The Twitter Debacle

[Reciever]

I dont mind working extremely long hours as long as I am compensated for the time, but I have essentially, 0 social life, and introverted enough to be able to not engage in society beyond required elements. Im also aware that my perspective is not in the majority. 

 

I think we all knew that in the event of the sale finalizing of Twitter, what would follow would be a huge mess. As it appears Musk's principles (or lack thereof) differ quite a bit from the principles (or lack thereof) of uhh lets say the "Old Guard"? 

 

I dont use twitter personally, probably not a good look considering how we have one for NBT lol

[Etern4l]

Musk's takeover is essentially an act of war on Twitter. What his actions are conveying is that Twitter is/was an enemy of itself, and his value proposition is in being able to come in and wipe out Twitter as we know it. The new Twitter will be run by employees who are happy to work 12h/day, ideally 7 days a week, for above average pay, but more importantly are on the same page. The bulk of the work will be done by volunteers on the Internet anyway, and those free resources will be given a bit more leeway in terms of working hours.

 

The antics around angry firings, "work ethics", and "code quality" tests are likely just designed to cast Twitter employees as precisely "old guard" comprised of poor coders and shirkers.

 

I very much doubt the best of the best would want to work there, simply because Musk doesn't seem to pay enough and the work regimen on offer is not sustainable for very long - he admitted this in interviews.

 

Check out glassdoor and indeed reviews for Tesla to get an idea. Dreadful place to work from what I can see, doesn't seem like they pay big bucks in exchange for those long hours, and obviously the product is not cheap. This is how you become the richest man in the world.

Leveraged buyouts are nothing new, but this seems like a particularly aggressive example - I feel sorry for the people caught up. Will be interesting to see if this blows up in his face and costs him his "the amazing Iron Man, saviour of the world" persona he cleverly constructed.

 

 

[Reciever]

As with all things, time will tell. I doubt Twitter will go anywhere, but wouldn't be surprised if it collapses either. 

 

It interesting to watch but perhaps that's because I don't have a vested interest in what Twitter does. 

[Etern4l]

Very interesting. I was initially confused like probably most people, as there is quite a lot of misinformation out there, but now it's fairly clear to me what the agenda is. He may have at some point realised the plan is a bit too nuts, even by his standards, and may result in too much PR cost, but was committed by that point. The official story goes: poor (figuratively) overworked to the point of being eccentric but deeply good Iron Man Elon got cheated by bad Twitter people. Nice. I mean he is clever, no doubt about that.

 

Oh yeah, the plan will work on the Twitter side, but potentially the PR concerns are real. The thing is that his customer base is not really the people who would be overly concerned by exploitation of American tech workers (not to mention H1Bs), so he may be fine there too unless he wishes to expand his empire to retail.

 

Still, it just seems like the upside is overall limited, but by now I'm convinced he has some grand plans for this that we just don't see, and they probably won't be pretty.

[Aaron44126]

I think Twitter is too big to go away, but it could become something of a shell of its former self (think AOL, Yahoo!, MySpace, ...), if Elon doesn't manage to turn it around somehow.  It wouldn't happen all at once, but over the course of the next few years as users get fed up with the turmoil and move to... I dunno, TikTok?  He could probably find devs to work his crazy long hours for modest pay but I doubt he'll get very many good devs; anyone with chops would be able to pick up a more reasonable job without too much trouble.  (Whenever we try to hire a new dev at work, it takes some time to find a good one, the market is very competitive.)  Not sure how he's going to handle Twitter losing gobs and gobs of money, both from the interest payments on his debt and also the fact that the bulk of advertisers seem to have abandoned the platform.  I guess bankruptcy and a sort of "reset" is probably in the cards.  He's already mentioned that.

 

I don't really care too much what happens to Twitter either way since I don't use it either, but this is just a fascinating situation to observe. 🙂 I used to have a much higher level of respect for Elon Musk.  I've heard him talk about Tesla and battery technology and rockets and various things, and the guy is clearly very smart.  Just somewhere in the past few years, his ego has gotten a bit out of control; he thinks that he knows better than everyone and "above the rules" to some degree, and it's starting to bite him.

 

I wonder if there will be other consequences for Musk down the line.  I mean, for example, he committed to a deal and then decided that it was a bad idea and spent months trying his darndest to get out of it, only to go through with it in the end when it became abundantly clear that he wasn't going to get his way in court.  He drug the company that he was planning to acquire through the mud on the way there (not to mention what is happening to it now post-acquisition).  Will anyone trust him if he says that he wants to buy another company?

[Reciever]

Not to derail, but I have been more interested in the recent reintroduction of the Doom Eternal debacle. That situation kind of bummed me out overall.

[Etern4l]

20 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

I wonder if there will be other consequences for Musk down the line.  I mean, for example, he committed to a deal and then decided that it was a bad idea and spent months trying his darndest to get out of it, only to go through with it in the end when it became abundantly clear that he wasn't going to get his way in court.  He drug the company that he was planning to acquire through the mud on the way there (not to mention what is happening to it now post-acquisition).  Will anyone trust him if he says that he wants to buy another company?

 

Good question, but that's what hostile takeovers are for, which is what this essentially is. Twitter did not want to do a deal with him, although they sold out in the end. Makes me wonder if the whole thing with pulling out wasn't orchestrated. If you're going to raze a public platform of this magnitude, you better have some good rationale in the public view.

 

BTW I suspect the motivation behind the deal is not immediately financial for him and the private investors who chipped in. They want to control a major global source of information to some end which probably doesn't involve having any pesky "old guard" free-thinking operators trying to suppress hate speech etc. on the platform. It's funny how hard it is to find people who actually use Twitter, but it's always all over the media. Information is power, and that's probably worth more than a 100 Twitters. There you have it folks.

[saturnotaku]

A lot of the people butthurt about Elon cleaning house at Twitter don't seem to have much to say about Amazon, Facebook, Lyft, Salesforce, Cisco, Stripe, Microsoft, and others making significant workforce cuts.

[Aaron44126]

57 minutes ago, saturnotaku said:

A lot of the people butthurt about Elon cleaning house at Twitter don't seem to have much to say about Amazon, Facebook, Lyft, Salesforce, Cisco, Stripe, Microsoft, and others making significant workforce cuts.

 

Yeah, it's the spectacle, combined with the fact that these other companies seem to be axing employees with the normal ebb and flow of business... while Twitter's cuts are coming from terrifically bad decision making.

 

—————

 

Robin Wheeler, Twitter’s head of ad sales, seems to have left the company yet again, just over a week after Elon Musk reportedly had to convince her not to resign.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/18/23467324/twitter-ad-sales-lead-robin-wheeler-reportedly-fired-salute

 

I'd really like to see a real count of how many employees Twitter has now.

[serpro69]

5 hours ago, saturnotaku said:

A lot of the people butthurt about Elon cleaning house at Twitter don't seem to have much to say about Amazon, Facebook, Lyft, Salesforce, Cisco, Stripe, Microsoft, and others making significant workforce cuts.

 

Big-tech cuts were pretty predictable, weren't they? They rode on a lot of free money and extremely high demand during pandemic, had to basically over-hire to support that demand. Now demand is dwindling, with inflation being high and all, so they're looking to cut costs. I think I read somewhere that half (or more?) of these BigTech-cuts are also operational (marketing, customer support, etc). And software engineers are still in high demand it would seem (which isn't really surprising). Also, it looks like these cuts haven't seriously affected the US job market overall (link one, and another one).
I also read sometime ago about how a lot of startups were able to hire a bunch of software engineers that they would otherwise have a very hard time getting.

IMO, as @Aaron44126 says, it's within the normal flow of business for the most part, considering current state of things. The problem is, in tech you often loose your best people during mass-layoffs, so good luck to "FAANGs and friends" getting those people back when they're going to need them again a year or two from now. 

[Etern4l]

7 hours ago, saturnotaku said:

A lot of the people butthurt about Elon cleaning house at Twitter don't seem to have much to say about Amazon, Facebook, Lyft, Salesforce, Cisco, Stripe, Microsoft, and others making significant workforce cuts.

 

A lot of people might be, although we are just a group of sophisticated individuals - with (by declaration) no direct exposure to Musk - discussing. Nobody is butthurting here.

 

Now, folks referring to the guy as "Elon", as if he was their friend or something, is one of his fairly amazing PR achievements. He's kind of like this "Boris" guy in the UK. Very charismatic, a bit eccentric, but essentially a despicable and rotten individual who significantly damaged the country.

 

Not being able to discern the glaring difference between 10%ish cuts where even the most pompous CEOs come out expressing deep regrets etc., and this hostile takeover sh*tshow resulting in a significant media company being basically bulldozered is quite an "achievement".

[Mr. Fox]

I cancelled my Twatter account after the Thought-Nazi censoring started with all of the irrational orange man bad emotard haters. I created a new account after Musk stepped into oust them. I don't use Twatter or Facepoot for the reason previously mentioned, but wanted to show my support for his hostile takeover of the woke libtard echo chamber. 

8 hours ago, saturnotaku said:

A lot of the people butthurt about Elon cleaning house at Twitter don't seem to have much to say about Amazon, Facebook, Lyft, Salesforce, Cisco, Stripe, Microsoft, and others making significant workforce cuts.

All of the retarded Tech Giants get a pass for their intolerant wokeness and lopsided political correctness.

[Etern4l]

It's interesting that while I probably disagree with you to some extent, I don't have to resort to these tirades etc.

Anyway, I see social media as a problem, but probably for different reasons. Should some moderation apply? Likely so, at least in cases of extreme abuse, and the reason is that unfortunately most people are not sophisticated rational agents, and thus very easily manipulated. In fact, they are basically helpless in the face of sophisticated brain-washing technology. Needless to say, you don't want foreign actors to get significantly involved either. Is Musk the right person to be in charge of this? Ridiculous. Is Mark Z.? Evidently not either. Check this out, the guy who helped elect Obama and his successor explaining how it's done:

 

 

It's not a hoax, it's not fake - it's the actual guy speaking up in public on how to break democracy. Unbelievable hubris. It was a huge scandal, and CA has been shut down after the FB data breach came out, but I'm sure this guy and others are continuing the work underground.

 

That's what it's all about. Divide, manipulate, and conquer. 

[serpro69]

Wow. Not surprising, but still unbelievably insane. Unfortunately it's very true that a lot of people are easily manipulated by social media.

 

On a more "positive" (just being sarcastic of course, I don't really care one way or the other) note, it seems that Musk has started a Twitter poll on whether to reinstate Trump.

[Etern4l]

10 minutes ago, serpro69 said:

Wow. Not surprising, but still unbelievably insane. Unfortunately it's very true that a lot of people are easily manipulated by social media.

 

On a more "positive" (just being sarcastic of course, I don't really care one way or the other) note, it seems that Musk has started a Twitter poll on whether to reinstate Trump.

 

That's so meaningful. A Twitter poll is definitely not easily manipulated by fake accounts and bots. I mean it's a joke. On the other hand, should this guy or another have the power to ban an account from the platform? Probably not either. There should be a legal framework around it, with a right to recourse. I am not sure Web 3.0 blockchain-based decentralization is the solution either.

[Aaron44126]

14 minutes ago, serpro69 said:

Musk has started a Twitter poll on whether to reinstate Trump.

 

So much for the "moderation council" made up of people with "widely diverse viewpoints".  (Or does he think maybe the entire Twitter population qualifies to serve as the council?)

 

The fun thing is, it's impossible to tell if his Twitter poll is a serious thing for him or a joke.  😕

[Etern4l]

2 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

So much for the "moderation council" made up of people with "widely diverse viewpoints".  (Or does he think maybe the entire Twitter population qualifies to serve as the council?)

 

The fun thing is, it's impossible to tell if his Twitter poll is a serious thing for him or a joke.  😕

 

Another good one was "The bird is freed".... More like captured by an individual who is increasingly looking like a sophisticated bad actor. For him to be able to legitimately claim the bird is freed, he would have to turn it into a fully decentralized solution, with him ending up having zero control. I am pretty sure that's not the idea here. And again, that would be hard to get to work without creating a bot/foreign troll paradise. The underlying assumption is that most people are stupid and won't be able to see the ruse, which unfortunately is probably correct.

 

  

2 hours ago, serpro69 said:

Wow. Not surprising, but still unbelievably insane. Unfortunately it's very true that a lot of people are easily manipulated by social media.

 

On a more "positive" (just being sarcastic of course, I don't really care one way or the other) note, it seems that Musk has started a Twitter poll on whether to reinstate Trump.

 

Shocking even if kind of expected, isn't it? It's kind of impressive YT didn't take that down under some pretence. Perhaps there is a bit of "Don't be evil" left in there.

 

Unfortunately fair to assume there would be people who, when shown the video, would either not really comprehend content and it's significance, or just reject / rationalise it away as a coping strategy upon realising they have been the primary target here.

 

Here is another one - an interview recorded right after the 2016 election, where he goes into some details of the methodology, and their involvement in the successful campaign:

 

 

The level of ingenious stealth privacy violation is astounding, but what many people don't realise is just how serious the consequences are. It's not about whether you receive nappy or Budweiser ads. 5000 data points on every individual in the US, available commercially to billionaires everywhere.

 

Again, kudos to YT for not deleting.

[Mr. Fox]

16 hours ago, Reciever said:

I dont mind working extremely long hours as long as I am compensated for the time, but I have essentially, 0 social life, and introverted enough to be able to not engage in society beyond required elements. Im also aware that my perspective is not in the majority. 

Same here, mostly. If you mean majority in the context of the Twitter zombie horde you would be correct. In the context of mainstream, decent citizenry that have not submitted themselves for reprogramming, you're squarely in the normal majority. They want you to think you're in a minority, because people who are concerned about whether or not they are popular will be influenced and subdued by the fear that they are not.

 

They create a perception of power and greatness by gathering together and excluding or silencing those who think for themselves and won't be intimidated and won't back down on expressing an opposing view.

 

That's why the liberal social media dictatorship banned so many. Having rational members that are willing to go against the flow is a serious threat to their agenda.

[Etern4l]

17 hours ago, Reciever said:

I dont mind working extremely long hours

 

2 hours ago, Mr. Fox said:

Same here, mostly.

 

I would suggest that smart, hard-working people have better options than working for Musk, and many wouldn't want to work for him on principle given the recent developments alone, but also taking into account the broader picture.

[serpro69]

6 hours ago, Etern4l said:

That's so meaningful. A Twitter poll is definitely not easily manipulated by fake accounts and bots. I mean it's a joke. On the other hand, should this guy or another have the power to ban an account from the platform? Probably not either. There should be a legal framework around it, with a right to recourse. I am not sure Web 3.0 blockchain-based decentralization is the solution either.

 

He seems to have forgotten about the fake accounts altogether lol. He's even bragging (?) about the poll getting 1m votes / hour, hah. 

 

Very true about about individuals (or even a company) having the power to block accounts on such platforms. I think any such platform should somehow be regulated by external parties (FCC , FTC, or some other authority ? ), especially when it comes to bans and maybe even content moderation. I also don't see decentralized blockchain-based something-something as solution; and besides blockchain has its own issues.

There's already Mastodon, for example, which is more or less a "decentralized twitter". I don't really see it being a solution to the problem though. The difference is, instead of "twitter banning Trump", you have an admin of one mastodon instance blocking another instance/user. Doesn't really help, and in some cases makes things worse, because it only affects users of the first instance that did the blocking. So if say, anyone wants to still follow Trump - they will still be able to do so; and those who don't, well why would they be following him in the first place?

 

6 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

The fun thing is, it's impossible to tell if his Twitter poll is a serious thing for him or a joke.  😕

 

Has it ever been possible to tell if his tweets are serious or not... and to think so many people blindly accept everything he tweets for truth...

 

 

39 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

Alright, let me pull mine out too: 12-16h/day + most weekends and, for better or worse, I'm sure I would be able to add value to his organisation. Fortunately I am blessed with better options than that, and given the recent developments I wouldn't want to work for him on principle.

 

THIS!

I can see how it might very easy become a challenge for him to find good people who would want to work for him, even if he stops demanding "only hardcore".

 

I've actually put a lot of overtime hours around 2017-2019 myself. But not because someone was making me do so (they actually have very strict laws about this stuff here). Rather because I had the time, didn't have anything better to do, and really believed that I could bring extra value with my spare time that I would have most likely wasted otherwise.

But if I were to work for a person like Musk, who demands insane working conditions without giving anything back, and treats everyone as sh*t on top of that. I'm pretty sure overtime work is not going to help bring a lot of extra value anyways.

[Reciever]

32 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

 

 

I would suggest that smart, hard-working people have better options than working for Musk, and many wouldn't want to work for him on principle given the recent developments alone, but also taking into account the broader picture.

This is framed as if there aren't better options? There is plenty left in the world outside of Musks domain. 

 

2 hours ago, Mr. Fox said:

Same here, mostly. If you mean majority in the context of the Twitter zombie horde you would be correct. In the context of mainstream, decent citizenry that have not submitted themselves for reprogramming, you're squarely in the normal majority. They want you to think you're in a minority, because people who are concerned about whether or not they are popular will be influenced and subdued by the fear that they are not.

 

They create a perception of power and greatness by gathering together and excluding or silencing those who think for themselves and won't be intimidated and wont back down on expressing an opposing view.

 

That's why the liberal social media dictatorship banned so many. Having rational members that are willing to go against the flow is a serious threat to their agenda.

As long as both parties agree to terms (free from duress) and engage then I don't see the issue. I'm pretty sure I am not in the majority though. I have to cite state law and verbiage of the employee handbook to argue my way out of a lunch break, if I need a minute to collect my thoughts and scope the day that's a 15 minute legally required break. 

 

My work is repetitive but requires a clear head, eating food dulls my focus in the later half so I just have some caffeine and water, neither of which requires a 30 minute time out. 

 

If I had to put a finger on the mentality its likely come out of my time in contracting as well as the framing of, my time on this earth is finite. I do not care that you are compensating me for my time, you are still wasting it. 

[Mr. Fox]

55 minutes ago, Reciever said:

This is framed as if there aren't better options? There is plenty left in the world outside of Musks domain. 

 

As long as both parties agree to terms (free from duress) and engage then I don't see the issue. I'm pretty sure I am not in the majority though. I have to cite state law and verbiage of the employee handbook to argue my way out of a lunch break, if I need a minute to collect my thoughts and scope the day that's a 15 minute legally required break. 

 

My work is repetitive but requires a clear head, eating food dulls my focus in the later half so I just have some caffeine and water, neither of which requires a 30 minute time out. 

 

If I had to put a finger on the mentality its likely come out of my time in contracting as well as the framing of, my time on this earth is finite. I do not care that you are compensating me for my time, you are still wasting it. 

I remember someone asking about the rep icons being updated. I always wish I had one of those red "100" tags. 😉

[Etern4l]

25 minutes ago, Reciever said:

This is framed as if there aren't better options? There is plenty left in the world outside of Musks domain. 

 

The earlier comments seemed to be framed in a way that suggested the person working hard feels closely aligned with Musk and his agenda, and my comments proposed an alternative viewpoint. One has nothing to do with the other. I am not quite sure if you agree, but I would be glad if you did.

 

28 minutes ago, Reciever said:

As long as both parties agree to terms (free from duress)

 

In the context of this thread, I suspect very few Twitter employees agreed to the takeover (only shareholders had a chance to have a very marginal say anyway).

To cheer leveraged buyouts is to lack first-hand experience with them from the employee's perspective (and probably run a bit short on general empathy). These are usually dire circumstances, where the company in question is suddenly being run by generic bean-counting MBAs. In this case it's way worse, as the bean-counters at least tend to maintain some level of professional business standards. Of course, one could argue the writing had been on the wall, but then due to the chaotic nature of the process it hadn't been very clear how it was all going to end, and people who had spent several years building the company probably felt quite a bit of loyalty towards it.

[Mr. Fox]

Twitter and Facebook are as much or more of a political tool of the radical extremist left than legitimate businesses. Being a major contributing tool to global misinformation and agenda-driven opinion manipulators, I am happy to see something like this come unraveled. I do feel bad for people that lost their means of supporting a family, but that could be lessened to the extent they were actually drinking the Kool-Aid rather than merely enjoying a paycheck doing what they were paid/told to do. To the extent any were thrilled with the opportunity to contribute to the cause, I honestly have no more sympathy than I would for a hit man that didn't get paid for his last assassination.

[Reciever]

25 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

 

The earlier comments seemed to be framed in a way that suggested the person working hard feels closely aligned with Musk and his agenda, and my comments proposed an alternative viewpoint. One has nothing to do with the other. I am not quite sure if you agree, but I would be glad if you did.

 

 

In the context of this thread, I suspect very few Twitter employees agreed to the takeover (only shareholders had a chance to have a very marginal say anyway).

To cheer leveraged buyouts is to lack first-hand experience with them from the employee's perspective (and probably run a bit short on general empathy). These are usually dire circumstances, where the company in question is suddenly being run by generic bean-counting MBAs. In this case it's way worse, as the bean-counters at least tend to maintain some level of professional business standards. Of course, one could argue the writing had been on the wall, but then due to the chaotic nature of the process it hadn't been very clear how it was all going to end, and people who had spent several years building the company probably felt quite a bit of loyalty towards it.

If any of my input was considered in part, or in totality to contribute to that sentiment, I do apologize. That was not my intent. What I will say is Twitter's PR facing side of "how hard people work here" has been very mixed. Its not lost of me that people who dont do much will likely have the loudest mouth while those in the grind will find it difficult to break free from their work to get some air. I enjoy working hard, but that is mostly circumstance. 

 

I dont think anyone, anywhere that have existed, currently existing or will exist has ever agreed in totality with anyone, ever. What I find strange in this era is that if you support one idea from one person, you are then an acolyte of what ever it is they do. I know that as humans we lack the I/O to ingest every nuance of every situation in real time and due to this we like for things to remain simple. What I fear is, oversimplification due to the lack of desire to spend the time we have on every single topic. Its also not lost on me that I tend to get stuck in the weeds of many topics I engage with, which makes me frustrating to talk to. I have had people scream at me, yell at me and belittle me on multiple occasions, 

 

As far as agreeing or disagreeing to the Musk purchase of Twitter, thats a risk of being a publicly traded company. Even if that risk is low, it does not mean it doesnt exist. In the event of those buyouts the only thing you can likely put money on, is that change will occur. This can either be because liquidating the IP is worth more than the purchase or someone thinks they can do something with the existing IP. Said employees had quite a long window to consider the facts on the ground before the sale was finalized. 

 

 

 

I would also like to Thank everyone for keeping this topic respectful (in large part), I love a good discussion even for topics that could easily fly off the handle. There have been plenty of chances for this thread to go straight into the political isle, and I do appreciate everyone's civility.