have to deliberately implement").

It's not a lot, but I don't think the pre-Musk Twitter changed even that much in the 3 year period before the acquisition.

I don't understand this thread - twitter is pretty much entirely dead, like stackoverflow - in some zombie state before getting the plug inevitably pulled in a decade or so. Its revenue halved since 2020.

That's due to Elon's gross mishandling of Twitter governance (e.g. demanding that the recommendation algorithm be tweaked so that literal Nazis dominate people's feeds), not due to any technical failings of the platform as a result of downsizing the engineering staff.

I doubt it. There are no Nazis in my feed.

For some people, everyone else is nazi.

This is a thought terminating cliche, ironically about a thought terminating cliche. X does have a problem with actual, literal, antisemitic, genocidal Nazis. No funny business or stretched definitions. Nazis. Dismissing it just because of a few people going by the Nazi bar analogy risks normalizing the actual fucking Nazis we're dealing with. "Oh everyone's a Nazi to you people" is a crazy thing to say when the individual under discussion is screaming about globalist cabals of bankers ushering in white erasure. And that is who is getting algorithmically elevated on X.

Also plenty of racists and homophobes, more than I see just about anywhere else on the internet. And more wild, rabid hate surrounding trans people than I see anywhere outside of narrow, festering cesspools in wastelands like 4chan.

I believe you that there are literal Nazis on X, just as there are on every social media platform (and society in general). I despise Nazis but again I literally never see them on my feed so I find it hard to believe that this is a major problem or that the platform is boosting that content. If you're seeing a lot of Nazi content then you're probably following the wrong type of accounts.

No, in fact I block every such account I see. I go on Twitter for inspiration of various kinds, not for doomscrolling, although I recognize that that's in vogue. But the owner of the platform has been demonstrated to artificially push posts and accounts into people's timelines and notifications, particularly his own, and he has retweeted, replied to, and otherwise boosted blatantly antisemitic conspiracy theories. It's pretty well documented as something that does actually happen, and not just as some sort of algorithmic quirk.

Twitter really is a hellscape. I was drawn in for a few days recently and started getting affected by the barrage of relentless right-wing garbage. And for those on twitter it seems like the most important information in the world when it’s just a dopamine pump of rage and fear. Easier just to switch it off and live your life in peace.

Net income/profit is what matters, revenue is largely irrelevant. Your own date is a perfect example of this since Twitter somehow managed to lose a ton of money in 2020 when they did indeed see record revenue, probably owing to over-stuffed election coffers. X's user counts and EBITDA are at record levels. In 2024 it was $1.25 billion on $2.7 billion revenue, contrasted against 'old Twitter's' $0.68 billion on $5 billion revenue in 2021. [1]

[1] - https://archive.is/evLAL (WSJ archive)

Doesn't this forum periodically discuss an article[*] about profit not really mattering in the grand scheme of things? (As in, profitable and growing companies are capable of showing profit whenever they want, and conversely to show no profit if they so wish.)

[*] This one I believe - https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/

The numbers I referenced were EBITDA, which is mostly the point of that article.

But a software company shouldn't really need to show even EBITDA. Amazon didn't between 2000 and 2012.

I'm not sure this is true. Amazon was investing heavily in things that would be reasonably expected to yield future gains, like fulfillment centers and just broadly expanding their logistic capacity. But for Twitter? So far as I know, most of their expenses were just ongoing operational costs and which seem to have been greatly bloated owing to mismanagement.

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