The Twitter Debacle

[Sandy Bridge]

The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. When people pass each other in the halls, we’re told that the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?”

 

Entirely believable.  I've been on a team where no one was really happy, although it was much, much less unhappy than Twitter, and people became very open about interviewing.  "I have a dental appointment this afternoon" was our not-so-secret code for "I have an interview" - or occasionally an actual dental appointment - and eventually even the managers in the area would ask, "how'd your interview go?" if they saw you in the elevator lobby.

 

Twitter is probably like that now - as long as the goons aren't around, no one is going to judge you for looking elsewhere.  More likely they'll ask for a reference.

[Etern4l]

Well, once Elon entered the organization, they were no longer "principal engineers" anyway. The effective job title became "AMSotPEE": A Mere Shadow of The Principal Engineer Elon. 

 

[Reciever]

Pretty much every place I worked at I was very open about job hunting; wasn't flaunting more of a chance for them to find a replacement. 

 

From what I hear leaving a company is much more hostile than in pretty much any other country where 1-3 months is the time for notice of departure where as here in the US its only two weeks and often shown the door the day of submitting notice. 

 

Disorganization around Tech is much less structured than I would like to see, mostly because a lot of companies don't have procedures in place, and if so don't enforce them. Couple that with an abused salary structure and Tech generally becomes a regrettable choice in the moment. 

[Etern4l]

Yep, tech is going downhill and it's only going to get worse unfortunately. 

[Mr. Fox]

I love it when accountability runs full circle and bad people get pantsed in public. I hope they go to jail after the smoke clears. They really deserve to. If you don't want to watch the entire clip, the really fun stuff that makes me happy starts at about 9:35. I just love Marjorie Taylor Greene... that lady rocks. She rips them a new posterior orifice and I thoroughly enjoyed watching it.

 

[Aaron44126]

At risk of being fired, Twitter engineers have created a "power user multiplier" for their "algorithm" and applied it to Elon Musk's account, to make sure that his tweets get high visibility, which is why he has been dominating many users' "For You" feed.  https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets-algorithm-changes-twitter

[Aaron44126]

Here's a new one...

If you use SMS for two-factor authentication for Twitter, pay up for Twitter Blue or they will deactivate this feature on March 20.  ...You can still use a physical key or authenticator app (which you should be using anyway) without paying extra.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/17/23605073/twitter-blue-charge-sms-2fa

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2023/an-update-on-two-factor-authentication-using-sms-on-twitter

[Aaron44126]

Elon Musk says the Twitter "algorithm" will be open sourced next week...

(Something he "promised" to do back when he originally announced his intent to buy Twitter.)

 

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1628122949185159168

 

[Etern4l]

How is open sourcing the algorithm going to help, apart from greatly facilitating the development of fake news bots?

[Aaron44126]

2 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

How is open sourcing the algorithm going to help, apart from greatly facilitating the development of fake news bots?

 

Doesn't make any sense to me either.

🤷‍♂️

(But it will be interesting to look at ...)

[Reciever]

51 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

How is open sourcing the algorithm going to help, apart from greatly facilitating the development of fake news bots?

For the same reason anything goes open source I would presume. It can be identified, though I imagine partisan players will have more fun on that front for the most part. 

[Etern4l]

1 hour ago, Reciever said:

For the same reason anything goes open source I would presume. It can be identified, though I imagine partisan players will have more fun on that front for the most part. 

 

There may be are a number of different reasons for which a company would consider open-sourcing proprietary software, and they don't apply in all circumstances, e.g. iD Software open sourced Quake code mostly for educational purposes when it became completely obsolete. Sounds like this is more of a combination of a desire to engage community and make Twitter a "people's platform", a publicity stunt really, with a potential to engage some free external resources, given the systematic extermination of the internal talent pool...

 

The flip-side of course is that this algorithm can probably be considered Twitter's secret sauce, i.e. IP, therefore by open-sourcing it he is destroying some of that value, and informing potential competing platforms. That's of course assuming that what is released (if it is released), is the actual current algorithm. I know, I know - Elon promised, but on the other hand Elon is Elon :)

[Aaron44126]

1 hour ago, Etern4l said:

...with a potential to engage some free external resources, given the systematic extermination of the internal talent pool...

 

I was wondering about this too.  Will he post it on GitHub?  Will they take pull requests?  It could be a way to "improve" the algorithm without having to pay Twitter SWEs to work on it.

 

...Though really, nothing Elon Musk does with Twitter makes much sense so I hesitate to speculate on anything.  I wouldn't be surprised if he releases "something" as open source but it's just a part of a bigger system and largely uninteresting.  He does have a propensity to rush things through, and with news suddenly that this will be available "next week" I sort of doubt that Twitter folks have had much time to put together a nice or well-documented package.

[Etern4l]

24 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

I sort of doubt that Twitter folks have had much time to put together a nice or well-documented package.

/**

The Twitter Algo v 1.2

 

RTFC hardcore until at least 4a.m.

 

- Elon

 

*/

 

(Edit: apparently, most of Twitter is written in Ruby. Good luck finding Ruby devs to read that stuff I guess, adds another level of weirdness to the mass firings)

[Reciever]

1 hour ago, Etern4l said:

 

There may be are a number of different reasons for which a company would consider open-sourcing proprietary software, and they don't apply in all circumstances, e.g. iD Software open sourced Quake code mostly for educational purposes when it became completely obsolete. Sounds like this is more of a combination of a desire to engage community and make Twitter a "people's platform", a publicity stunt really, with a potential to engage some free external resources, given the systematic extermination of the internal talent pool...

 

The flip-side of course is that this algorithm can probably be considered Twitter's secret sauce, i.e. IP, therefore by open-sourcing it he is destroying some of that value, and informing potential competing platforms. That's of course assuming that what is released (if it is released), is the actual current algorithm. I know, I know - Elon promised, but on the other hand Elon is Elon :)

 

I doubt there is much value in the algorithm anymore, Twitter was just among the first to do it and enter the mainstream. 

 

I would like to say it's entertaining to watch but it's just continue affirmation of what looks to be tribal nonsense, which is more concerning to me. 

[Etern4l]

29 minutes ago, Reciever said:

 

I doubt there is much value in the algorithm anymore, Twitter was just among the first to do it and enter the mainstream. 

 

I would like to say it's entertaining to watch but it's just continue affirmation of what looks to be tribal nonsense, which is more concerning to me. 

 

A lot of social media as well as the content of reddit and various forums is tribal, for the very simple reason that most humans are are wired to be strongly tribal. Thankfully, there is also public space for well formulated and community-moderated statements of fact free of tribalism: Wikipedia. 

 

While I'm not entirely sure what the exact scope of the algo in question is, it does seem to be at the core of Twitter operations, so normally the complete implementation might contain non-trivial fine detail of competitive value. Perhaps another reason it might be open sourced (as hinted at by the tweet above), is to just reveal it because he plans to deprecate it, but also with this many leavers, any material IP is on the street already. 

[Reciever]

11 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

 

A lot of social media as well as the content of reddit and various forums is tribal, for the very simple reason that most humans are are wired to be strongly tribal. Thankfully, there is also public space for well formulated and community-moderated statements of fact devoid of tribalism: Wikipedia. 

 

While I'm not entirely sure what the exact  scope of the algo in question is, it does seem to be at the core of Twitter operations, so normally the complete implementation might contain non-trivial fine detail of competitive value. Perhaps another reason it might be open sourced (as hinted at by the tweet above), is to just reveal it because he plans to deprecate it, but also with this many leavers, any material IP is on the street already. 

Im aware, however ideas and arguments based on tribalism are typically nonsense.

 

I dont really use Wikipedia often enough to declare it anything, its a good aggregate for references.

 

As for the open-source, its likely early days.

 

 

[Etern4l]

35 minutes ago, Reciever said:

Im aware, however ideas and arguments based on tribalism are typically nonsense.

 

Particularly from a broader point of reference yes, but people can't do that easily (e.g. change the scope of one's 'tribe' to 'humanity'), if at all. A grand global cause, ideally one that would not involve a threat of mass extinction, would help with that, but none is in sight at present unfortunately and things are regressing overall. I'm not sure Twitter is helping, at any rate - it seems to be doing less lately, which is probably for the best.

[Reciever]

12 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

 

Particularly from a broader point of reference yes, but people can't do that easily (e.g. change the scope of one's 'tribe' to 'humanity'), if at all. A grand global cause, ideally one that would not involve a threat of mass extinction, would help with that, but none is in sight at present unfortunately and things are regressing overall. I'm not sure Twitter is helping, at any rate - it seems to be doing less lately, which is probably for the best.

I guess it's a luxury of an introvert, I keep the hype at arms length which affords me a better chance at not getting swept into it. 

 

World needs more humor, and less assumptions. 

[Etern4l]

7 hours ago, Reciever said:

World needs more humor, and less assumptions. 

 

Some areas just need more vodka apparently (or much much less, whichever is easier).

[Aaron44126]

Twitter's Slack (primary internal communication tool) has been down since Wednesday, and it was apparently intentionally disabled by someone at Twitter (even though Twitter has also been shirking the bill so it would have probably been cut off eventually anyway), making the remaining Twitter engineers' jobs even more awesome...

 

Twitter shut off its internal Slack, and now ‘everyone is barely working’

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/24/23613288/twitter-slack-jira-outages-performance-degradation

(Also includes some notes on the state of getting the "algorithm" ready for open sourcing.)

[Etern4l]

Feels like this calls for a neologism of a synonymous nature... 

 

to elon someone/something (up) 

 

Examples:

 

Oh man, we are really eloned now! 

 

The company was eloned up beyond repair during the takeover. 

[Sandy Bridge]

Twitter decided it still had too many employees: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/twitter-payments-chief-is-out-as-layoffs-cut-10-of-twitter-staff-report-says/

 

More engineers, product managers, and data scientists are out at Twitter, as another round of layoffs has slashed 10 percent of the remaining staff, The New York Times reported. Multiple sources familiar with the matter told the Times that 200 employees were affected.

 

...

Among those impacted is Esther Crawford, who enthusiastically embraced Twitter CEO Elon Musk's vision of Twitter 2.0 and proved to be so hardcore that she became the chief executive of Twitter Payments, Financial Times reported

 

Definitely not a good sign if even Extremely Hardcore employees are being let go!  Although Slack going down might be the worse sign.  Always choose where to work in tech based on whether they have a working Slack instance.

[Aaron44126]

What happens when you put one engineer on the API project.

 

How a single engineer brought down Twitter

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627875/twitter-outage-how-it-happened-engineer-api-shut-down

 

(...Though, apparently they have their Slack instance back.)

[Reciever]

Source?