[VirusNewbie]

>3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make.

Did he? Their revenue is way down, and they've had a lot of downtime. Unlike Netflix, they make most of their money on ads, not subscriptions, so more downtime is more money lost.

They're also on a huge hiring spree right now. Go look at how many roles they're hiring for. I don't think they'd be hiring that much if everything was fine and dandy.

[philwelch]

The loss of ad revenue isn’t a consequence of downtime or losing staff, and I wouldn’t agree they’ve had “a lot” of downtime. Most of the drop in ad revenue is a consequence of content management decisions that seem to be a matter of principle for the company’s new owner.

It’s strange to see hiring as an indication that a company is doing poorly; regardless, obviously Twitter is in a position where they’ve needed to eliminate much of their headcount and replace much of the rest.

[_jal]

> The loss of ad revenue isn’t a consequence of downtime or losing staff

Firing the Trust and Safety team had a huge impact on advertising - that's why big brands find Xitter so toxic.

It is certainly also true that Musk's... emanations haven't helped relations with advertisers, but it is the lack of moderation that freaks them out, and also by-the-by chased off a noticeable fraction of the user base.

And now there's the bots:

https://www.threads.net/search?q=Twitter&serp_type=tags&tag_...

[philwelch]

> Firing the Trust and Safety team

Yes, technically, adopting a principled stance favoring freedom of expression implies laying off people whose job is to infringe upon freedom of expression, but it’s disingenuous to cast that as a staffing issue rather than a change in policy.

And I’m sure advertisers also really hate the fact that even the ads on the timeline can get community notes. But, well, I’ve seen what other platforms turn into under the foul influence of advertisers and I’m frankly not interested. If that means it has to be subsidized by an eccentric billionaire out of principle, so what? Other billionaires subsidize much more toxic outlets, the Washington Post for instance.

[pests]

I'm not seeing his principled stance. In fact, it seems business as usual. He still bans content he doesn't agree with and doesn't follow through with anything he says.

[rpmisms]

I actually love the community notes on ads. Really good stuff.

[93po]

> they've had a lot of downtime

Twitter is possibly the website most well known for downtime, and has been since literally the beginning. There's no real measure for whether it's true it's down more than usual lately, and sensationalist journalism and anecdotal reports from people with an axe to grind aren't really reliable.

The closest thing I can think of is looking at Google trends, which shows that "twitter down" is pretty consistent over the years:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=t...

There's a spike in Nov 2022 when the layoffs happened, but again that's not indicative that it's especially bad - just that people were especially whiny about it or anticipating it would be bad

[ProxCoques]

This is what I find ... interesting about the engineering layoffs - was Musk right? Was there a large part of the engineering function at Twitter that was just existing on some mythology, and was in fact just not needed? If so, are the FAANG companies (and others) the same? Legions of engineering roles just bullshit wastes of $200K salaries plus share options and free pizza?

I utterly hate Musk, so firmly hope he was wrong. Just wish Xitter went down more.

[VirusNewbie]

> interesting about the engineering layoffs - was Musk right?

Yes and no. Twitter was started before so much of the common “web scale” Open Source projects existed. Cassandra, Kafka, Spark, Kubernetes, etc didn’t exist yet.

So versions of the aforementioned and then some were completely done from scratch at twitter, who has continued to maintain those projects despite them not being the premier open source offering in each of those categories. They also never achieved the scale of some of the largest tech companies where it makes economic sense to have say, a custom database or queue system.

Finally, Twitter has been using GCP for some of their new projects in the last few years, but they still had old legacy systems and teams to maintain that software, so they couldn’t fully reap the rewards of the cloud.

So, if you rebuilt twitter today you could likely do it for a fraction of the engineers they had at peak, by leveraging either cloud or popular existing OSS solutions. But that’s from scratch, not porting millions of lines of legacy code.

What Musk should have done was migrate various systems, then wind down teams. That probably would have worked, but been expensive in the short term.

So I think they cut too much, and I also think they honestly thought more engineers would be up for “hardcore twitter”, instead of quitting.

Musk forgot that all his very loyal Tesla employees may have also factored in their 10x RSU appreciation. It’s a lot easier to put up with insane working hours when your next years stock grant is 500k or million or something. Doesn’t apply at twitter.

Tl;DR: not a Musk hater at all, but he fucked up at Twitter.

[ekianjo]

> don't think they'd be hiring that much if everything was fine and dandy.

Usually you dont hire if your business is not working or expected to grow

[pests]

Why fire then rehire so soon then?

[autoexecbat]

How does that work for equity? It must be difficult for them to explain this to new people, as where is the exit-condition for liquidity