[frontman1988]

Elon showed with Twitter how you don't need hordes of engineers to run a company. He laid off 90% of the staff and still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise). More engineers lead to more useless bullshit being created(like at Google). A lean mean team seems the way to go.

[thinkingtoilet]

Twitter is facing mounting debt, large quarterly loses, and lost tens of billions of dollars in valuation. I wouldn't use that as a success story.

From the WSJ, so no complaining about liberal bias.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-elon-musks-twitter-faces-mo...

[linuxftw]

All of that is true, but it was true before Elon took over, now they just have fewer employees to pay, so if they can turn the advertising back around, they'll be in a better cashflow situation.

[manuelabeledo]

> ... now they just have fewer employees to pay, so if they can turn the advertising back around, they'll be in a better cashflow situation

They cut ~$1B in operating expenses, to go from $4.73B to $3.31B in advertising revenue, and forecasts don't look much better [0]

What has Twitter left to offer? They don't have the manpower to add new functionality, and they are bleeding advertising money.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/271337/twitters-advertis...

[linuxftw]

Twitter could have fired nobody and the advertising revenue would have still declined, those two things were mostly unrelated.

I've never personally believed in Twitter as a business model, so you're preaching to the choir there. As far as innovation, though, Elon has stated he wants X to be the 'everything app' similar to whatever it is they use in China, in particular payments.

[manuelabeledo]

> Twitter could have fired nobody and the advertising revenue would have still declined, those two things were mostly unrelated.

Unrelated in the short term. In the long term, I disagree.

Twitter is not that interesting of an app that users are flocking to it, nor it is so fundamentally different from any of its competitors and essential as a social network, that it would have a captive audience.

Twitter user base peaked in 2022. There haven't been any new major features, no concrete plans, but regardless, they have not enough manpower to implement them even if they wanted to.

> As far as innovation, though, Elon has stated he wants X to be the 'everything app' similar to whatever it is they use in China, in particular payments.

Good luck with that. People in the US, and especially the EU, don't like to have their payment apps linked to their social media. It's not like big tech hasn't tried already, e.g. Google Wallet, Facebook Pay, SnapCash, etc.

East Asia runs on a different gear. They have their own "everything apps", e.g. Kakao, Line, WeChat. Musk is not going to convince them to switch, that's for sure, and I highly doubt he would succeed where so many others have failed, definitely not with a withering platform like Twitter.

[oceanplexian]

Yeah the whole everything app/banking app concept is pushing is bizarre to me.

Why wouldn’t everyone use Apple Pay? And as successful as Elon has been in his other companies, is it wise to go up head on against Apple, literally one of the most valuable companies in the world? Making Twitter into a payment app sounds like one of the worst ideas I could possibly think of.

[linuxftw]

I'm not trying to argue that Twitter will be successful. Only that none of their current problems (eg, profits) were caused by the layoffs.

[lesuorac]

> Twitter could have fired nobody and the advertising revenue would have still declined, those two things were mostly unrelated.

They're not unrelated. Advertisers like to know that their ads work; you need staff to do that.

Look at how much tailored the FaceBook ads were vs Twitter [1]. Advertisers would be sticking with Twitter if they thought the ads were worth it.

> Facebook targeting allows advertisers to drill down, ensuring your ad is targeted at those most interested in your ads’ content.

> The Facebook ad targeting based on interests looked like this:

> Science > Mari Smith > Joel Comm > Social science > HootSuite > Post Planner > Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn > Kim Garst > Sprout Social > Social Media Examiner > Buffer

> Twitter’s targeting is not quite as refined, but we targeted these keywords:

> instagrammarketing > socialmediamarketing > socialmediaexaminer

[1]: https://www.agorapulse.com/social-media-lab/twitter-ads-cpc-...

[linuxftw]

Facebook's features really don't have much to do with advertisers leaving due to twitter firing a bunch of employees.

[HDThoreaun]

Twitter targeting has always been ass though. All the employees they had pre elon were unable to improve it over a decade plus.

[chii]

> They don't have the manpower to add new functionality

or may be they dont need new functionality. It works fine as it is today.

What twitter needs is revenue sources, and i don't see how they are going to get it.

[acdha]

You’re leaving out the massive amount of debt he added to the company as part of the buyout. That means they need to do something like triple their most profitable quarter just to be where they were before the buyout.

[Jensson]

But that has nothing to do with the layoffs.

[acdha]

Nobody said it did? I was responding to a claim that they could end up in a better financial situation because they have fewer staff, which would be an easier argument if there weren’t so many extra billions in debt on the balance sheet now.

[thinkingtoilet]

It was not. They are losing far more money because they removed the content moderation team and advertisers don't like their brands showing up next to questionable content. The buyout added a ton of debt to Twitter. It's far worse now.

[lhnz]

These issues are caused by (1) the buy-out by Elon Musk involving a large amount of debt, and (2) Elon Musk annoying "woke" advertisers who have subsequently deserted the platform.

The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs.

[thinkingtoilet]

I wouldn't expect too much change right away after a lay off that size. Any decent engineering team will have processes, workflows, CI/CD, etc... in place and if all the engineers went away today, most places would still run just fine for a while, maybe even a long time if the systems are set up correctly. The question becomes what happens next? How quickly will they be able to leverage new advantageous technologies? What happens when that rare thing breaks and you have no institutional knowledge? How do you solve difficult problems like content moderation? I'm curious to see where Twitter will be a couple years from now in terms of how it's engineered. I would expect a slow decline in expectations and results.

[lhnz]

You are right in theory. But instead of trying to predict the future I'm trying to be descriptive about what has changed so far (very little) and why (mostly advertisers + debt driven by buy-out).

[ctvo]

> The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs.

Are new features being added? Honest question -- I don't use the product.

Keeping the lights on for a product with 10% of the workforce isn't shocking or new. We do it in this industry all the time. Can you iterate and ship with 10% of the workforce? That's much more impressive.

[lhnz]

Features are both being added and removed. Actually, the main difference is that more feature are being added than were before, but this is being done in a more haphazard way. Sometimes things appear to break but are then fixed. It's not awful though, is what I'm saying.

[HDThoreaun]

I think the point is that twitter doesnt need new features. Twitter can just be twitter.

[kypro]

You're getting downvoted for this, but factually what you're saying is correct. He did lay of 90% of the staff and although people have claimed Twitter will die any minute, it hasn't.

Whether or not a lean team is the way to go perhaps remains to be seen, but what I'd say is that my anecdotal opinion on this is that the majority of engineers are a liability and assuming that 10x more engineers means 10x more work done is incorrect. Most engineers can build stuff, but they also add complexity and require hand holding. Both suck time from the most productive engineers.

A team of 10 excellent engineers is easily better than a team of 100 good engineers, in my opinion.

[itsoktocry]

>He did lay of 90% of the staff and although people have claimed Twitter will die any minute, it hasn't.

It lost 3/4 of its value, partially because it's losing advertisers, partially because they fired everyone outside of engineering.

I'm an avid Twitter user to this day; do you think it's thriving, just because the website is still up? It has more spam, bots and porn than ever.

[abledon]

increasing growth most places in world

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1743028102446408026

heres a total feature map of what was released in 2023:

https://twitter.com/enriquebrgn/status/1740950767325024387

I think thats definitely a signal that the B and C teams werent needed, considering they cut 90% of staff LOL.

As for the bots, AI is making it easier than ever to bypass those systems. CogVLM is just sitting there menacingly on github https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM

[manuelabeledo]

> He laid off 90% of the staff and still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise).

This is debatable.

Twitter hasn't added any meaningful functionality in recent years, which is fine if you think your product can survive stagnation for the foreseeable future. I wouldn't think so, but who knows.

Also, random Twitter functionality seems to be broken once a month, more or less. Last time I checked, new signups were having trouble following accounts and posting, which is as essential as it could be for Twitter to work.

[syspec]

I think to most people, twitter is fine and was fine with only its core product.

[digital_sawzall]

The core products of social media platforms are the advertising systems!

After telling the advertisers to go 'F themselves', those paying customers are leaving in droves plus the ad ecosystem is one of the worst in the industry.

The only alternative is to get enough paying users. Good luck.

[manuelabeledo]

"Most people" are the users. Users (mostly) aren't paying for the platform, advertisers are.

[lesuorac]

> still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise)

It's not though. I assume you're trying to claim Twitters only problem is the Advertisers leaving and that the platform is fine but that's not the case.

Lets ignore all visible technical problems such as outages or broken features that have happened since the purchase.

You have to compare Twitter to FaceBook. Both of them have had similar outrage by Advertisers for the respective companies actions. However, Advertisers keep coming back to FaceBook because of the engineering. FaceBook has much better targeting and also staff that interacts with the Advertisers. Twitter has absolutely horrendous targeting; Jews don't want their 'buy a Torah' ad next to a pro-gaza post not just because they disagree with the post but also because that somebody isn't their target audience. This is an engineering problem; if Twitter had better engineering the Advertisers wouldn't be leaving.

[HDThoreaun]

Twitter targeting wasnt any better with 10x as many employees. Its ad system has always largely sucked, Elon was just the push advertisers needed to get out.

[ralphc]

The smaller staff may be ok for maintaining an existing Twitter, with feature tweaks, but could you build a Twitter up from scratch with the amount of people they have now?