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Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story

Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels. The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO. The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side. Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions.

beaned 3y ago
There's definitely a strong element of people here rooting for Twitter to fail because they dislike Elon's politics.
- inpdx 3y ago
  As a software developer, I hate the way he treats his employees. Politics are secondary.
  - beaned 3y ago
    Do the people who actually work for his companies generally feel the same way?
- epistasis 3y ago
  I hate Elon's politics but want Twitter succeed. And if he didn't make his politics part of how he runs stuff, I probably wouldn't even care about his politics. But you know how celebrities get crap for inserting politics into things, when they know very little about that topic? Elon is going to get the same.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 1attice 3y ago
  It is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- entirely OK to root for the failure of a company that is owned, directed and dominated by an odious person with abhorrent politics. Compare: - hoping Ballmer-era Microsoft would fail in their attempts to snuff out Linux - hoping that USSR would fail in their attempts to snuff out large numbers of their own citizens - hoping that the Confederates would fail at snuffing out resistance to literal slavery - (in fiction,) hoping that the Death Star would fail at snuffing out various planets, etc and so forth. There is not some weird list of permissible root-reasons. You have no gotcha; you are just gotten.
  - 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
    I like Michael Hobbes's succinct gripe regarding the "debate RFK" nonsense about a week ago (alas, on Twitter, hence no link to the thread): > The problem with this asinine debate over debating is that everyone is trying to come up with a content-neutral principle.
    - bandrami 3y ago
      I think the bigger problem there is that RFK could win the debate but that still wouldn't make vaccines cause autism.
    - 1attice 3y ago
      Disclaimer: I'm not American and have only the foggiest notion of who RFK is, but the urge to identify boundary conditions for 'permissible wants' does feel especially America-y to me. I speculate that it has something to do with the veneration given to markets --- the underlying anxiety being that having feelings about an intensely cultural use of forty billion dollars is somehow antithetical to the conduct befitting an ideal rational agent.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    And speaking of having no gotcha but just being gotten, if you have showdead=true you can see one of Musk's biggest stans trevioustrouble rolling out their very best most deep and thoughtful arguments in support of Musk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36556393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36556393 >trevioustrouble 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself >It’s just a feed, and needs to be rate-limited for unregistered users. No need to pull out your philosophy-degree. The people that were fired from Twitter were fired for good reason and if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt. >* PS: Dislike my comment fags And then they sum up their politics and best arguments and what the Twitter they're fighting so hard for and what Musk they worship so much is all about, in just one word: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36556423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36556423 >trevioustrouble 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | flag | vouch | favorite | on: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself >fag And that's the best they've got. It really makes Musk's apologists so angry and frustrated to see everyone laughing their asses off at Musk explosively and bloodily sharting himself in public like that, because now they have to follow behind the elephant and wipe up all the mess.
- tadfisher 3y ago
  That's... a perfectly reasonable position to hold?
  - JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
    I think its like, totally reasonable? to want the Gates Foundation to like implode and everybody who works for it to be unemployed? and all those poor African kids to go unvaccinated? Because I kinda think Bill Gates has bad politics?
    - ryukafalz 3y ago
      The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a charity. Twitter is a for-profit social network. These are not particularly comparable.
  - beaned 3y ago
    Is it..? All the replies to this thread just mention how he has abhorrent politics but there's no specifics. I'm not sure anyone really knows why they dislike him, and thought critically about it. A lot of it seems assumption-based, fed mostly by the media who is Twitter's biggest competitor. And on Hacker News, of all places. I'd think it the most likely place to find people who understand the rift between tech and trad media, and that character assassination is the biggest tool used by one particular side in this war. Instead the middling tech armchair specialists who partake in and promote the culture that birthed Elon and his multitude of companies have bought the other side's narrative to hate on their own.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  And now that he's opened his big fat mouth and revealed just what kind of a person he really is, I'm also rooting for unconed to fail because of his politics.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Fascists don't have politics, they have hatred.
  - 18pfsmt 3y ago
    As you can see from Mussolini's own writing on the Doctrine of Fascism, they hate individualism, and love the State. >7. Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; http://www.historyguide.org/europe/duce.html http://www.historyguide.org/europe/duce.html Prior to Twitter's acquisition by Musk, they worked quite closely with the State and even hired the former top FBI lawyer as their chief legal counsel.
- bart_spoon 3y ago
  It’s not his politics, it’s him personally. Many find him an arrogant, loathesome baffoon and an asshole, even outside of the political realm. Obviously many people are rooting for him to fail.
PavleMiha 3y ago
Unless you have some information I don’t, Twitter is way below its pre-pandemic staffing levels. Obviously hard to tell exactly how low they went as they’re not public anymore, but this is quite different from Meta and such that really did just go back to pre-pandemic level. CNBC say Twitter is at 1300 people, a drop of 80%. It’s mind boggling.
pfisch 3y ago
Name another tech company that lost 80% of its employees. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-than-550-full-time-engineers.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer...
1attice 3y ago
> The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels. Citation needed. Show me the 2020 Twitter headcount. Show me the 2023 Twitter headcount. > The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO. That is not the 'only difference'. There is also the matter of all the hate speech. Which I guess you don't really notice, as you're not one of the targets, but I sure am. This is like Trump going 'boo hoo everyone hates me because I'm Donald Trump,' when in fact there is this small matter of an armed insurrection. You are writing off the valid political concerns of your opponents as being rooted in personality, rather than in odious politics. > The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side. This is the most reality-defying way of recalling that the entire company basically quit on him overnight, but ok, bro > Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions. That is not the reason we are anticipating its failure. We are anticipating its failure because we understand how people, platforms, and software interact. 'Hope' has nothing to do with it; we just read it off the verniers.
- stOneskull 3y ago
  who is 'we' and why are they the same group as the 'lot of people'?
- agentofoblivion 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - jquery 3y ago
    Why should a victim of hate speech spread the hate being spewed at them?
benzible 3y ago
You claim with a straight face that, had Musk not taken over Twitter, it would have had the same rate of outages and level of degradation as it does now? It's completely obvious to anyone familiar with the stability of Twitter pre and post Musk that his takeover was an inflection point. You're ignoring reality in order to support a claim that fired non-coders and "diversity hires" contributed nothing.
- unconed 3y ago
  No, you claim that I am claiming that. What I claim is that: - OPs story that Twitter was a healthy and productive tech company pre-Elon is complete non-sense. How many years did people pine for an edit button? - Twitter returned to pre-2020 staffing levels, which is true - Twitter struggled to push out new features (like an edit button) for years, which is true, wheras post-Elon they pushed out edit buttons, longer tweets, subscriptions, etc.
  - benzible 3y ago
    Nope! From your original post: "The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top" Claiming that nothing is different other than Elon's presence implies that Twitter was just as much of a technical dumpster fire as it is now. That is not _at all_ what you're now claiming you said, which is, effectively, "Twitter made slow progress on product priorities". No one disputes that, but it's not what we're discussing here, which is the rapid degradation of service since Musk took over. Maybe those "diversity hires", as you call them, actually contributed to keeping the site running.
ineedasername 3y ago
>has made way for free-speech Here’s just a few of the people (in these cases journalists) that Elon has banned. It’s not hard to find other examples of censorship either. That’s his right, he owns all of it, but he lied about ideals of free speech. If it’s speech he doesn’t like, he kills it: Ryan Mac Drew Harwell Micah Lee Matt Binder Aaron Rupar Donie O’Sullivan Tony Webster EDIT: these bans were related to reporting on the elonjet tracking account that was banned. He didn’t just ban the account he didn’t like, he banned the accounts of journalists who talked about that.
- minimaxir 3y ago
  For posterity, those journalists were banned (unbanned a few months later) for just reporting on ElonJet, who used publicly available FAA data to track Elon's jet. Elon called it doxxing. And also temporarily banned links to Mastodon just to prevent people from accessing ElonJet that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet
  - ineedasername 3y ago
    Good point, they were all related as bans resulting from reporting or tweeting about the elonjet ban. I edited my comment accordingly since it’s important context to know the ones I mentioned were all related to a single event (though he’s silenced others as well for different reasons too)
    - unconed 3y ago
      How embarrassing, I have never heard of those people! Here are some journalists or whistleblowers I have heard of: - Daniel Ellsberg - Julian Assange - Glenn Greenwald - Seymour Hirsch - Chelsea Manning
- codechicago277 3y ago
  More recently he banned Aaron Greenspan, founder of Plainsite, and prominent Elon Musk critic. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/15/elon-musk-led-twitter-suspended-plainsite-a-prominent-tesla-critic.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/15/elon-musk-led-twitter-suspen...
kristianc 3y ago
This narrative just about washed when Musk hadn’t had time to get his feet under the table, and all we could speak about is “Elon could!” The data is in now!
NegativeK 3y ago
> The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the ... diversity ... side. Your statement is gross.
- JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
  His statements were dumb in many ways, but your hand-wringing is gross and un-constructive.
- unconed 3y ago
  Your statement is an admission that you prefer to judge messages for their implied moral valence instead of their truth content. Personally I find that pathetic.
miunau 3y ago
What a fantastically bad take supported by no facts whatsoever. I like your graphics work but you should really think before you type this kind of a thing up.
- unconed 3y ago
  Twitter went from a 4.9k headcount in Dec 2019, to 7.5k in Dec 2021. Fact. I don't care if you "like my graphics work" or not. You seem to be implying I owe you something, which is crazy. I have been publishing stuff online for decades and I can tell you, judgy and entitled people such as yourself have _never_ done anything useful in return. What's amazing is you chastizing me for a "bad post", even as you dispute something you could've googled in 5 seconds.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - PavleMiha 3y ago
    And now they’re down to 2,300 according to Musk. Those are huge layoffs, even if we take pre pandemic staffing numbers as a baseline. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1616706530841333761?s=46&t=byApjW52D3E6SKKr2cdLfA https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1616706530841333761?s=46...

beaned 3y ago

There's definitely a strong element of people here rooting for Twitter to fail because they dislike Elon's politics.

inpdx 3y ago
As a software developer, I hate the way he treats his employees. Politics are secondary.
- beaned 3y ago
  Do the people who actually work for his companies generally feel the same way?
epistasis 3y ago
I hate Elon's politics but want Twitter succeed. And if he didn't make his politics part of how he runs stuff, I probably wouldn't even care about his politics. But you know how celebrities get crap for inserting politics into things, when they know very little about that topic? Elon is going to get the same.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
1attice 3y ago
It is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- entirely OK to root for the failure of a company that is owned, directed and dominated by an odious person with abhorrent politics. Compare: - hoping Ballmer-era Microsoft would fail in their attempts to snuff out Linux - hoping that USSR would fail in their attempts to snuff out large numbers of their own citizens - hoping that the Confederates would fail at snuffing out resistance to literal slavery - (in fiction,) hoping that the Death Star would fail at snuffing out various planets, etc and so forth. There is not some weird list of permissible root-reasons. You have no gotcha; you are just gotten.
- 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
  I like Michael Hobbes's succinct gripe regarding the "debate RFK" nonsense about a week ago (alas, on Twitter, hence no link to the thread): > The problem with this asinine debate over debating is that everyone is trying to come up with a content-neutral principle.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    I think the bigger problem there is that RFK could win the debate but that still wouldn't make vaccines cause autism.
  - 1attice 3y ago
    Disclaimer: I'm not American and have only the foggiest notion of who RFK is, but the urge to identify boundary conditions for 'permissible wants' does feel especially America-y to me. I speculate that it has something to do with the veneration given to markets --- the underlying anxiety being that having feelings about an intensely cultural use of forty billion dollars is somehow antithetical to the conduct befitting an ideal rational agent.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  And speaking of having no gotcha but just being gotten, if you have showdead=true you can see one of Musk's biggest stans trevioustrouble rolling out their very best most deep and thoughtful arguments in support of Musk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36556393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36556393 >trevioustrouble 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself >It’s just a feed, and needs to be rate-limited for unregistered users. No need to pull out your philosophy-degree. The people that were fired from Twitter were fired for good reason and if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt. >* PS: Dislike my comment fags And then they sum up their politics and best arguments and what the Twitter they're fighting so hard for and what Musk they worship so much is all about, in just one word: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36556423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36556423 >trevioustrouble 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | flag | vouch | favorite | on: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself >fag And that's the best they've got. It really makes Musk's apologists so angry and frustrated to see everyone laughing their asses off at Musk explosively and bloodily sharting himself in public like that, because now they have to follow behind the elephant and wipe up all the mess.
tadfisher 3y ago
That's... a perfectly reasonable position to hold?
- JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
  I think its like, totally reasonable? to want the Gates Foundation to like implode and everybody who works for it to be unemployed? and all those poor African kids to go unvaccinated? Because I kinda think Bill Gates has bad politics?
  - ryukafalz 3y ago
    The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a charity. Twitter is a for-profit social network. These are not particularly comparable.
- beaned 3y ago
  Is it..? All the replies to this thread just mention how he has abhorrent politics but there's no specifics. I'm not sure anyone really knows why they dislike him, and thought critically about it. A lot of it seems assumption-based, fed mostly by the media who is Twitter's biggest competitor. And on Hacker News, of all places. I'd think it the most likely place to find people who understand the rift between tech and trad media, and that character assassination is the biggest tool used by one particular side in this war. Instead the middling tech armchair specialists who partake in and promote the culture that birthed Elon and his multitude of companies have bought the other side's narrative to hate on their own.
DonHopkins 3y ago
And now that he's opened his big fat mouth and revealed just what kind of a person he really is, I'm also rooting for unconed to fail because of his politics.
bloopernova 3y ago
Fascists don't have politics, they have hatred.
- 18pfsmt 3y ago
  As you can see from Mussolini's own writing on the Doctrine of Fascism, they hate individualism, and love the State. >7. Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; http://www.historyguide.org/europe/duce.html http://www.historyguide.org/europe/duce.html Prior to Twitter's acquisition by Musk, they worked quite closely with the State and even hired the former top FBI lawyer as their chief legal counsel.
bart_spoon 3y ago
It’s not his politics, it’s him personally. Many find him an arrogant, loathesome baffoon and an asshole, even outside of the political realm. Obviously many people are rooting for him to fail.

PavleMiha 3y ago

Unless you have some information I don’t, Twitter is way below its pre-pandemic staffing levels. Obviously hard to tell exactly how low they went as they’re not public anymore, but this is quite different from Meta and such that really did just go back to pre-pandemic level. CNBC say Twitter is at 1300 people, a drop of 80%. It’s mind boggling.

pfisch 3y ago

Name another tech company that lost 80% of its employees. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-than-550-full-time-engineers.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer...

1attice 3y ago

> The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels. Citation needed. Show me the 2020 Twitter headcount. Show me the 2023 Twitter headcount. > The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO. That is not the 'only difference'. There is also the matter of all the hate speech. Which I guess you don't really notice, as you're not one of the targets, but I sure am. This is like Trump going 'boo hoo everyone hates me because I'm Donald Trump,' when in fact there is this small matter of an armed insurrection. You are writing off the valid political concerns of your opponents as being rooted in personality, rather than in odious politics. > The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side. This is the most reality-defying way of recalling that the entire company basically quit on him overnight, but ok, bro > Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions. That is not the reason we are anticipating its failure. We are anticipating its failure because we understand how people, platforms, and software interact. 'Hope' has nothing to do with it; we just read it off the verniers.

stOneskull 3y ago
who is 'we' and why are they the same group as the 'lot of people'?
agentofoblivion 3y ago
[flagged]
- jquery 3y ago
  Why should a victim of hate speech spread the hate being spewed at them?

benzible 3y ago

You claim with a straight face that, had Musk not taken over Twitter, it would have had the same rate of outages and level of degradation as it does now? It's completely obvious to anyone familiar with the stability of Twitter pre and post Musk that his takeover was an inflection point. You're ignoring reality in order to support a claim that fired non-coders and "diversity hires" contributed nothing.

unconed 3y ago
No, you claim that I am claiming that. What I claim is that: - OPs story that Twitter was a healthy and productive tech company pre-Elon is complete non-sense. How many years did people pine for an edit button? - Twitter returned to pre-2020 staffing levels, which is true - Twitter struggled to push out new features (like an edit button) for years, which is true, wheras post-Elon they pushed out edit buttons, longer tweets, subscriptions, etc.
- benzible 3y ago
  Nope! From your original post: "The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top" Claiming that nothing is different other than Elon's presence implies that Twitter was just as much of a technical dumpster fire as it is now. That is not _at all_ what you're now claiming you said, which is, effectively, "Twitter made slow progress on product priorities". No one disputes that, but it's not what we're discussing here, which is the rapid degradation of service since Musk took over. Maybe those "diversity hires", as you call them, actually contributed to keeping the site running.

ineedasername 3y ago

>has made way for free-speech Here’s just a few of the people (in these cases journalists) that Elon has banned. It’s not hard to find other examples of censorship either. That’s his right, he owns all of it, but he lied about ideals of free speech. If it’s speech he doesn’t like, he kills it: Ryan Mac Drew Harwell Micah Lee Matt Binder Aaron Rupar Donie O’Sullivan Tony Webster EDIT: these bans were related to reporting on the elonjet tracking account that was banned. He didn’t just ban the account he didn’t like, he banned the accounts of journalists who talked about that.

minimaxir 3y ago
For posterity, those journalists were banned (unbanned a few months later) for just reporting on ElonJet, who used publicly available FAA data to track Elon's jet. Elon called it doxxing. And also temporarily banned links to Mastodon just to prevent people from accessing ElonJet that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet
- ineedasername 3y ago
  Good point, they were all related as bans resulting from reporting or tweeting about the elonjet ban. I edited my comment accordingly since it’s important context to know the ones I mentioned were all related to a single event (though he’s silenced others as well for different reasons too)
  - unconed 3y ago
    How embarrassing, I have never heard of those people! Here are some journalists or whistleblowers I have heard of: - Daniel Ellsberg - Julian Assange - Glenn Greenwald - Seymour Hirsch - Chelsea Manning
codechicago277 3y ago
More recently he banned Aaron Greenspan, founder of Plainsite, and prominent Elon Musk critic. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/15/elon-musk-led-twitter-suspended-plainsite-a-prominent-tesla-critic.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/15/elon-musk-led-twitter-suspen...

kristianc 3y ago

This narrative just about washed when Musk hadn’t had time to get his feet under the table, and all we could speak about is “Elon could!” The data is in now!

NegativeK 3y ago

> The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the ... diversity ... side. Your statement is gross.

JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
His statements were dumb in many ways, but your hand-wringing is gross and un-constructive.
unconed 3y ago
Your statement is an admission that you prefer to judge messages for their implied moral valence instead of their truth content. Personally I find that pathetic.

miunau 3y ago

What a fantastically bad take supported by no facts whatsoever. I like your graphics work but you should really think before you type this kind of a thing up.

unconed 3y ago
Twitter went from a 4.9k headcount in Dec 2019, to 7.5k in Dec 2021. Fact. I don't care if you "like my graphics work" or not. You seem to be implying I owe you something, which is crazy. I have been publishing stuff online for decades and I can tell you, judgy and entitled people such as yourself have _never_ done anything useful in return. What's amazing is you chastizing me for a "bad post", even as you dispute something you could've googled in 5 seconds.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- PavleMiha 3y ago
  And now they’re down to 2,300 according to Musk. Those are huge layoffs, even if we take pre pandemic staffing numbers as a baseline. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1616706530841333761?s=46&t=byApjW52D3E6SKKr2cdLfA https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1616706530841333761?s=46...