6 ms·

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

by runako 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ryandrake 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 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.
  - wonderwonder 2y ago
    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 https://x.com/lindayaX/status/1820838625245880634
    - ghshephard 2y ago
      Companies have to be sensitive to the overton window of their customers. You make a mistake - it can be expensive. Let's ignore X/Twitter for a second - look at what happened to one of ABInBev's brands, Bud Light. They stepped outside that window and got smacked down pretty quickly. I still don't understand why Musk believes he can dictate to his customers who they should do business with. I can kind of understand regulating what vendors do when interacting, particularly with (for the most part) completely powerless customers caught up in monopolies. But I'm looking forward to digging into the theory of law which suggests that vendors can regulate who/what type of business their customers do. I've heard of Monosopny's - but it just doesn't feel like there is a "single buyer" in this scenario - and, companies are really, really profit seeking - if there was an opportunity for them to make a lot of money by advertising on Twitter/X, and increasing their revenue, and therefore their stock - I challenge you go find me 1 CFO/VP Marketing in 100 who wouldn't jump at the chance. Their political views would be irrelevant. The problem is - when all these trust and safety and advertising people were let go -their was nobody left to reassure those CFO/VP Marketing types that something horrible wouldn't happen to their brand on Twitter/X. So they just decided to play it safe until things shook out.
    - runako 2y ago
      This lawsuit is ridiculous. If Twitter can sue companies for not advertising, can Tesla sue people for buying vehicles not made by Tesla? Can Google sue companies for advertising on Bing? Can Rivian sue Tesla buyers for not buying Rivians? The whole notion that Twitter is owed a share of advertising spend (based on what?) is absurd.
  - hcurtiss 2y ago
- recursive 2y ago
  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.
- padthai 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    They have recently reported an all time high usage record, that unsurprisingly happened after the assassination attempt on Trump.
    - irksomehails 2y ago
      I wonder if that record takes bots into account because the site is now teeming with bots, even more so than before.
- jokethrowaway 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
    - lokar 2y ago
      This is the Broadcom business model
      - Zigurd 2y ago
        It's hilarious that Broadcom bought what was left of Computer Associates. It's like they needed to absorb that PE-with-a-tech-fig-leaf vibe.
- orblivion 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Definitely more spammy but I have not found it to be more buggy.
- Lutger 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - muddi900 2y ago
      Not all censorship is bad. For example, I doubt you would like to be exposed to CSAM or ISIS videos when scrolling Twitter.
    - psd1 2y ago
      Bollocks. The word "censorship" has connotations of "suppressing truth". There's no uptick of truth. It's not censorship to flush a turd.
    - dang 2y ago
      They're paired like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation.
- gopher_space 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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"?
- onion2k 2y ago
  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.
- albedoa 2y ago
  Hey man, checking in on this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1823152153445404990 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1823152153445404990
brabel 2y ago
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/ 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".
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Is there a reason to assume this website has access to audited figures from a private business like Twitter?
- edmundsauto 2y ago
  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.
  - brabel 2y ago
    > 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.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    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.
brightball 2y ago
Well, based on today’s activity there is apparently some conspiracy involved. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1820849880283107725?s=46&t=alZCBpHQmrOiijvY9w8DwA https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1820849880283107725?s=46&t=alZ...
- runako 2y ago
  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.

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

by runako 2y ago

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

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ryandrake 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 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.
- wonderwonder 2y ago
  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 https://x.com/lindayaX/status/1820838625245880634
  - ghshephard 2y ago
    Companies have to be sensitive to the overton window of their customers. You make a mistake - it can be expensive. Let's ignore X/Twitter for a second - look at what happened to one of ABInBev's brands, Bud Light. They stepped outside that window and got smacked down pretty quickly. I still don't understand why Musk believes he can dictate to his customers who they should do business with. I can kind of understand regulating what vendors do when interacting, particularly with (for the most part) completely powerless customers caught up in monopolies. But I'm looking forward to digging into the theory of law which suggests that vendors can regulate who/what type of business their customers do. I've heard of Monosopny's - but it just doesn't feel like there is a "single buyer" in this scenario - and, companies are really, really profit seeking - if there was an opportunity for them to make a lot of money by advertising on Twitter/X, and increasing their revenue, and therefore their stock - I challenge you go find me 1 CFO/VP Marketing in 100 who wouldn't jump at the chance. Their political views would be irrelevant. The problem is - when all these trust and safety and advertising people were let go -their was nobody left to reassure those CFO/VP Marketing types that something horrible wouldn't happen to their brand on Twitter/X. So they just decided to play it safe until things shook out.
  - runako 2y ago
    This lawsuit is ridiculous. If Twitter can sue companies for not advertising, can Tesla sue people for buying vehicles not made by Tesla? Can Google sue companies for advertising on Bing? Can Rivian sue Tesla buyers for not buying Rivians? The whole notion that Twitter is owed a share of advertising spend (based on what?) is absurd.
- hcurtiss 2y ago
recursive 2y ago
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.
padthai 2y ago
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 2y ago
  They have recently reported an all time high usage record, that unsurprisingly happened after the assassination attempt on Trump.
  - irksomehails 2y ago
    I wonder if that record takes bots into account because the site is now teeming with bots, even more so than before.
jokethrowaway 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - lokar 2y ago
    This is the Broadcom business model
    - Zigurd 2y ago
      It's hilarious that Broadcom bought what was left of Computer Associates. It's like they needed to absorb that PE-with-a-tech-fig-leaf vibe.
orblivion 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Definitely more spammy but I have not found it to be more buggy.
Lutger 2y ago
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 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - muddi900 2y ago
    Not all censorship is bad. For example, I doubt you would like to be exposed to CSAM or ISIS videos when scrolling Twitter.
  - psd1 2y ago
    Bollocks. The word "censorship" has connotations of "suppressing truth". There's no uptick of truth. It's not censorship to flush a turd.
  - dang 2y ago
    They're paired like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation.
gopher_space 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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"?
onion2k 2y ago
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.
albedoa 2y ago
Hey man, checking in on this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1823152153445404990 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1823152153445404990

brabel 2y ago

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/ 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".

lotsofpulp 2y ago
Is there a reason to assume this website has access to audited figures from a private business like Twitter?
edmundsauto 2y ago
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.
- brabel 2y ago
  > 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.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  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.

brightball 2y ago

Well, based on today’s activity there is apparently some conspiracy involved. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1820849880283107725?s=46&t=alZCBpHQmrOiijvY9w8DwA https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1820849880283107725?s=46&t=alZ...

runako 2y ago
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.