[BMc2020]

Zuckerberg said that companies are no longer shrinking their employee size simply because of overhiring — they're now realizing there can be benefits to being leaner.

While a lot of tech companies were reluctant to make cuts at first, they realized it didn't spell the end, Zuckerberg said.

Translation: They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online.

[ignoramous]

For executives at companies with higher job security than God, they must spin laying off "talented people we care about" in some positive light like "year of efficiency". So, I wouldn't read too much into whatever they say really is the main driver for these cuts.

[catchnear4321]

you don’t need to read anything into it. the intended outcome of an increase in efficiency is an increase in money. efficiency is a polite way to say “more money for me.”

the main driver is “more money for me,” meaning more money for zuck, more money for shareholders, more money for the employees that remain.

[blitzar]

They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and go from making money to losing money and their market cap slash by 50+%.

If they saw that and thought they "we should do that too", they are idiots.

[sitkack]

Being in business is about power and control, the money is a byproduct and a tool. The feds cut off funding and told the business world to sacrifice as much canon fodder as possible. “Leadership” loves cuts. They feel bold and dramatic, leaderly.

[throw310822]

Twitter losing money is a political decision by advertisers. I don't mean this is a negative way- it might be perfectly legitimate- but it still has nothing to do with the technical viability of the service.

[StackRanker3000]

I agree that it has nothing to do with Twitter’s technical capabilities per se.

I disagree that it’s due to political decisions - it’s due to business decisions. To a large extent because Elon dropped the ball when major advertisers were figuring out their ad spend for 2023, but also because of a fear on their part of being associated with more and more unappealing content due to the new policies. Advertisers did not go ”oh, Elon wants more conservative content on Twitter, and because we support the Democrats, we’re gonna stop paying for ads on that platform to punish him”. They are acting in their own best financial interest.

Twitter’s finances are also hamstrung by the large amount of debt that Elon brought with his purchase, so in practice they need to perform even better than before.

[panarky]

If you don't want your brand to appear next to violent white supremacist material, is that a political decision, or is it a business decision to protect your brand image?

[paganel]

> They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online.

I remember the denialism on tech-focused forums like this one about that move, turns out it was the correct one from the owner's point of view. Of course that it s*cked big time for the employees being laid-off, but that's why we need to unionise in this industry and form some sort of solidarity/class consciousness, i.e. realising that the likes of "Zuck", "paulg", "Sam Altman" are not our friends, to the contrary.

[karlgkk]

There's a few things at play here.

First, Elon cut a bunch of "non-essential" core Twitter staff, like the trust and safety teams. This is going to cause long term brand damage - in fact, it already is!

Second, Elon completely cut all non-core Twitter projects. Twitter was being used by its major investors as a platform to build and test new social experiments and startup concepts. As far as I can tell, this was about 1000 engineers and product people. This was probably a pretty solid cut for someone like him, but also a pretty gross example of the whims of capital - who knows what great idea was killed off.

Lastly, when they say Twitter cut 80% of their staff, they never mentioned what happened after: massive attrition from people who "survived" but could go elsewhere. Way beyond what Elon thought would happen. Way beyond the 10-20% additional resignations after a normal layoff happens. This may have almost killed Twitter

[croes]

If so, they missed the part of Twitter losing two thirds of its value.

[Brigand]

It is not publicly traded, value estimates are more like political statements now. To the owner, getting running cost down may have made twitter long term viable.

[croes]

>getting running cost down may have made twitter long term viable.

That may have worked, but Musk limited the reach of tweets by only allowing logged-in users to see the entire thread and comments.

Not to mention insulting advertisers.

[dogma1138]

Ads are still visible when you aren’t logged on, in fact they take a fare greater real estate of the screen now so Elon’s antics aside as far as advertisers go they get a better deal now.

Before the change you could scroll down past the ads for the rest of the thread, now you only see the linked tweet and then ads.

[croes]

But it makes less sense to visit a Twitter link in the first place.

Without Nitter Twitter links are useless to me.

[AstralStorm]

And Nitter instances get seriously rate limited now, so...

[mrtksn]

>They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online.

Maybe its a bit more complicated than that? If software is built around the business and if the business is no longer changing much maybe they simply don't need as many people around? After all, software can run hands off if you don't mess with it much.

IMHO it should be possible for musk to run Twitter singlehandedly all by himself if He has no intention to change anything. It should run fine until it needs something fixed due to a bug, a legal requirement or a partner change(some provider of some service changing something about their service).

Its kind of obvious that we are no longer in the age of Internet exploration, things are quite stagnant for some time and you don't need much explorers and sailors to do the same things. Know How is there, tools are mature. The average techie jobs have been automated to great extend, be it through tools they created or AI that can take care of busywork or understand legacy codebase without the need of retaining the people who built it.

The interesting things are happening in the AI, robotics and other areas but your average "tech" worker is not equipped to do these things.

[AussieWog93]

>IMHO it should be possible for musk to run Twitter singlehandedly all by himself if He has no intention to change anything.

Not sure if this was a Freudian slip, but love the capital "He" here as if Musk is on the same level as God.

[mrtksn]

More like autocorrect :)

[hnaccount_rng]

That’s what a true believer would say ;)

[miyuru]

> Maybe its a bit more complicated than that

No its not.

FB copied the twitter verified as meta verified. Did not even change the name.

https://twitter.com/verified

https://about.meta.com/technologies/meta-verified/

[timeon]

Twitter was working for anyone before. Now just for logged in. It is in saving mode.

[doktrin]

If it’s even remotely true that 70% of the super bowl traffic they sent to advertisers came from bots… then maybe for much longer.

[Zanfa]

> Translation: They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online.

Is it though? Any time there's a Twitter link, clicking on it has at least a 1/3 chance of seeing "Something went wrong. Try again?".

[Pmop]

Twitter as a non critical application can afford to malfunction for a couple of minutes or maybe hours even.

I think they're not understaffed, for now. They're delivering new features and fixing most bugs. A understaffed engineering team usually struggles with that.

[karlgkk]

One of the orgs that Elon cut the hardest was the trust and safety and spam team. He had strong condemnation for their "suppression" of "free speech".

Maybe he had a point. Maybe he didn't. But what is clear is that spam and fraudulent traffic on Twitter has exploded in the past year, to the point where it's causing serious problems.

[Nextgrid]

To be fair, this is entirely a result of having too many front end developers and needing to find busywork for them. So instead of the tweet data being sent by the server in HTML, you load megabytes of JS that (if the stars align and it doesn’t “go wrong”) will then request the tweet from the server and display it.

[glimshe]

I don't experience many problems with Twitter, not visibly more than before the layoffs.

But still, let's assume the reports are true and there was nontrivial reduction in reliability... It was a very extreme engineering cut for a service which is still "generally working". I believe that tech executives are simply assuming that Twitter's decline has a lot more to do with Elon Musk's controversial persona than the service's reliability. While an 80% cut might be too much, they think, a 20% cut would work just fine.

[greatgib]

There are so many bugs now but we live with it as it is free.

Also, most of the time, video will not play if you open the post directly. The play button will have no effect.

[cryptoz]

I mean, that was 100% before Elon took over though, not 1/3.

[vdaea]

I understand why this is happening, but the current technical problems of twitter are way, way overstated. Twitter has always been very buggy. It is indeed correct that for the longest time every time you clicked a twitter link and it opened in your browser you had to refresh the window to see it. This was pre-Musk.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20471601

If this happened now you would see dozens of articles saying that twitter is melting down. But now, it turns out Twitter ran perfectly before! I can't help but scoff.