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Twitter Fate Poll
- Thread starter MmkLucario
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With advertisers fleeing this dumpster fire, Musk laying off 1/2 the company, 80% of the contractors and by some reports, 1,200 voted not to take Musk up on his requirement to work long hard hours. I just don't see it
Twitter is Going Great!
Twitter is Going Great is a project inspired by Web3 is Going Just Great to track the latest examples of how Twitter is actively falling to pieces thanks to its current owner Elon Musk (with special guests Jack Dorsey and the Saudi Arabian royal family).
True, but those employees may not be working enough for what they are being payed for.
Apart from operational IT things like security updates and new hard drives, I wonder how many employees Twitter actually needs. All the critical functionality is already there and has been for many years, so the product should be in "maintenance mode" by this point.
It’s interesting to see the outside perspective from folks in this thread while knowing some engineers and data scientists who were/are working at Twitter.
Obviously everyone has their perspective on this, but you might find it helpful to compare Twitter to similar services/companies (eg Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, etc) to pressure test your assumptions.
Also, Twitter is not software. It’s a social service run by advertisements, meaning it needs sales people, data scientists, moderators, marketing, legal, etc.
Obviously everyone has their perspective on this, but you might find it helpful to compare Twitter to similar services/companies (eg Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, etc) to pressure test your assumptions.
Also, Twitter is not software. It’s a social service run by advertisements, meaning it needs sales people, data scientists, moderators, marketing, legal, etc.
Yes, but they do need developers as well, and from the various news reports, articles, he lost too many.
Perhaps, but at this point does he have enough to keep the lights on? It appears that almost 1/2 of the remaining people refused his ultimatum - at least that's what many news outlets were reporting. If that's accurate, then the workforce shrank from 13,000 people working at twitter to 3,650 I don't believe any company can effect any sort of business strategy losing so many people within a span of 2 weeks.
You could tell he was getting desperate as the deadline for that ultimatum was approaching, he tried to stem the people voting no, by re-allowing work from home. I don't think too many people believed him, and I think they expected that benefit to be quickly taken away the first chance he got.
He's now looking to hire developers, I wonder how hard will it be for him to start hiring, no matter how you slice it, twitter has an appearance of a dumpster fire. Musk says one thing, then back tracks. He's flipped flopped so many times, and been so harsh on the employees, do the best and brightest developers really want to work there? Especially if it looks like a sinking ship and its hard not to draw that conclusion, even he said Bankruptcy is a possibility.
I think your poll is missing the likely third option of "survive but never be the same".
Managing to keep the tech aspects of the service running, but it's taking a huge hit to its popularity with people who've been using the platform.
Myspace and AOL were once extremely popular and have managed to continue on in diminished size after losing large percentages of their users......Twitter may well be in the process of going the same route
Was Twitter ever "successful"? I suppose it depends on your definition of the term.
Popular before Elon? Yes
Profitable? No
Popular after Elon? Yes
Profitable? TBD
Popular before Elon? Yes
Profitable? No
Popular after Elon? Yes
Profitable? TBD
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True, but I think Musk is figuring out how to run Twitter without running into the ground. That said, he did say that the purchase of Twitter wasn’t from a business standpoint, though that may be a goal of his.
Also, Meta let go of 11,000 employees. That’s a lot of people.
11k is certainly a large number, but if you look at how many people work there (76,000) it represents only 15% of the workforce, where as Twitter effectively laid off 72% of their workforce (when you factor in both employees and contractors and that silly ultimatum).
I'll venture that Meta had a plan in how to handle the reductions, where as for twitter. Some contractors were literally updating code right up until to the point where they were unable to save their work. Even their managers were unaware of the terminations.
The worst may be over for Twitter, at least in terms of employees, but I don't see how they'll be able to win back advertisers - at least quick enough to keep paying the bills.
Edit: corrected the percentages as I didn't include the ultimatum in my calculation
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It will survive, but more so as another Parler or Truth Social sort of thing.
The mainstream appeal of a free for all of toxicity is not there…for users or advertisers
The mainstream appeal of a free for all of toxicity is not there…for users or advertisers
Nah, it won't end up like those platforms. Most likely a lot of the government officials/etc give their accounts to someone else to manage very static, people in a certain segment don't like that on both sides, get bored, and leave.
They have plenty of teenagers and twenty-somethings/people not interested in talking solely about political issues to advertise to. There's a lot of better stuff happening on there that activism/political Twitter doesn't pay attention to.
They have plenty of teenagers and twenty-somethings/people not interested in talking solely about political issues to advertise to. There's a lot of better stuff happening on there that activism/political Twitter doesn't pay attention to.
Every time people like Musk bring up how they want to create an "ultimate unlimited free-speech zone" they seem to forget that plenty of sites with that setup already exist (parler, gab, truth social), it's just that normal people don't want to hang out on them because they're awful
Ah, let me clarify. Twitter is not *just* software and all the folks I called out are needed *in addition* to the dwindling few engineers who are still there. I’d also you need folks in Product, UX, and several other disciplines before you even begin approaching a functional company (most of whom have left Twitter.)
Plus, a lot of functionality is effectively invisible to users (which is a good thing) and if you’ve never worked on a planet scale service like Twitter, Amazon, Google, etc, you might be surprised at just how many wildly talented people it takes to create and maintain something as “simple” as, say, serving search results for a given vertical (eg “news”) within a search engine (which Twitter is/has). Not only do you have to prioritize relevance using metrics like NDCG, you have to factor in freshness, SPAM, malware, illegal content (including some truly horrific stuff that is illegal to not just serve but index), personally identifiable information, etc. And then you layer on laws like GDPR and California Privacy (thankfully), but which add more engineering complexity. And, of course, you still have to deal with penetration attacks, hackers (both inside and out), and state agencies who may operate at an ISP or backbone level.
And that’s just a tiny sliver of some of the challenges a service like Twitter faces. All that to say Twitter needs a lot more people than it has to survive and I don’t know a single qualified person who would consider working there.
Twitter imo, was in need of a change. Elon Musk came in like a tornado. It certainly can’t end up worse than it was.
Well, perhaps he wanted to adjust to how the moderation was being used so it would apply to all people equally, instead of of the moderation being applied to one social and political side, and since Twitter is more well known, more people might want to come back onto Twitter.
This.
and he will have spent $44 billion dollars to do it.
A single human being wrecked twitter.
users per day (if we can even believe him about such things) does not matter.
Ad Dollars per day is all that matters.
And half the advertisers are already gone,
expect another half to drop once he completes the transition to Twitter-Gab.
97% of their revenue comes from ad dollars.
Any come back without those advertisers returning is just another way of saying, Twitter will return to glory, 'cause Musk*
*No real facts, just 'cause Musk.
Ad Dollars per day is all that matters.
And half the advertisers are already gone,
expect another half to drop once he completes the transition to Twitter-Gab.
97% of their revenue comes from ad dollars.
Any come back without those advertisers returning is just another way of saying, Twitter will return to glory, 'cause Musk*
*No real facts, just 'cause Musk.
Moderator Note:
Please continue the discussion in one of the relevant Twitter threads in the Political News section.
Please continue the discussion in one of the relevant Twitter threads in the Political News section.
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