>> Of the three acquisitions I've been part of, only one didn't have some sort of change freeze associated.
> Indeed, this is reporting standard practice as if it were newsworthy.
I think you're confusing "newsworthy" with novel. You might know what "standard practice" is for an acquisition and can infer a change freeze from that fact, but a lot of people don't know and may still be interested in knowing the implications.
That's been my biggest frustration as an engineer reading this - is people seeing "CHANGES TO TWITTER CODEBASE FROZEN!!!" as if it's part of some story of leftist anti-Elon engineers that would sabotage the codebase, rather than standard tech acquisition practice.
I've seen prolific Twitter users "move" to Mastodon for years, but they always come back. It's not the same thing on the other side. A fraction of the followers and activity, but there's also an interesting psychological effect.
Due to the distributed nature of mastodon, you'd likely create or move into a "community" of your liking. Where you'll meet friends and like-minded people. A little happy bubble.
You'd think it's a utopia where people can finally leave behind the "hell" that is Twitter. Turns out they need the hell. They've become addicted to continuous outrage and their counter rage is what was holding the bubble together.
As it comes to media and social media, it seems to me it can't exist without rage, division and hate.
Imagine social media updates like this: "Had a pretty good day at work. Ran into my conservative neighbor, we shared a drink, and agreed to disagree on a few matters. To each their own I guess."
Or news channels and papers largely reporting on things going pretty well and reasonable, which is like 99% of reality.
Nobody would want to consume that, it's super boring. Not at all "engaging". Happiness sucks. Even our escape of reality, entertainment, largely consists of even more suffering. Imagine a movie where nothing traumatic happens to the characters. What is the point of even watching it?
As if people ever leave their social media. First, Zuckerberg has given people a reason to leave facebook time and time again, but hardly anybody left. Second, twitter's main attraction is that all the media, most importantly, the established and influential media, see twitter as a source of press releases and hands the most raucous twitterers an enormous extra platform. They, and their followers and foes, will not give that up lightly.
Who left Friendfeed? I don't remember people leaving it. I remember people not joining it (after its glory days) and then Facebook closing it. Idem for Orkut (mostly only popular in Brazil IIRC).
"I remember people not joining it (after its glory days) "
That's just the obverse of leaving isn't it? The site loses any momentum, becomes stagnant, and peters out, or in the case of Friendfeed, became ripe for acqui-hiring, then effectively spun down.
Orkut actually kept growing for a while, but in secondary markets (not just Brazil, but that was its biggest geo), until started to stagnate then decline.
TBH - he did a pretty good job. Stock was at $45 when he became CEO and it is now effectively valued at $54.20, while the NASDAQ is down over 15% in that time period.
- It took them about two years to replicate Clubhouse, which was built by about 4 engineers in far less time
- They killed Vines, and then proceeded to lose on short videos to TikTok a couple years later with no response
- Their Substack competitor is a joke that nobody uses, and also took years to produce
This is not an organization which ships products! You don't have to be a Harvard MBA to evaluate the output of this organization. The ratio of employees to product development is not in line with any other major engineering organization.
A fact I have always found baffling about most tech companies.
You read on here: it is just tales of giga, 10x programmers...I only work at companies with sufficient technological prowess, 7 figures, I expect my workplace to be staffed with those of similar intelligence to myself, Ivy League PHds only, send me full resumes of everyone who will be on my team, I only deal with problems that are world-changing...on and on.
You read financial statements: inept management, no controls, massive staff expenses, development budget is usually totally out of whack with revenue, growth in staff faster than revenue, struggle to develop new features (despite a relatively simple product), over-engineered, bloated maintenance...on and on.
Financial statements don't lie (the consistency between these two stories is: most engineers are massively overpaid, they aren't good at doing useful things, many tech companies have monopoly products, they then hire lots of engineers who do nothing but bloviate about how influential they are).
In the case of TWTR, comically mismanaged company. I don't know where the bloat is but Dorsey isn't someone who should be running a listed company (and has crashed and burned several times at Twitter alone). The guy who he appointed was an obvious stooge who was clearly not up to it. If nothing else, hopefully Musk will put them back on an even keel (I don't Musk is a good exec either, but this job is far simpler than Tesla so hopefully he will bring them back to an even keel).
eh, in most cases I have seen, it is the product org that is dysfunctional, not the engineering org. The people who are paid to know how to make money are often not good at making money. That leads to poor morale, loss of trust of eng team, and the rise of bullshit work.
Bay Area / startup engineering culture is an absolute dysfunctional mess. No consequences, either you land the next funding round on promises of scaling up or just jet off to the next job before any of your decisions matter. One of the main reasons I was happy to leave.
Ah, ofc...it is someone else's job to grub for money. You just like people to give you the money...a bit like pre-Revolutionary France, someone else gets their hands dirty, gives you the money for cultural reasons.
The purpose of my comment wasn't to suggest how to remedy the situation but your answer is indicative: there is no separation between money-making and non-money making (engineers' viewpoint, as with everyone else, on who is making the money tends to vary quite significantly...when it is pay discussions, they are responsible...when a product has gone wrong, I can't believe these managers did this to me), if you work at a company your job is to make money...that is where your salary is coming from, customers. The precise problem is that so many engineers are paid for specialising in arcane knowledge unrelated to any revenue or consumer demand. In my experience, companies that move this responsibility over to engineers do better (indeed, companies that don't, won't survive at all...the only reason these jobs exist is because some tech companies happen to have monopoly products and choose to overhire...if banks had a monopoly product, you would see a profusion of very over-educated people specialising in some arcane area of finance with no consumer demand but which get hired for cultural reasons).
There is no-one else to blame. The distinction between product and engineering is a function of dysfunction.
Another interpretation is that this has nothing to do with engineers, rather organizing any large organization to do useful work is difficult because of information asymmetry and politics.
Because he totally mishandled the bid, his communication skills were terrible, it was an internal tech hire (I do not know the process, but was it competitive?), TWTR's board is notoriously dysfunctional (so I am guessing they just went with what Dorsey said, they were quite happy to let him run the company off a cliff...so why not let him appoint his successor), and he appears to have been on leave for a large part of 2021 (when the shit started to make contact with the fan for TWTR).
But he also gave the impression consistently of someone who was in the wrong job. Communication is an important skill for a CEO, the least worrying interpretation is that he was making choices about PR with no reference to his PR people...least worrying...if PR actually was involved, that is worse.
Company was run more as a hobby/toy than a serious attempt at making money.
I was hearing credible stories back in 2014 about them having way too many junior devs with nothing, or very marginal amounts to do.
They had the excesses on the spending side covered without the insane growth or profitability to go along with it. Can be a great business if it's hugely downsized in headcount
The Thanos approach, half by random lottery. Otherwise it's a corporate politics fight to find out who stays and those who win that fight are more likely to be better at corporate politics and probably not as good at the business of Twitter.
In addition, those who are let go are not tainted as underperformers, just unlucky.
I don't know what 7,000 Twitter employees do but it does seem like a rather high number to me.
> the wokes will protest no matter what. even if he gives them 500k bonuses
I won't comment on your first sentence. But your second makes it seem like you believe that everyone is motivated primarily by money. A good amount of people just want to make the world a better place.
Nah... if anything, the Trump wing of the Right is far less interested in money than the "traditional" business-first wing. For instance, this whole anti-Disney thing in Florida his hardly about wanting more money. It's just about power.
Not sure you can separate the two. An underlying presumption is that if power/control is acquired, that allocation of the spoils inevitably follows and that everything will fall in line.
I'm not disputing your statement per se, just that I think it's more of a splitting the difference than much else.
i said it in the context of layoffs in the parent context. even if there were no layoffs and instead they gave people bonuses there still would be unrest. that was the point i was trying to make. that the unrest has nothing to do with layoffs/money
Source for the SpaceX profitability? They raised a lot of money last year, which wouldn't be necessary for a profitable company. Falcon is probably profitable, but it only grosses a couple billion a year. OTOH, Starlink and Starship are both $10B+ projects that aren't generating significant revenue yet.
Cash flow != profitability. You can be profitable but have negative cash flow. If you have negative cash flow, you need to borrow capital to keep growing.
Tesla is profitable and SpaceX is currently pouring all their resources into two futuristic megaprojects with high upfront costs, so it's understandable that they aren't "solidly profitable" at the moment.
At the time MS was old hat. They only grew because Office 365 extended their natural monopoly in enterprise. Definitely a good stock pick in hindsight, but not the new type of ‘new’ platform growth that was going on at FAANG at the time.
Tesla isn't a mass-market software/online-services business. They manufacture, which means a lot of capital going into factories and a lot higher of material-input costs, and they're kind of a high end brand.
This gives their business different performance characteristics from Facebook (mass market social-media and ads), Amazon (mass market sales and logistics), Apple (which is at least slightly luxury, but contracts out its manufacturing, and does mass market hardware — look at that iPhone sell), Netflix (mass market entertainment), and Google (mass market search, mail, advertising).
Amazon and apple probably both have more capital invested in factories, warehouses, etc than Tesla does. Apple is also kinda a high end brand. They seem a lot more similar than different.
The way things are trending, it's going to be FAAG soon, which is not so good. I guess, technically, it's not F anymore, so it's MAAG, which is almost as perilous. But if we're truly being technical, it's not G, it's a, in which case it's MAAA, in which case we might as well go with GOAT.
That's probably for the best for both parties. Twitter sounds really freaking exciting right now. If I were leaving uni, I would be rushing to get in there instead of a FAANG. If mad product development happens, you'll have a chance to be there, making it work. The only reason I'm not is that I've got even more fun going on.
But FAANG folks self-select as low-variance people in general, so it's best that they seek low-variance outcomes. Happiness is in indulging your true nature.
Low-variance outcomes are just that: low-variance. If you're a decent FAANG engineer, you're making in the $500k at least by your 5th year, if not earlier, which puts your net worth at 50 at around $25 million. Pretty good outcome and quite certain.
I wouldn't have wanted to work at Twitter as it previously existed, but I'm curious now. I think Musk could be a better leader of the company. And I might like to be part of the changes that are coming even if I disagree with some of them. Any idea how someone could get in the queue to be hired at the new Twitter?
I'm in the same boat - there's no way I would have worked at Twitter a year ago; but now I would consider it. Elon's acquisition has made me much more optimistic about the outlook of the company. If Twitter has a mass exodus after the acquisition, I'm sure there's a wave of open-minded engineers ready to take their place.
Twitter: 500 million tweets a day.
WhatsApp: 65 billion messages a day.
Is writing better spam filters / bot detection really so fun sounding? I don't get the fascination, it just seems like one of the most boring websites in the world. (Not being sarcastic)
It is up and running for a long time already, written and rewritten and rerewritten.
Sure. And I know it isn't directly comparable to WhatsApp but it isn't mind boggling scale really.
You want to work on the adtech side of it there's quite a few of those exchanges similar in size around, they just aren't house hold names. Where is the fun? I'm genuinely asking.
Why would you want to encourage employees to leave? I understand there’s desired attrition of bad employees but isn’t most attrition undesirable? How do you build product by pushing out experience?
In the case I am most familiar with, private equity is involved. They want to get rid of the expensive people and replace them with people in cheaper locations because they view people as interchangeable.
Like most of Elons strategic vision, its hardly a tactic he came up with on his own. his operating strategy is similar to a few historic figures i can think of.
Sears CEO Eddie Lampert was so ruthless in his cost cutting he would pit his own divisions of sears against eachother for bonuses an even continued employment. he declared a moratorium on any in-store livery updates for 25 years and played the company off its stock to increase its value. the guy bilked sears for personal wealth hovering around 2bn and left shareholders holding the bag.
Al Dunlap, former Sunbeam CEO, was so ruthless people called him "chainsaw al." he was notorious for massive layoffs, factory shutdowns, and threatening physical violence against board members. the guys famous catchphrase was "if you want to be liked, get a dog." he died in 2019, but is really only remembered for massive accounting fraud nowadays.
Those examples couldn't be less like Musk's strategy. There are both good/ethical and bad/wrong reasons to do layoffs. Musk's primary strategy at Tesla has been to create innovative products that people want to buy in huge numbers.
Teslas 2019 cost cutting effort included basic hygene products like toilet paper, arguably an inconsequential operating expense. Employees had to bring their own to work.
Sounds like a good first step. Especially if his plan is to run Twitter in a more hands off way. Instead of 7,500 employees, they can probably do the job with 700 people that are specially picked, and make the company much more efficient.
Reddit apparently has 700 employees today, and they haven't done anything significant since they had far fewer employees. Scaling these services just isn't nearly as hard as it used to be, especially given how many more experienced engineers and good technologies exist today.
Twitter should re-build the product to be almost purely software driven, with as little employee intervention as possible. Give users the tools to self-moderate content however they want. For the good of their users and long-term success, they'd be wise to make self-moderation easier to do in a "healthy" way even if it's worse for short-term engagement and revenue. Again, Reddit did this fairly well for years without a huge team.
What Twitter lacks most of all is someone with the guts to risk breaking the product in order to fix the product. The team at Twitter has been visibly afraid to make significant changes, which has left the product weak by modern standards. It's a lot like Apple was before Jobs came back.
One of the things that would be fascinating to see come out is how the company was run. I truly wonder if some scandalous manipulations and collusion will come to light.
These were random employees (including one head of media that found himself talking to prominent Saudi contacts requesting the blue check, and one site reliability engineer who ended up becoming CEO of some Saudi non-profit for his thousands of data inquires for the Saudis). The bigger problem with that story is how Twitter leaders brushed it under the rug and supposedly did not care to mention it while the news made rounds.
In the new information economy, attention for any reason is good. Doesn't matter if its bad attention anymore, just get yourself trending and keep yourself there.
It's going to be a privately owned company, I doubt that anything will "come to light". Since there is very little private companies are compelled to produce publicly, there's typically very little benefit from doing so voluntarily.
If new leadership takes over a publicly traded company, then it makes sense to reveal past failings so that investors can gain new found trust in the new leadership. But I don't see any reason that would benefit Musk in revealing anything damaging about the company, past or present.
Would be really interesting to see explanations for this. I have a hard time believing that Twitter was consciously suppressing republican follower counts and inflating democratic ones, but I wonder if it could be something related to a sudden change in how they detect and ban bots, where bots happen to be used much more heavily by one political side than the other.
What a wild time to be a Twitter employee. If I was there right now I'd consider it a 6 month vacation (while fully paid and vesting) then either quit or wait for the inevitable layoff.
A question I'm curious about, what happens to RSU based compensation after the company goes private?
Clearly RSUs that have vested will be paid out at the $54/share, but what about unvested?
Additionally, like most tech companies, roughly half of Twitter TC is RSUs. Will this end up being a massive pay cut for Twitter employees? I can't really imagine Musk matching with cash, especially given the notoriously low TC for Tesla/SpaceX SWEs.
I assume they'll keep getting RSUs, just that the stock won't be tradable. And the company will probably offer liquidity events for employees to cash out.
This is pretty standard for a takeover process. As the sale is far from complete it’s normally considered safer not to make any changes that could threaten the sale or commit the company to something the new owner doesn’t want.
TBH, it doesn't seem like they've been doing much before either.
Their major problems in many fronts have remained unsolved for a long time (e.g. spam bots, readability of long threads, functional bulk block lists etc.).
They aren't even that good at the one thing they seem to be passionate about: censorship.
One very obvious difference is that twitter does not purport to be a forum for any particular community or field of interest. So in that sense it's much more of a town square in that ppl can (or should be able to) tweet about anything.
I have only personally been through one acquisition personally but I do follow the game industry acquisitions. In those cases the companies have continued to largely operate as if nothing is happening until it actually closes.
If for some reason the deal doesn't close it is a huge risk to the company to not continue to operate as normal.
Game companies are usually making art products sold per unit. To continue as is while an acquisition is going through, you can't stop development and not release new titles; the company would go broke before it got bought! Twitter is a forever product; it means that maintaining the product and its revenues the same while the acquisition is happening is possible.
There's also the underlying idea that perhaps Elon has said he has big plans, but no one at Twitter knows what those are and if they even exist. Better err on caution with Fickle Musk.
I don't know that this is normal. It's certainly not unheard of. In this case I just think it's such a huge acquisition that they probably just want to hold off until they get a clear vision from Elon. Why spend a bunch of time and money on something if Elon will come in and advocate for its exclusion from future features? Though I will say that I don't believe that Elon will have a tremendous amount of sway when it comes to drastic changes. I think it'll be a good year or two before we see substantial changes to Twitter as a platform.
There have been tons of tech firm takeovers in the past 10 years. I can't recall a single case like this, where employees were literally completely locked out of their own systems because of the risk of them going rogue (citing the source in the Bloomberg article, there).
No major changes in product direction, yes, obviously. You don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. No changes at all - and only for a week - is pretty clearly a sign that Twitter management fear emotional kneejerk extremism in their own employee base. The fact that they have to do this speaks volumes about the problems inside the company.
Next six months will be really interesting to watch. Twitter leadership will be paralyzed until Musk arrives. There's no point executing a roadmap that could be abandoned so soon. Leadership is also the most likely to be pushed out first. Everyone at Twitter is taking a paid vacation until Elon arrives, possibly using the time to look for another job. For the health of the company they should loop Elon in as soon as possible.
Even 4chan is moderated so I think it will be interesting to see how Musk thinks he's solved the moderation problem. I'm confident he would have listened to counsel and not waded into that cesspool without having some sort of new moderation idea that he thinks will work. He says he's a free speech absolutist without ever defining that. He can't rely on the law, because people are free to say all kinds of awful things without breaking the law. 4chan gets away with hate speech every hour of the day.
Edit: This just in, he just defined it and says he will rely on the law.
4chan gets me out of my bubble. It always surprises me how some people look at the world, kind of like how Terry Davis and his Temple OS was interesting.
I highly doubt Elon actually follows through with his "all legal speech is permissible" plan. Even in that tweet he's not completely unequivocal. He didn't say he's against censorship that goes beyond the law. He said he's against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
It is not practical or desirable to rely on the government to set the bounds for speech on giant social media platforms.
Which law? How is jurisdiction determined? Are there places where merely witnessing certain content is illegal for them but legal for the person posting it? Is a proxy or VPN sufficient to avoid that as a user? Is it going to just be U.S. federal law, California law, U.N. treaties and policies, or what?
US Federal laws and CA law will be the same, 1st amendment trumps anything CA would try to do to curb speech.
Same with UN Treaties, it literally not possible for the US to enter into a treaty that violates the constitution, the US Constitution overrules all laws, treaties, agreements, state laws, everything.
> 1st amendment trumps anything CA would try to do to curb speech.
Technically, no, the 1st Amendment as such, has no effect on California. The Supreme Court has, however, found that the among the restrictions imposed on the Statss by the 14th Amendment are protections essentially precisely equivalent to those in several parts of the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment.
But that doesn’t make California and federal law identical, it makes the outer limit of what federal and state governments could prohibit generally similar (because of the different interests of federal and state government and the way the strict scrutiny test is applied, even the actual outer limits on the two are not identical.)
>>The Supreme Court has, however, found that the among the restrictions imposed on the Statss by the 14th Amendment
So then, technically, yes it does apply.
>But that doesn’t make California and federal law identical,
Exactly, CA can only allow MORE speech, it CAN NOT have a more restrictive speech law than is allowed by the 1st amendment, which is pretty expansive prohibiting only actual defamation and true threats.
Technically, the First Amendment doesn't, the due process clause of the 14th does.
Practically, the effects are indistinguishable, since the Supreme Court has found that 14th’s due process clause protects rights essential to ordered liberty, and the Supreme Court has found that those rights essential to ordered liberty include (but are not limited to) rights coincidentally identical to the entirety of those protected against federal encroachment by Amendments in the Bill of Rights whose numbers are integer powers of 2 (though to my knowledge no actual case has used that particular description), plus subsets of those protected against federal encroachment by the 5th and 6th amendments.
> Exactly, CA can only allow MORE speech
California can, and does, restrict content in ways which the federal government does not. It can't allow less than the First/Fourteenth Amendment freedom of speech mandates, but the federal government doesn't prohibit everything that could be prohibited under those restrictions, and a rule that only prohibited illegal conduct would apply differently if it applied California law (or law applicable in California, including federal law) than if it applied only federal law, and differently if it applied the combination of federal and California law than if it applied the combination of federal law and the law of some other state.
You are just being intentionally obtuse, and not really providing anything of substance this conversation. I would like you to cite an example of your claim where CA "can, and does, restrict content in ways which the federal government does not"
> I would like you to cite an example of your claim where CA "can, and does, restrict content in ways which the federal government does not"
A few illustrative areas:
1. Violations of the California Right of Publicity (Civil Code § 3344).
2. Libel (Civil Code §§ 45, 45a.)
3. Violations of California obscenity law (Penal Code § 311 et seq.).
All three of these are laws that have been found enforceable and outside of First Amendment protection, but which impose civil or criminal liability for content which is not (inherently, though there may be some overlap) unlawful to create/distribute under federal law.
The first is pretty special to California, the other two are things which are generally viewed as “illegal in the US” in broad outline, but which mostly are a matter of state law, not federal law, with different precise statutory boundaries (and even more differences due to case law) in each state which has a similar prohibition.
> This just in, he just defined it and says he will rely on the law.
Twitter operates in many places with different laws, does it apply the law of the jurisdiction in which the reader is currently located, the law of the jurisdiction of the readers nationality, the law of the jurisdiction the sender is located in when the tweet is sent, the law of the jurisdiction of the senders nationality, the law of the jurisdiction in which the particular server handling a particular API request is located, does it just apply the law of, say the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to all content?
And, once a law is chosen, what is the mechanism of ensuring and providing transparency that all and only those cases where content is prohibited by the identified law are blocked?
(I mean, while some have a problem with what Twitter says it prohibits, IME a lot more people have a problem that what Twitter actually does has no identifiable relationship to it's stated policies, with things clearly not in violation receiving sanctions and things clearly and flagrantly in violation being tolerated.)
>4chan gets away with hate speech every hour of the day.
Just because you hate the speech doens't make it hatespeech.
>He can't rely on the law, because people are free to say all kinds of awful things without breaking the law
When did things change from technocrats advocating for freedom of speech and expersion to being worried about someone tweeting mean words?
Growing up I always heard: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.". Now I hear about deplatforming anything and everything that doesn't support status quo.
In general, I agree with you, but I'm referring to speech in the context of a social network. 4chan is a niche community because it is too rough for most people. Unless Musk wants to turn Twitter into 4chan, he's going to have to get real about moderation and like I said, even 4chan is moderated.
I really don't think this is as good of an argument as you think it is. Yes, 4chan is moderated to remove illegal content. Then of course there are topic boards and SFW boards which are moderated to keep off-topic and NSFW threads at bay, but then there is always /b/ where everything goes.
This is pure speculation but here's what I think is happening...
There's no basis to believe that anybody at Twitter is adding or removing followers as following somebody is a purposeful action.
But...not really.
Whether you get a lot of followers (or not) likely depends on you ending up in the "recommended follows" feed. Which showcases your profile to an enormous audience.
It's unknown what decides whether you end up in the recommended feed or not, but I would not be surprised if in part it involves manual curation. It may be that currently less manual curation is happening which is changing outcomes.
The liberal/conservative point is a distraction from a much more important insight into social media. When you see somebody having 200K followers, many people are naturally inclined to believe that this person is an authority. Perhaps a VIP in the real world, or a person with brilliant insight. Surely this person is dramatically better, smarter, more important than the person with 2K followers, 200, or 20.
This idea is based on the naive assumption that 200K individuals came to the rational decision of discovering said person organically and deciding to follow based on merit.
Nope. The account was pushed to millions of people on mysterious grounds after which perhaps 10% spent about 2 secs of thought on it, and thought...why not? It just takes a single tap.
With critical mass achieved, there's a wide array of tactics to stay there and grow it further, like a snowball effect. None of this is organic.
This is a one week ban, which ends at the end of this week. I don't think the headline is clickbait per se, but people aren't reading the article. dang, any chance of getting the title updated to say "one week" instead of "Temporary"?
How crazy unprofessional you have to be to do harm to your company because you don’t like the new owner? It totally blews my mind that people can be so childish.
If you don’t like your employer, change job or organize and change rules. But you should work for your company best interest while you’re there. Only then it makes sense to work there at all.
Sometimes I think that our industry is full of kids that need to grow up.
If your employer is breaking the law, you should probably gather evidence and notify law enforcement, not mess with it’s product code to do nasty jokes.
Update: sorry, I’ve misread your comment. If what you mean is that current management wants to hide something, then yes, this might be a good idea from Elons perspective.
>How crazy unprofessional you have to be to do harm to your company
You mean like smoking a substance that the federal government says is illegal on camera while the feds are one of your most important customers? It's not exactly rare...
I guess this is to prevent sabotage from employees who have rather radical disagreements with Elon. The terms probably have a clause that "Twitter shall remain in exactly the same shape by such and such date, or the purchase agreement is void."
The Twitter's CEO will get booted for sure. Otherwise he will have to admit he is a hypocrite, as he made clear he had a very different vision than Musk.
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> Indeed, this is reporting standard practice as if it were newsworthy.
I think you're confusing "newsworthy" with novel. You might know what "standard practice" is for an acquisition and can infer a change freeze from that fact, but a lot of people don't know and may still be interested in knowing the implications.
Due to the distributed nature of mastodon, you'd likely create or move into a "community" of your liking. Where you'll meet friends and like-minded people. A little happy bubble.
You'd think it's a utopia where people can finally leave behind the "hell" that is Twitter. Turns out they need the hell. They've become addicted to continuous outrage and their counter rage is what was holding the bubble together.
As it comes to media and social media, it seems to me it can't exist without rage, division and hate.
Imagine social media updates like this: "Had a pretty good day at work. Ran into my conservative neighbor, we shared a drink, and agreed to disagree on a few matters. To each their own I guess."
Or news channels and papers largely reporting on things going pretty well and reasonable, which is like 99% of reality.
Nobody would want to consume that, it's super boring. Not at all "engaging". Happiness sucks. Even our escape of reality, entertainment, largely consists of even more suffering. Imagine a movie where nothing traumatic happens to the characters. What is the point of even watching it?
Friendster, Orkut, Google+, MySpace, Vine, Flickr, Friendfeed...they absolutely do.
If you thought of an exodus after investors meddled in, mentioning Digg v4 (to Reddit) would have been à propos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4
That's just the obverse of leaving isn't it? The site loses any momentum, becomes stagnant, and peters out, or in the case of Friendfeed, became ripe for acqui-hiring, then effectively spun down.
Orkut actually kept growing for a while, but in secondary markets (not just Brazil, but that was its biggest geo), until started to stagnate then decline.
Digg is a great example as well.
So an employee revolt would neither be unexpected nor entirely unreasonable.
Note: not to imply that SpaceX is profitable, they certainly are deep in the red due to Starlink and Starship. But that's by choice.
It's not just about profitability, it's a bloated, ineffective, behemoth.
- They killed Vines, and then proceeded to lose on short videos to TikTok a couple years later with no response
- Their Substack competitor is a joke that nobody uses, and also took years to produce
This is not an organization which ships products! You don't have to be a Harvard MBA to evaluate the output of this organization. The ratio of employees to product development is not in line with any other major engineering organization.
You read on here: it is just tales of giga, 10x programmers...I only work at companies with sufficient technological prowess, 7 figures, I expect my workplace to be staffed with those of similar intelligence to myself, Ivy League PHds only, send me full resumes of everyone who will be on my team, I only deal with problems that are world-changing...on and on.
You read financial statements: inept management, no controls, massive staff expenses, development budget is usually totally out of whack with revenue, growth in staff faster than revenue, struggle to develop new features (despite a relatively simple product), over-engineered, bloated maintenance...on and on.
Financial statements don't lie (the consistency between these two stories is: most engineers are massively overpaid, they aren't good at doing useful things, many tech companies have monopoly products, they then hire lots of engineers who do nothing but bloviate about how influential they are).
In the case of TWTR, comically mismanaged company. I don't know where the bloat is but Dorsey isn't someone who should be running a listed company (and has crashed and burned several times at Twitter alone). The guy who he appointed was an obvious stooge who was clearly not up to it. If nothing else, hopefully Musk will put them back on an even keel (I don't Musk is a good exec either, but this job is far simpler than Tesla so hopefully he will bring them back to an even keel).
The purpose of my comment wasn't to suggest how to remedy the situation but your answer is indicative: there is no separation between money-making and non-money making (engineers' viewpoint, as with everyone else, on who is making the money tends to vary quite significantly...when it is pay discussions, they are responsible...when a product has gone wrong, I can't believe these managers did this to me), if you work at a company your job is to make money...that is where your salary is coming from, customers. The precise problem is that so many engineers are paid for specialising in arcane knowledge unrelated to any revenue or consumer demand. In my experience, companies that move this responsibility over to engineers do better (indeed, companies that don't, won't survive at all...the only reason these jobs exist is because some tech companies happen to have monopoly products and choose to overhire...if banks had a monopoly product, you would see a profusion of very over-educated people specialising in some arcane area of finance with no consumer demand but which get hired for cultural reasons).
There is no-one else to blame. The distinction between product and engineering is a function of dysfunction.
Curious to know why you think so?
But he also gave the impression consistently of someone who was in the wrong job. Communication is an important skill for a CEO, the least worrying interpretation is that he was making choices about PR with no reference to his PR people...least worrying...if PR actually was involved, that is worse.
I was hearing credible stories back in 2014 about them having way too many junior devs with nothing, or very marginal amounts to do.
They had the excesses on the spending side covered without the insane growth or profitability to go along with it. Can be a great business if it's hugely downsized in headcount
In addition, those who are let go are not tainted as underperformers, just unlucky.
I don't know what 7,000 Twitter employees do but it does seem like a rather high number to me.
I won't comment on your first sentence. But your second makes it seem like you believe that everyone is motivated primarily by money. A good amount of people just want to make the world a better place.
I'm not disputing your statement per se, just that I think it's more of a splitting the difference than much else.
As SpaceX is privately held we don’t really know.
They are definitely not profitable now, but by choice.
This gives their business different performance characteristics from Facebook (mass market social-media and ads), Amazon (mass market sales and logistics), Apple (which is at least slightly luxury, but contracts out its manufacturing, and does mass market hardware — look at that iPhone sell), Netflix (mass market entertainment), and Google (mass market search, mail, advertising).
bigger question is why was microsoft not part of it? mainly because it didnt form a catchy word.
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google
Everything else ... not so sure ...
There are only so many letters you can use to make a word and some companies had to be dropped.
The original meaning was a term to describe the big tech companies.
But FAANG folks self-select as low-variance people in general, so it's best that they seek low-variance outcomes. Happiness is in indulging your true nature.
FWIW I wasn't insulting anyone. Evidence that I'm not a hater:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30980395
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30960680
Low-variance outcomes are just that: low-variance. If you're a decent FAANG engineer, you're making in the $500k at least by your 5th year, if not earlier, which puts your net worth at 50 at around $25 million. Pretty good outcome and quite certain.
Is writing better spam filters / bot detection really so fun sounding? I don't get the fascination, it just seems like one of the most boring websites in the world. (Not being sarcastic)
It is up and running for a long time already, written and rewritten and rerewritten.
You want to work on the adtech side of it there's quite a few of those exchanges similar in size around, they just aren't house hold names. Where is the fun? I'm genuinely asking.
WhatsApp: 0 public posts a day.
This might be comparing apples to oranges, as one is more like a global town square, and one is more like a postal service.
It is going about as well as you can imagine.
Sears CEO Eddie Lampert was so ruthless in his cost cutting he would pit his own divisions of sears against eachother for bonuses an even continued employment. he declared a moratorium on any in-store livery updates for 25 years and played the company off its stock to increase its value. the guy bilked sears for personal wealth hovering around 2bn and left shareholders holding the bag.
Al Dunlap, former Sunbeam CEO, was so ruthless people called him "chainsaw al." he was notorious for massive layoffs, factory shutdowns, and threatening physical violence against board members. the guys famous catchphrase was "if you want to be liked, get a dog." he died in 2019, but is really only remembered for massive accounting fraud nowadays.
https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/tesla-fires-hundreds-of-wo...
Tesla arguably chose to fire 1200 people to avoid paying their severances.
https://electrek.co/2019/05/24/tesla-cost-cutting-effort-toi...
Teslas 2019 cost cutting effort included basic hygene products like toilet paper, arguably an inconsequential operating expense. Employees had to bring their own to work.
Reddit apparently has 700 employees today, and they haven't done anything significant since they had far fewer employees. Scaling these services just isn't nearly as hard as it used to be, especially given how many more experienced engineers and good technologies exist today.
Twitter should re-build the product to be almost purely software driven, with as little employee intervention as possible. Give users the tools to self-moderate content however they want. For the good of their users and long-term success, they'd be wise to make self-moderation easier to do in a "healthy" way even if it's worse for short-term engagement and revenue. Again, Reddit did this fairly well for years without a huge team.
What Twitter lacks most of all is someone with the guts to risk breaking the product in order to fix the product. The team at Twitter has been visibly afraid to make significant changes, which has left the product weak by modern standards. It's a lot like Apple was before Jobs came back.
Sabotaging your company by secretly pushing code because you suspect a layoff is coming isn't unreasonable?
So wouldn't even surprise me much
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-former-twitter-employees-...
If new leadership takes over a publicly traded company, then it makes sense to reveal past failings so that investors can gain new found trust in the new leadership. But I don't see any reason that would benefit Musk in revealing anything damaging about the company, past or present.
https://twitter.com/cbouzy/status/1518953731961802752
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/151900201165147751...
https://twitter.com/MZHemingway/status/1518946715407106048
The dream is to always work a couple years and get laid off with severance - even better if you smell it coming.
A question I'm curious about, what happens to RSU based compensation after the company goes private?
Clearly RSUs that have vested will be paid out at the $54/share, but what about unvested?
Additionally, like most tech companies, roughly half of Twitter TC is RSUs. Will this end up being a massive pay cut for Twitter employees? I can't really imagine Musk matching with cash, especially given the notoriously low TC for Tesla/SpaceX SWEs.
Options in the money at 54.20 will be converted to cash for the difference between exercise price and 54.20.
Options underwater are cancelled.
Their major problems in many fronts have remained unsolved for a long time (e.g. spam bots, readability of long threads, functional bulk block lists etc.).
They aren't even that good at the one thing they seem to be passionate about: censorship.
Twitter on the other hand has such an extreme political bias that bias is written right in to the (current) rules for the platform
To compare the 2 is laughable
"Twitter Inc. locked down changes to its social networking platform through Friday."
I have only personally been through one acquisition personally but I do follow the game industry acquisitions. In those cases the companies have continued to largely operate as if nothing is happening until it actually closes.
If for some reason the deal doesn't close it is a huge risk to the company to not continue to operate as normal.
There's also the underlying idea that perhaps Elon has said he has big plans, but no one at Twitter knows what those are and if they even exist. Better err on caution with Fickle Musk.
No major changes in product direction, yes, obviously. You don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. No changes at all - and only for a week - is pretty clearly a sign that Twitter management fear emotional kneejerk extremism in their own employee base. The fact that they have to do this speaks volumes about the problems inside the company.
Edit: This just in, he just defined it and says he will rely on the law.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376
It is not practical or desirable to rely on the government to set the bounds for speech on giant social media platforms.
Same with UN Treaties, it literally not possible for the US to enter into a treaty that violates the constitution, the US Constitution overrules all laws, treaties, agreements, state laws, everything.
No, they won't.
> 1st amendment trumps anything CA would try to do to curb speech.
Technically, no, the 1st Amendment as such, has no effect on California. The Supreme Court has, however, found that the among the restrictions imposed on the Statss by the 14th Amendment are protections essentially precisely equivalent to those in several parts of the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment.
But that doesn’t make California and federal law identical, it makes the outer limit of what federal and state governments could prohibit generally similar (because of the different interests of federal and state government and the way the strict scrutiny test is applied, even the actual outer limits on the two are not identical.)
hmmm
>>The Supreme Court has, however, found that the among the restrictions imposed on the Statss by the 14th Amendment
So then, technically, yes it does apply.
>But that doesn’t make California and federal law identical,
Exactly, CA can only allow MORE speech, it CAN NOT have a more restrictive speech law than is allowed by the 1st amendment, which is pretty expansive prohibiting only actual defamation and true threats.
Technically, the First Amendment doesn't, the due process clause of the 14th does.
Practically, the effects are indistinguishable, since the Supreme Court has found that 14th’s due process clause protects rights essential to ordered liberty, and the Supreme Court has found that those rights essential to ordered liberty include (but are not limited to) rights coincidentally identical to the entirety of those protected against federal encroachment by Amendments in the Bill of Rights whose numbers are integer powers of 2 (though to my knowledge no actual case has used that particular description), plus subsets of those protected against federal encroachment by the 5th and 6th amendments.
> Exactly, CA can only allow MORE speech
California can, and does, restrict content in ways which the federal government does not. It can't allow less than the First/Fourteenth Amendment freedom of speech mandates, but the federal government doesn't prohibit everything that could be prohibited under those restrictions, and a rule that only prohibited illegal conduct would apply differently if it applied California law (or law applicable in California, including federal law) than if it applied only federal law, and differently if it applied the combination of federal and California law than if it applied the combination of federal law and the law of some other state.
A few illustrative areas:
1. Violations of the California Right of Publicity (Civil Code § 3344).
2. Libel (Civil Code §§ 45, 45a.)
3. Violations of California obscenity law (Penal Code § 311 et seq.).
All three of these are laws that have been found enforceable and outside of First Amendment protection, but which impose civil or criminal liability for content which is not (inherently, though there may be some overlap) unlawful to create/distribute under federal law.
The first is pretty special to California, the other two are things which are generally viewed as “illegal in the US” in broad outline, but which mostly are a matter of state law, not federal law, with different precise statutory boundaries (and even more differences due to case law) in each state which has a similar prohibition.
Twitter operates in many places with different laws, does it apply the law of the jurisdiction in which the reader is currently located, the law of the jurisdiction of the readers nationality, the law of the jurisdiction the sender is located in when the tweet is sent, the law of the jurisdiction of the senders nationality, the law of the jurisdiction in which the particular server handling a particular API request is located, does it just apply the law of, say the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to all content?
And, once a law is chosen, what is the mechanism of ensuring and providing transparency that all and only those cases where content is prohibited by the identified law are blocked?
(I mean, while some have a problem with what Twitter says it prohibits, IME a lot more people have a problem that what Twitter actually does has no identifiable relationship to it's stated policies, with things clearly not in violation receiving sanctions and things clearly and flagrantly in violation being tolerated.)
Just because you hate the speech doens't make it hatespeech.
>He can't rely on the law, because people are free to say all kinds of awful things without breaking the law
When did things change from technocrats advocating for freedom of speech and expersion to being worried about someone tweeting mean words?
Growing up I always heard: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.". Now I hear about deplatforming anything and everything that doesn't support status quo.
I really don't think this is as good of an argument as you think it is. Yes, 4chan is moderated to remove illegal content. Then of course there are topic boards and SFW boards which are moderated to keep off-topic and NSFW threads at bay, but then there is always /b/ where everything goes.
For instance Ron DeSantis getting 96k followers in one day:
or MSNBC vs Fox News
or Jair Bolsonaro getting 42k in one day:
https://twitter.com/cbouzy/status/1518953731961802752
Something definitely smells like shit to me.
There's no basis to believe that anybody at Twitter is adding or removing followers as following somebody is a purposeful action.
But...not really.
Whether you get a lot of followers (or not) likely depends on you ending up in the "recommended follows" feed. Which showcases your profile to an enormous audience.
It's unknown what decides whether you end up in the recommended feed or not, but I would not be surprised if in part it involves manual curation. It may be that currently less manual curation is happening which is changing outcomes.
The liberal/conservative point is a distraction from a much more important insight into social media. When you see somebody having 200K followers, many people are naturally inclined to believe that this person is an authority. Perhaps a VIP in the real world, or a person with brilliant insight. Surely this person is dramatically better, smarter, more important than the person with 2K followers, 200, or 20.
This idea is based on the naive assumption that 200K individuals came to the rational decision of discovering said person organically and deciding to follow based on merit.
Nope. The account was pushed to millions of people on mysterious grounds after which perhaps 10% spent about 2 secs of thought on it, and thought...why not? It just takes a single tap.
With critical mass achieved, there's a wide array of tactics to stay there and grow it further, like a snowball effect. None of this is organic.
If you don’t like your employer, change job or organize and change rules. But you should work for your company best interest while you’re there. Only then it makes sense to work there at all.
Sometimes I think that our industry is full of kids that need to grow up.
Update: sorry, I’ve misread your comment. If what you mean is that current management wants to hide something, then yes, this might be a good idea from Elons perspective.
You mean like smoking a substance that the federal government says is illegal on camera while the feds are one of your most important customers? It's not exactly rare...