[jsheard]

They've already cut about 80% of their workforce since Elon took over, I'm not sure how much more attrition they can take. Sure the site still mostly works in the technical sense, but the way it works now has led to a significant decline in revenue and active users.

[brookst]

There’s how much the company can take, and how much Elon thinks the company can take. He subscribes to the ubermensch view, where him and maybe two other superior specimens of manhood could single handedly run the entire company.

[chairmansteve]

"where him and maybe two other superior specimens of manhood could single handedly run the entire company" - while driving their manly cyber trucks.

[sleepybrett]

Correction: "While their manly cybertrucks drive them"

[nicce]

If they happen to work…

[tiahura]

Did you think it would collapse when he canned the 80%

[runako]

Revenue is down by a larger percentage than the headcount, right? I think that counts as "collapse" by any reasonable definition.

[ryandrake]

I thought the company would collapse after firing 80% of staff, and for a long time I kept arguing that Twitter was still in the "Wile E Coyote ran off the edge of the cliff but didn't fall yet" phase where they were running on pure momentum. I must admit, as time goes by, it's harder and harder to argue that. I just can't believe that 80% of the company was really just not needed. Every company I've ever worked at was lean to the point where they almost couldn't get anything done due to lack of people. I can't imagine a company that could lose 80% of their people and keep on trucking.

[ghshephard]

Twitter’s US revenue has dropped -83% from $661M in Q2 of 2022 to $114M in Q2 of 2024 according to: https://twitter.com/RealNeilC/status/1817562915634819464

That's a pretty dramatic collapse.

The thing about Infra - is that if all you want is 99% uptime - that's, with reasonable architectural decisions - relatively straightforward. You can run with a skeleton crew (particularly if you make really smart Infra Decisions like Midjourney, Whatsapp, others have done an outsource 95%+ of your infra to a third party (Discord, Platform Messaging APIs).

As time goes on though, and you go through incident review after incident review, and sharpen things up - and 99% becomes 99.9% you start to get diminishing returns on more Infra Employees - at some point they don't add much reliability value (but boy do they make pager rotation schedules pretty nice).

My sense (from both interviewing and working with them) is that the vast majority of people fired/laid off from Twitter weren't (for the most part - definitely lots of exceptions) core engineers or core infra-people -they were people on the periphery associated with making Twitter a friendly place for advertisers, and just maintaining a healthy work-life balance for the Infra people - a job where you could work your 30-32/hours week without it becoming all encompassing.

When they were fired, Twitter became a very unfriendly place, and the advertisers ran away, and the revenue crashed.

[hcurtiss]

Where would they get revenue numbers on a private company?

[wonderwonder]

They just announced an anti-trust lawsuit regarding what they say is a coordinated effort to remove advertisers from the site. Not advocating one way or the other as to the merits of the claim but an interesting development regarding the revenue drop you mentioned.

https://x.com/lindayaX/status/1820838625245880634

[zdragnar]

Don't forget that 2022 was still a good time for tech with people recovering from COVID lockdowns. It's not really much of a surprise that they're back to pre-COVID income.

Aside from that, there's the lawsuit the sibling mentioned, plus the coordinated campaigns from groups like Media Matters and others attempting to scare advertisers away.

[TrapLord_Rhodo]

Those numbers don't mean anything. Revenue does not equal profit.

Tesla makes double what GM makes with a 1/3 of the revenue. Twitter was always a money loser. If they made $661M in revenue, but lost 700m, and now they make $114M a quarter with $80M in profits, i wouldn't call that a dramatic collapse but rather a dramatic revival.

Quote profit not revenue when it comes to Elon Companies.

[Lutger]

Not able to comment on the technical side, but for sure a lot people who got sacked were on moderation. Some countries like mine eventually lost all moderators specifically working for that country. And it does show in the amount of spam an unchecked racism etc, which is a big reason why many advertisers left.

From a moderation point of view, Twitter arguably did collapse. The technical side is not all there is to it when running social media.

[valval]

[flagged]

[orblivion]

Depends on your standards I guess. You could cut it down to one person and have a website running. As it stands if you look at most people's profiles when logged out you see tweets starting a couple years ago other than the pinned tweet. I haven't used it much since a bit before Elon took over but generally as I understand it's more buggy and spammy than before. If that's good enough, I guess you could say it's still trucking.

Funny thing is that I took the opposite side of that bet. I figured Elon would slash things that people thought were important but actually weren't, and make it more efficient. It's mostly played out, except that the site is still rickety. But maybe from a business perspective that's not important, which is a shame for us.

[ljsprague]

Definitely more spammy but I have not found it to be more buggy.

[padthai]

I think Twitter is down 60% in advertisers and 30% in users? Elon personality is part of it, but losing so many people handling community, clients, institutions… I am sure the company has lost most of its institutional knowledge.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

They have recently reported an all time high usage record, that unsurprisingly happened after the assassination attempt on Trump.

[gopher_space]

> I can't imagine a company that could lose 80% of their people and keep on trucking.

Musk didn't buy Twitter to make money or learn how to run a successful business. "Keep on trucking" isn't what Twitter is supposed to be doing right now. 20% workforce is more than enough to run the operation in maintenance mode, which is exactly what's being asked for.

How many dev-ops roles would it take to just keep the lights on at your org? A dozen? Three? You certainly wouldn't have a need for decision-makers or heavy lifters.

[durandal1]

By "maintenance mode" you mean shipping more features per year than the pre-Elon Twitter? Remember, the pre-Elon Twitter was completely stagnant and seemingly unable to ship even the most desired features.

[WheatMillington]

Musk has openly said many times he wants X to be an "everything app" and sees huge growth in its future. What makes you think he ever intended to put it in "maintenance mode"?

[jokethrowaway]

I thought the same when they fired a bunch of people at my old employer (and 98% of the developers left).

Well, they just outsourced everything to cheap devs in India and things kept rolling. No new features and some new bugs, but most things work.

Turns out you don't really need that much to keep lights on.

[Lutger]

That is true. But you'll:

a) slowly lose to competitors as you can't keep up with increased demands in the space. b) take on more and more existential risks

For a lot of companies, that is exactly what they want to do. Its called the exploit phase, I forgot what business lingo this came from. Do a practical feature freeze, cut costs to the max, and squeeze all the value out the product for as long as it lives. Informally known as enshittification. Its all about cost-cutting rather than market capture.

You can last a while though, especially because there aren't many changes so there's also less operational risk.

[recursive]

People always find a way to justify their existence. In sufficiently large companies you can find people whose job is to satisfy policies invented by other people in other departments. In one sense, they were all "needed" because of the domino effects of some policy created long ago.

But if you get rid of all of it at the same time, it might be tough to see the difference from the outside.

[albedoa]

Hey man, checking in on this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1823152153445404990

[onion2k]

80% was needed to grow the business. If Twitter chooses not to grow them it doesn't need those people. It only needs enough to keep the lights on.

If Twitter ever gets a competitor with some traction it'll be dead in months because it won't be able to react. It seems like new social networks aren't a thing any more though so it's probably quite safe.

[brabel]

Not really, revenue seems to have fallen but not so much and it's growing again according to this: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

    2014 1.4
    2015 2.2
    2016 2.5
    2017 2.4
    2018 3
    2019 3.4
    2020 3.7
    2021 5
    2022 4.4
    2023 3.4

Number of users is actually larger than ever now:

    2015 304
    2016 313
    2017 310
    2018 298
    2019 312
    2020 347
    2021 362
    2022 401
    2023 421

I think everyone can agree this looks nothing like "collapse".

[AlexandrB]

Where is this site getting revenue numbers for 2023 & 2024? The company is no longer public and doesn't issue public earnings reports AFAIK.

[runako]

Let's assume we can trust these numbers. The user count is not material for a site that has already scaled and monetized, so focus on the actual money changing hands.

That is obviously in decline but does alone not capture how much worse off the company is today than before the acquisition. In 2022, the company did $4.4B in revenue and had negligible debt. In 2023, the company possibly had debt service payments in the range of $1.2B for the year. If you back out the mandatory debt service, 2023 looks more like $2B in topline.

Put another way: Twitter 2022 was significantly more capital-efficient than Twitter 2024.

Similarly, one can run a simple model of the value of the company now. Once you include the $13B in outstanding debt, you will end up with a negative number.

Yes, this business is currently in "collapse."

[slashdave]

> Number of users is actually larger than ever now

So... you mean the bot detection is now more broken?

[lotsofpulp]

Is there a reason to assume this website has access to audited figures from a private business like Twitter?

[edmundsauto]

The linked article doesn’t seem to say anything about growth in revenue numbers - but it does say overall revenue has dropped 50% since Musks takeover. The quarterly chart doesn’t look great either.

Further, the brand has been tainted and Threads was allowed to pop up. Now threads is around 1/4 to 1/3 the size of Twitter MAU. It may not have replaced Twitter, but the door has been opened and that seems like an unforced error.

This election season looks poised to further drive long term disengagement as the platform is going to be very toxic and very unmoderated.

Otoh, profit might actually be up - if revenues are down 50% but costs down 80%, it may make more money. I suspect, like other private equity investments, this will not work for too long. With how much Musk has put his personal brand onto the site, it may also be difficult to unload the pieces at a profit as per the normal PE playbook.

[skissane]

> Threads was allowed to pop up. Now threads is around 1/4 to 1/3 the size of Twitter MAU

Main thing I consume on X nowadays is space journalism. Plenty of big name space journalists seriously posting on X (e.g. Jeff Foust, Eric Berger). I had a look at Threads, I can't find any of that content, mostly just people posting silly memes and mind-numbingly misinformed takes on the topic, at best people just reposting stuff that you'll already find better coverage of on X.

> This election season looks poised to further drive long term disengagement as the platform is going to be very toxic and very unmoderated.

I don't find much "toxic" on X. If you only read stuff posted by people you follow, and are selective in who you follow, you can have a pretty curated experience.

[zdragnar]

Don't forget the peak happened during COVID- where it is at now isn't really much different than where it was before, if the numbers are accurate anyway.

[brabel]

> if revenues are down 50%

Check the actual graphs! It went down by 50% briefly, but then increased again. It's still lower than before, but not by that much.

[bigstrat2003]

> Further, the brand has been tainted

The brand was never not tainted. Twitter has long been known as one of the cesspools of the Internet, actively contributing to the degradation of the social fabric. It would be a great blessing if Elon did actually kill it the way his detractors predicted. Twitter delenda est.

[vecter]

Isn't revenue declining according to that data?

[brabel]

Look at the revenues per quarter. It was growing in 2023, but declined in the first quarter of 2024, but I wouldn't say you can make conclusions for 2024 from one quarter.

[brightball]

Well, based on today’s activity there is apparently some conspiracy involved.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1820849880283107725?s=46&t=alZ...

[runako]

If you're suing your customers? With frivolous lawsuits? You are admitting that your business is in collapse.

There's no mystery here. The company cut Trust & Safety so that people could post whatever they want under the guise of "free speech." This means more objectionable (to advertisers) content on the site. Advertisers do not want to run ads next to objectionable content.

Worse, Twitter was never big enough to really matter to big ad spenders. So it's small, doesn't have the ability to move the needle for any big advertiser, and now CMOs/ad agencies have to worry about their ads being run next to 4chan-quality posts? Easy decision to stop spending there. There's really no conspiracy involved here.

At base, this is a simple conflict of ideas. Twitter management wants to create a space where people can post ideas that may be broadly seen as objectionable, even if they are legal. Big advertisers are well-known for restricting their ads to more sanitized spaces (this practice predates the Internet). The goals of Twitter management are directly in conflict with the goals of big advertisers. This was the obvious way for this situation to unfold.

[dbbk]

> Sure the site still mostly works in the technical sense

They just auto-banned everyone who downloaded their new Mac app so... no

[ben_w]

Oh? I missed that news.

Edit:

This, I guess: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/x-kills-its-mac-app-ac...

[justinhj]

“ If you're a Twitter diehard who's not willing to swap to X, it might be finally time to ditch X for Mastadon or Threads. On your way out, don't forget to delete your X account.” journalists are so biased against X

[justinhj]

ofc a “journalist” just outright tells people to delete their X accounts and I get a downvote

the anti musk shit on this site is counter to logic and ideological

[amiantos]

You're getting downvoted because you're just regurgitating the Elon Musk fanboy "journalists hate X because they're threatened by it!" and "journalists are biased and not trustworthy!" party line nonsense like a complete weirdo.

[dbbk]

Yep happened to me. 16 year old account. Oh well, Threads it is.

[happyopossum]

> but the way it works now has led to a significant decline in revenue and active users

I don' think that's completely true - MAUs are up this year, and hit 500M for the first time last Oct...

[1] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-sha...

[Starlevel004]

Given the replies to every popular tweet, I don't really believe those are actual people.

[michaelt]

To me "revenue and MAUs have declined significantly" sounds like a reason they would want to reduce employee numbers, rather than a reason they wouldn't.

At least in a conventional business that uses revenue to pay wages.

[brookst]

Layoffs are expensive compared to making people miserable so they quit.

[runako]

Only if you pay severance/etc., which X doesn't.

[lotsofpulp]

Terminating employees without cause (i.e. due to employee’s poor performance) entitles the employer to unemployment benefits, causing the state to increase the business’s unemployment insurance premiums.

If an employee quits or is terminated due to not coming into work, then they are not eligible for unemployment benefits, and hence the business’s unemployment insurance premiums are unaffected.

[runako]

Increased UI premiums on the remaining employees are not likely to approach the cost of "normal" severance for 80%+ of the original staff.

[nuz]

They've cut out things like viewing who liked a tweet etc (for cost savings I suspect) so the site is probably dirt cheap. Can't imagine ads don't pay for the cost of running servers at this point, and a headcount reduction might bring it to profitability.

[kryptiskt]

The ads may pay for the servers and reduced headcount[1], but there is no way that they pay for servicing the $10B of high-interest debt that the company was saddled with.

[1] Though with the NYT reporting that the American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition it might not be so obvious.

[runako]

> American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition

Debt service was estimated at ~$100m/mo, with the likelihood that rates on some of the debt could increase substantially since the financing was initially booked in mid 2022.

If these numbers are directionally accurate (and they do not report, so we don't know for sure), this thing is probably closer to losing a billion $ annually than to breakeven.

[mistrial9]

> Debt service was estimated at ~$100m/mo

source?

[runako]

Many sources for this, including:

https://www.thestreet.com/technology/elon-musk-has-a-huge-tw... and

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-twit...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-03/twitter-s...

If you don't like my choice of sources, any popular search engine will help you surface additional sources.

[dragontamer]

$13 Billion leveraged buyout means that Twitter took on $13 Billion in loans for the privilege of being bought out by Elon.

Assuming a rough interest rate of 10% to 15%, leaves 100million to 150million / month on debt alone.

[throwaway2037]

    > Assuming a rough interest rate of 10% to 15%

Do you have a source on this? I couldn't find anything.

[jrpelkonen]

Yes, the debt weighs heavily around their neck. If it eventually ends up in bankruptcy, will Elon Musk lose control of his beloved x.com domain name for the second time?

[zinekeller]

I would imagine that it was set up so that it is rented from Musk (instead of owning* outright), but it's Musk so who knows.

* I know it's still not owned owned but there is still a legal difference between X Corp directly renting x.com (from Verisign) versus leasing x.com by a different owner (maybe Musk, maybe a holding corp) to X Corp.

[rahkiin]

He’ll probably sell x.com to himself just before that happens

[chuckadams]

He’ll probably name his next kid X. His history at PayPal shows how obsessed he is with that letter.

[deeth_starr_v]

He calls his first kid with Grimes X

[ninininino]

Already happened

https://twitter.com/Garossino/status/1817220477427093963

[queuebert]

Maybe they could declare bankruptcy and sell for pennies on the dollar to a mysterious new holding company: Ksum Nole, LLC.

[seanhunter]

That's not how a bankruptcy works. In a bankruptcy, the company is owned by the creditors and gets resolved by them. Usually a business will attempt to avoid bankruptcy by filing Chapter 11[1] or similar so they get to propose a plan for restructuring that will pay back the creditors over time, but their actions as debtor in posession are scrutinized by the US trustee to ensure they meet a fiduciary obligation to the debtors, and the debtors can file a court case to appeal both the chap 11 and can try to get the debtor kicked out and a trustee appointed if they aren't acting in their interests.

[1] https://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/bankruptcy/bankruptc...

[sebastiennight]

Quick heads-up: I think you've written "debtor" instead of "creditor" a couple times in there.

[queuebert]

Yes, I know. It was a joke.

[arresin]

Nah uh. Mr Ksum would find a way.

[citizenkeen]

I will wager a box of donuts the like-hiding was due to some combination of politics and Musk’s embarrassment for being called out every time he liked some cringe porn-adjacent tweet.

[dragontamer]

The issue is the $13 Billion loans and estimated $1.3 Billion/year interest payments.

I'm sure Elon can wipe those out himself, but it's still a lot of money that isn't accounted for. Twitter cannot merely float at barely profitability. Twitter needs at least $1.3 Billion/year to counteract interest payments.

[throwaway2037]

Elon can either directly pay the loans himself, or lend money to Twitter/X.

[dragontamer]

He could, but hasn't done so yet.

Instead, Elon continues to make decisions like closing Twitters headquarters.

[wonderwonder]

I actually don't think the removal of like views has anything to do with revenue.

I think they actually did this so users are free to like whatever they want without having to worry about getting vilified for liking something that is not supported by the majority. For example liking something political or anti whatever.

[chii]

which i think is a good thing - but i wish there's a toggle to allow the user to choose.

Sometimes i find interesting twitter accounts or posts through likes, and that's now gone.

[jandrese]

4Chan was run by like one guy using the change he found in the cushions of his couch.

Getting the pixels on people's screens is the easy part. Keeping the Nazis and bots at bay is the expensive part. You have to do the latter if you want to keep the advertisers on your site, which is why X switched to a more for-pay model and still loses money hand over fist. Being able to pay to have your voice amplified has been a real boon for the fascist users on X, they're having a great time.

[rabuse]

I much prefer the Twitter of today. Since I'm a grown adult, I can handle some mean words being seen by my eyes, and just ignoring what I don't like. It's nice seeing a balance of both sides of an argument now, rather than only seeing the left biased information.

[Shocka1]

I was a big Reddit user back in 2015/16 and also spent a lot of time in the NPR comments. Watching the insanity around the 2016 election in real time was an interesting experience. The mass suppression on Reddit and NPR shutting their comment section down was enough to form my opinion on this whole thing.

That being said, I've enjoyed it since the takeover. It still seems very similar to what it used to be, but feels very much like I'm seeing it from both ends now. For every crazy right leaning comment there are plenty of crazy leftists that counter, and vice versa.

[reverius42]

Is "left biased information" a euphemism for anything that doesn't include Nazi propaganda or hate speech? Because those are pretty much the things that were (loosely, not fully) banned prior to Elon's takeover.

[mvdtnz]

No. Left biased information is what was on twitter before. Not everything you disagree with can be classed as nazi.

[jandrese]

"You and everyone like you should be rounded up and executed" is a just a mean message, but it's also dangerous. People will believe that stuff, and then try to do it. This isn't a theoretical danger, it has happened time and time again throughout history. These sorts of seductive messages that target out-groups and provide a sense of community have lead to real life horrors.

X has also gotten very bad about amplifying misinformation, especially on white supremacist topics. Just yesterday (maybe the day before?) that bullshit old paper that said sub-Saharan Africans had an average IQ of 55 made it to the top of the feed with no community notes. The comment section was full of great replacement theory blue check guys all agreeing with one another and making it sound like there was a consensus. People see stuff like this and actually believe it. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if Elon himself re-Xed it at some point.

[cyphertruck]

Active users on the site is setting records pretty regularly, according to Linda. Usability and performance of the site is far higher than before in my experience as well. Revenue is down only due to an illegal cartel boycott, which X has recently filed a lawsuit to resolve.

[verandaguy]

I've only seen the words "illegal cartel boycott" being used (verbatim, as it were) by Musk, as well as the Twitter account of something called Rumble who are apparently joining Musk in trying to sue the advertisers who left the platform in response to it becoming too volatile to associate their brands with.

Is this the illegal cartel boycott you're talking about?

Would it not be an expression of free speech and advertisers' choice to disassociate from another entity, seen through the lens of Musk's famous free speech absolutism combined with corporate personhood? At worst, wouldn't it be the invisible hand of the free market acting to telegraph reduced demand in a resource by its previous consumers?

[cyphertruck]

Government using force, whitewashed with a thin veneer of an NGO to cartelize advertisers and censor twitter is not “free speech”.

You pretended to be unaware of the situation then you straight up lie to push the dishonest narrative.

You support censorship.

This site literally bans anyone who defends conservative positions.

There’s nothing more hypocritical than leftists pretending to care about human rights.

I’m not going to indulge pretending otherwise.

You cannot lie your way into moral superiority.

[mmmmmbop]

This take, which is taken straight from Elon, is plainly hilarious.

They claim to be the last bastion of free speech, but when advertisers exercise their free speech and go advertise someplace else, suddenly that's unacceptable.

Same way Elon goes on and on about how they won't moderate hate speech and will only ever delete content if it's illegal by law, 'cause "otherwise it'd be censorship". But then with the legal and publicly available information posted by ElonJet, that was different and everybody who ever mentioned it was banned.

[verandaguy]

>Government using force, whitewashed with a thin veneer of an NGO to cartelize advertisers and censor twitter is not “free speech”.

This is squarely in conspiracy theory territory, but doesn't really justify the thought that association between any group of private entities could be compelled.

> You pretended to be unaware of the situation then you straight up lie to push the dishonest narrative.

I think this may have been in reference to another commenter.

> You support censorship.

I literally have spent much of my career on teams trying to find technical workarounds to online censorship in dictatorial regimes. What Musk's Twitter stands for these days is closer to the censorship seen in those places than it was before Musk took over.

I'll also add that what the US Right often decries as censorship is... jarringly hypocritical, at best. I won't get started on here.

> This site literally bans anyone who defends conservative positions.

Summarily incorrect. I don't know that there have been any high-profile bans since I joined, but HN does delete conversations where people who aren't constructively participating in the thread are. It wouldn't surprise me if this thread got removed, for example.

I'm not going to entertain your remaining points since those aren't really substantial enough to even talk about.

[latentcall]

"illegal cartel boycott"

I'm not sure what you're talking about, can you fill me in a little bit?

[BobAliceInATree]

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/6/24214536/x-elon-musk-antit...

Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds.

[cyphertruck]

Except he is not suing advertisers. The Verge is fake news.

He is suing a literal cartel after their crime was exposed in congress.

[BobAliceInATree]

And what is this supposed "cartel" composed of? Advertisers.

Yeah, congress "exposed" it, when it's right on their website (https://wfanet.org/leadership/garm/about-garm)

This is just another of Musk's "free speech for me, but not for you" lawsuits that never go anywhere and are designed to waste your money with lawyers.

[cyphertruck]

From the CEO: https://x.com/lindayax/status/1820838625245880634

[WheatMillington]

Elon?

[throwaway290]

I don't know if you are serious but because of LLMs trained on our work basically every tech company is scrambling for ways to get rid of programmers. Just yesterday I commented in a thread here where someone said 80% of their work is LLMable "bullshit" (somehow that guy, like many, didn't connect it to headcount or likelihood of keeping own job...)

[ben_w]

Even if it wasn't for LLMs, it feels like a long time since I did more than convert someone else's Figma (or Adobe XD, or Photoshop document) into code, and glue it to a pre-existing API.

I'm sure real estate lawyers feel much the same about how rote their work is.

People pay for that, and it's valuable, but it does feel like these tasks should've been automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.

[throwaway290]

Lawyers or real engineers can only push a button and still have secure jobs because they have licenses/certifications/boards and liabilities with consequences. There is no such thing in programming. (Even though our mistakes can and do also lead to real people dying)

> it feels like a long time since I did more than convert someone else's Figma (or Adobe XD, or Photoshop document) into code, and glue it to a pre-existing API

That looks like webdev, that's like a minuscule part of all programming in question.

> automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.

I think LLMs is the worst part of it because literally what programmers do is used against them. It's like taxi drivers used to train self driving cabs to automate themselves out of jobs, except imagine self driving cars actually worked and there are no unions or protective gov regulation and taxi drivers all cheer for this because each thinks the whole firing and pay reduction is only for someone else not themselves:)

[ben_w]

> That looks like webdev, that's like a minuscule part of all programming in question.

Mobile, even smaller.

> It's like taxi drivers used to train self driving cabs to automate themselves out of jobs

I was talking to a taxi driver pre-pandemic (from his passenger seat) who was enthusiastic about FSD even though it would end his career.

And if FSD AI don't perform some of their training by trying to predict what all the other cars will do, they're missing out on a huge opportunity.

More broadly, I think this pattern applies to all labour: surveillance is easy, humanoid robots exist.

[throwaway290]

FSD is moot because it didn't work in the end.

> this pattern applies to all labour

Yup, that was the point of the taxi analogy.

It is why unions/gov protections/certifications exist... accountability and keeping society from unraveling

[ben_w]

> FSD is moot because it didn't work in the end.

"Work" isn't Boolean — the self drive AI does exist, just not well enough to do everything and even the "F" (though the Waymo AI seems to be?)

The same quality may be worse or better in specific roles, but AI isn't stationary.

> It is why unions/gov protections/certifications exist... accountability and keeping society from unraveling

No, but it is why the Amish and literal communism existed — but in the latter case, they weren't opposed to the automation itself just the unfairness of using profit to make workers redundant.

Unions are more about fair pay for fair work, and safe conditions in that work. Certifications are consumer protection.