4 ms·

It's frustrating to regularly hear people (particularly on HN, but not exclusively) justifying, or even just giving a light nod of approval, to Musk's horrendou

by unsui 4y ago

It's frustrating to regularly hear people (particularly on HN, but not exclusively) justifying, or even just giving a light nod of approval, to Musk's horrendous "leadership" via firings, simply because twitter isn't profitable in their eyes. It seems like cherry-picking excuses to support Musk's leadership style rather than any justified basis. If the parent comment is correct, they just aren't as profitable as Wall Street would like (therefore they are not "profitable"). Saying that the firings are justified is then just moving the goalposts to support an a-priori conviction. Additionally, it seems ironic that this is coming from proponents of the Silicon-Valley ethos of "screw profitability, we'll figure it out later"... an ethos that created Amazon and so many other tech titans. Yes, profitability matters, but only when your other forms of capital (e.g., social, political) have been depleted. It's tragic that Musk is depleting whatever capital twitter had remaining on its current death march. Financially "profitable" or not, twitter did undeniably have social and political capital. Soon, it will have neither.

ethanbond 4y ago
It’s because people are looking at him and saying, “whoa, I can behave like that and not only get away with it, but win by it?!” There’s room for sincere curiosity about what’s going on and what’ll happen, but a lot of what I see online is people just relishing in the sadism of the whole ordeal.
- abathur 4y ago
  The cruelty does seem to be the point. Not sure how we escape the gravity of it.
  - andirk 4y ago
    Part of the mostly made up version of the American Dream is like "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" which oddly also implies "and then once you have, close the door behind you. Don't want this party getting too crowded". My point is that fetishizing capitalism requires a taste for squeezing others for all their worth. If others aren't, then that means you endured that bootstrap pain for no reason!
- ilyt 4y ago
  I mean, if you don't like Twitter, and don't like musk, the whole thing is very entertaining
  - abathur 4y ago
    lulz certainly abound here--there's been a lot of great comedy in this. But I read the GP to mean they've seen people crossing a thin line. I doubt any of us are above a bit of schadenfreude when the fates deal a fair dose of karma to someone we think deserves it. But actively cheering (and trying to multiply, in the case of aggressive trolling) the sadism in public is a kind of dark prayer.
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      Spot on.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      Oh, some highly paid people (that made product that actively made society worse) will need to find a new job, how utterly sadistic /s
      - ethanbond 4y ago
        Finding pleasure in the suffering of other people is quite literally the definition of sadism. Be proud of it if you want, but that’s what it is. Also, it’s very obviously not true that all the people who lost their jobs are highly paid. It’s curious how this self-deception keeps appearing among people who are cheering it on.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    I think this is nearly as destructive of a perspective. People have become way, way too obsessed with what is entertaining and are willing to accept way too much horrible stuff in the name of the lulz. It’s really not a game show. There are important ideas being tested and norms being created (or destroyed).
    - 4y ago
pxmpxm 4y ago
Twitter stock returned ~30% vs 190% for nasdaq in the same period... let's not pretend this company is even remotely close to being performant. I'd be far more inclined to believe "we rolled our own" engineering excellence stories from a massively profitable organization, rather than this confused-about-being-a-nonprofit company. Also more broadly, people quitting en-masse with new leadership attempting to make the place profitable should tell you all you need to know about the culture.
- saghm 4y ago
  > Also more broadly, people quitting en-masse with new leadership attempting to make the place profitable should tell you all you need to know about the culture Trying to make the place profitable by firing large swaths of their coworkers. You make it sound like people started jumping overboard right when the rescue crew was on the way, rather than when a new captain took over and started trying to stop the ship from sinking by forcibly tossing people himself.
- semicolon_storm 4y ago
  Elon is going far beyond "attempting to make the place profitable"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
fleddr 4y ago
It isn't cherry-picking. Twitter has a very long runway where > 90% of its existence it was making a loss. Where competing social networks have exponentially grown in size (FB, Insta, Tiktok, even Reddit), Twitter has stagnated. Twitter is widely known to never really ship anything. So I have no idea which "velocity" the author is talking about. Before the musk take-over, a plan was already in the works to cut 800M in expenses. May I remind you that Twitter almost went bankrupt in 2016? They tried to sell but nobody wanted it.
RetpolineDrama 4y ago
>to Musk's horrendous "leadership" via firings He isn't firing those people as a component of "leadership", he's clearly cleaning house. He doesn't _want_ the vast majority of twitter staff to remain for obvious reasons.
- guelo 4y ago
  What's the obvious reason?
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Let's just say Twitter staff weren't very happy and vocal about it when before acquisition he said he want it to be more free speech platform, and most of those people looked pretty left leaning. Now of course that was tiny minority of workers there, but there seemed to be zero that's happy about it before acquisition so the "obvious reason" is "aside from cost cutting he's kicking people that would give resistance to whatever he wants to do with twitter"
    - camel_Snake 4y ago
      can we please stop with this 'freedom of speech' bogeyman that Musk spouts? He cherry-picks what previously banned accounts get unbanned, he fires employees for making public tweets he doesn't like, as well as firing employees for making comments in company slack channels critical of his leadership - which is a notable departure from previous company policy. Of course if employees don't believe in leaderships vision they might not be a good fit. Of course a company looking to cut costs is going to look at trimming their workforce. This all makes sense, it just has absolutely nothing to do with free speech.
      - ilyt 4y ago
        Oh I don't believe that compulsive liar for a second, I'm just saying that it triggered some people once he started talking about maybe "moderating" (censoring by any other name) less of it
- 4y ago
ilyt 4y ago
Well, twitter being badly managed company and musk being a wanker at same time is also pretty common sentiment. Just that musk fanboys are pretty loud. > It's tragic that Musk is depleting whatever capital twitter had remaining on its current death march. Financially "profitable" or not, twitter did undeniably have social and political capital. Soon, it will have neither. Is it tho ? The social capital Twitter had was just used to push ideas of whoever was in charge there at the time. It was slowly becoming a propaganda machine that was disguised as social network. Just like a week ago we had HN discussion about how after firing a bunch of people Japanese twitter suddenly stopped being so political [1], coz those topics were being forced. Twitter dying in fiery musky fireball might be the best thing to happen in long term. * [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2022/11/14/japanese-twitter-trends-shift-away-from-politics-to-pop-culture-after-curation-team-is-laid-off/?sh=588e9fe92776 https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2022/11/14/japanese...
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >It was slowly becoming a propaganda machine that was disguised as social network. Is there a difference? From what we've seen over the past couple of decades, it seems like social networks are doomed to devolve into propaganda machines. >Twitter dying in fiery musky fireball might be the best thing to happen in long term. That's what I feel like too.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    There is a difference between people using platform as propaganda machine and platform itself picking a side and deprioritizing anything that they don't like, especially with reach it has. First one is de facto popularity contest and each side is free to call on other's bullshit, if control comes from company running it the detractors from "right" vision gets silenced,either explicitly, or by just modifying algorithm to deprioritize their content

by unsui 4y ago

ethanbond 4y ago

It’s because people are looking at him and saying, “whoa, I can behave like that and not only get away with it, but win by it?!” There’s room for sincere curiosity about what’s going on and what’ll happen, but a lot of what I see online is people just relishing in the sadism of the whole ordeal.

abathur 4y ago
The cruelty does seem to be the point. Not sure how we escape the gravity of it.
- andirk 4y ago
  Part of the mostly made up version of the American Dream is like "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" which oddly also implies "and then once you have, close the door behind you. Don't want this party getting too crowded". My point is that fetishizing capitalism requires a taste for squeezing others for all their worth. If others aren't, then that means you endured that bootstrap pain for no reason!
ilyt 4y ago
I mean, if you don't like Twitter, and don't like musk, the whole thing is very entertaining
- abathur 4y ago
  lulz certainly abound here--there's been a lot of great comedy in this. But I read the GP to mean they've seen people crossing a thin line. I doubt any of us are above a bit of schadenfreude when the fates deal a fair dose of karma to someone we think deserves it. But actively cheering (and trying to multiply, in the case of aggressive trolling) the sadism in public is a kind of dark prayer.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Spot on.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Oh, some highly paid people (that made product that actively made society worse) will need to find a new job, how utterly sadistic /s
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      Finding pleasure in the suffering of other people is quite literally the definition of sadism. Be proud of it if you want, but that’s what it is. Also, it’s very obviously not true that all the people who lost their jobs are highly paid. It’s curious how this self-deception keeps appearing among people who are cheering it on.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  I think this is nearly as destructive of a perspective. People have become way, way too obsessed with what is entertaining and are willing to accept way too much horrible stuff in the name of the lulz. It’s really not a game show. There are important ideas being tested and norms being created (or destroyed).
  - 4y ago

pxmpxm 4y ago

Twitter stock returned ~30% vs 190% for nasdaq in the same period... let's not pretend this company is even remotely close to being performant. I'd be far more inclined to believe "we rolled our own" engineering excellence stories from a massively profitable organization, rather than this confused-about-being-a-nonprofit company. Also more broadly, people quitting en-masse with new leadership attempting to make the place profitable should tell you all you need to know about the culture.

saghm 4y ago
> Also more broadly, people quitting en-masse with new leadership attempting to make the place profitable should tell you all you need to know about the culture Trying to make the place profitable by firing large swaths of their coworkers. You make it sound like people started jumping overboard right when the rescue crew was on the way, rather than when a new captain took over and started trying to stop the ship from sinking by forcibly tossing people himself.
semicolon_storm 4y ago
Elon is going far beyond "attempting to make the place profitable"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

fleddr 4y ago

It isn't cherry-picking. Twitter has a very long runway where > 90% of its existence it was making a loss. Where competing social networks have exponentially grown in size (FB, Insta, Tiktok, even Reddit), Twitter has stagnated. Twitter is widely known to never really ship anything. So I have no idea which "velocity" the author is talking about. Before the musk take-over, a plan was already in the works to cut 800M in expenses. May I remind you that Twitter almost went bankrupt in 2016? They tried to sell but nobody wanted it.

RetpolineDrama 4y ago

>to Musk's horrendous "leadership" via firings He isn't firing those people as a component of "leadership", he's clearly cleaning house. He doesn't _want_ the vast majority of twitter staff to remain for obvious reasons.

guelo 4y ago
What's the obvious reason?
- ilyt 4y ago
  Let's just say Twitter staff weren't very happy and vocal about it when before acquisition he said he want it to be more free speech platform, and most of those people looked pretty left leaning. Now of course that was tiny minority of workers there, but there seemed to be zero that's happy about it before acquisition so the "obvious reason" is "aside from cost cutting he's kicking people that would give resistance to whatever he wants to do with twitter"
  - camel_Snake 4y ago
    can we please stop with this 'freedom of speech' bogeyman that Musk spouts? He cherry-picks what previously banned accounts get unbanned, he fires employees for making public tweets he doesn't like, as well as firing employees for making comments in company slack channels critical of his leadership - which is a notable departure from previous company policy. Of course if employees don't believe in leaderships vision they might not be a good fit. Of course a company looking to cut costs is going to look at trimming their workforce. This all makes sense, it just has absolutely nothing to do with free speech.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      Oh I don't believe that compulsive liar for a second, I'm just saying that it triggered some people once he started talking about maybe "moderating" (censoring by any other name) less of it
4y ago

ilyt 4y ago

Well, twitter being badly managed company and musk being a wanker at same time is also pretty common sentiment. Just that musk fanboys are pretty loud. > It's tragic that Musk is depleting whatever capital twitter had remaining on its current death march. Financially "profitable" or not, twitter did undeniably have social and political capital. Soon, it will have neither. Is it tho ? The social capital Twitter had was just used to push ideas of whoever was in charge there at the time. It was slowly becoming a propaganda machine that was disguised as social network. Just like a week ago we had HN discussion about how after firing a bunch of people Japanese twitter suddenly stopped being so political [1], coz those topics were being forced. Twitter dying in fiery musky fireball might be the best thing to happen in long term. * [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2022/11/14/japanese-twitter-trends-shift-away-from-politics-to-pop-culture-after-curation-team-is-laid-off/?sh=588e9fe92776 https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2022/11/14/japanese...

midoridensha 4y ago
>It was slowly becoming a propaganda machine that was disguised as social network. Is there a difference? From what we've seen over the past couple of decades, it seems like social networks are doomed to devolve into propaganda machines. >Twitter dying in fiery musky fireball might be the best thing to happen in long term. That's what I feel like too.
- ilyt 4y ago
  There is a difference between people using platform as propaganda machine and platform itself picking a side and deprioritizing anything that they don't like, especially with reach it has. First one is de facto popularity contest and each side is free to call on other's bullshit, if control comes from company running it the detractors from "right" vision gets silenced,either explicitly, or by just modifying algorithm to deprioritize their content