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Most of those 7500 were not engineers. They were moderators, sales, support, HR, etc The moderation, whatever people personally think of it now, has certainly

Most of those 7500 were not engineers. They were moderators, sales, support, HR, etc The moderation, whatever people personally think of it now, has certainly suffered from an advertiser perspective, which is why they left. It was a mistake to fire many of them. The sales people with relationships to advertisers left, and so again did many advertisers. It's apparently impossible to get your account reinstated if you were banned, because there is no more support. People had pay issues due to lack of HR and also lost benefits, so they left. On top of that, almost all the features they shipped were in the works before the company was bought, so they didn't really ship anything. Stability was worse and users left. They are flocking to Threads because it's stable. Remaining devs continued to trickle away as the work environment became intolerable. Basically every aspect of his experiment was a failure. I'm sure Twitter could have cut 10-15% and been okay but what Musk did absolutely did not work. All those things managers talk about, those reasons to treat your people well: cratering morale after layoffs, increasing attrition, dead sea effect, loss of institutional knowledge, it's all true, and just what everyone expected. The only thing to learn from Twitter's fall is that they were right. Great experiment I guess? Really validated some things we had all seen small scale or intuited.

adam_arthur 3y ago
Twitter layoffs will have only "failed" due to creating a cultural divide and driving people to other services. Not due to the mechanical aspect of them Twitter laid off 80-90% of their people and the app functions the same. No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased. Even if the features were in the pipeline already, none of them appeared over the 5-6 years preceding the acquisition. Highly coincidental, to the point of being suspect. Advertisers left due to taking sides on will of the moment cultural reasons, not because of moderation. The individuals behind advertising at many large corporations simply didn't want to help Elon. Would you want to give money to somebody you hated, and who loudly vocalized things that went strongly against your principles? This part is obvious to any objective observer. It's clear at this point that net added value per Twitter employee was low or even negative for many. If a company can layoff 90% of the developers and have no material change in availability or development velocity, then it's really inarguable otherwise
- stubybubs 3y ago
  > Advertisers left due to taking sides on will of the moment cultural reasons > who loudly vocalized things that went strongly against your principles? I mean, you're talking about moderation. It's always going to be based on where the culture is at the moment. 70 years ago, nobody cared about misogynistic ads, now they've fallen out of fashion. People don't want to advertise on a site flooded with posts that go against the values of their customers. You simply can't have it both ways, Elon's preferred kind of speech and having advertisers. > No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased. The downtime and strangeness has definitely increased. And the features aren't good! Blue was not good. It existed as a paid feature with edit capability. He added boosting for Blue and removed verification, and he fired all the product people who told him it was a terrible idea to convert to pay to win comments. They lost users, saw hate comments float to the top under ads etc. etc. Nobody wanted massive walls of text on Twitter, that's what made it different. Brevity is the soul of wit. And they put up a login wall because of scraping? It's a public site, you just have to live with that. If you're getting slammed, the solution is to increase your server availability, not take eyeballs of your content. > If a company can layoff 90% of the developers It wasn't 90% of developers. It wasn't even 90% of the company, if they really went from 7500 to 2000, which was the last count. Most of the layoffs/firing/quits were outside of development, in moderation, sales etc. And after all this, their traffic has massively declined, and ad sales are down 60% YoY. It is absolutely spiraling. It is unreal how it can be seen as anything but.

adam_arthur 3y ago

Twitter layoffs will have only "failed" due to creating a cultural divide and driving people to other services. Not due to the mechanical aspect of them Twitter laid off 80-90% of their people and the app functions the same. No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased. Even if the features were in the pipeline already, none of them appeared over the 5-6 years preceding the acquisition. Highly coincidental, to the point of being suspect. Advertisers left due to taking sides on will of the moment cultural reasons, not because of moderation. The individuals behind advertising at many large corporations simply didn't want to help Elon. Would you want to give money to somebody you hated, and who loudly vocalized things that went strongly against your principles? This part is obvious to any objective observer. It's clear at this point that net added value per Twitter employee was low or even negative for many. If a company can layoff 90% of the developers and have no material change in availability or development velocity, then it's really inarguable otherwise

stubybubs 3y ago
> Advertisers left due to taking sides on will of the moment cultural reasons > who loudly vocalized things that went strongly against your principles? I mean, you're talking about moderation. It's always going to be based on where the culture is at the moment. 70 years ago, nobody cared about misogynistic ads, now they've fallen out of fashion. People don't want to advertise on a site flooded with posts that go against the values of their customers. You simply can't have it both ways, Elon's preferred kind of speech and having advertisers. > No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased. The downtime and strangeness has definitely increased. And the features aren't good! Blue was not good. It existed as a paid feature with edit capability. He added boosting for Blue and removed verification, and he fired all the product people who told him it was a terrible idea to convert to pay to win comments. They lost users, saw hate comments float to the top under ads etc. etc. Nobody wanted massive walls of text on Twitter, that's what made it different. Brevity is the soul of wit. And they put up a login wall because of scraping? It's a public site, you just have to live with that. If you're getting slammed, the solution is to increase your server availability, not take eyeballs of your content. > If a company can layoff 90% of the developers It wasn't 90% of developers. It wasn't even 90% of the company, if they really went from 7500 to 2000, which was the last count. Most of the layoffs/firing/quits were outside of development, in moderation, sales etc. And after all this, their traffic has massively declined, and ad sales are down 60% YoY. It is absolutely spiraling. It is unreal how it can be seen as anything but.