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One off, politically driven reductions in advertisers and user groups is not caused by unhandled load from reduced workforce or implications of work from office

One off, politically driven reductions in advertisers and user groups is not caused by unhandled load from reduced workforce or implications of work from office policy. Despite this out migration, so far their health looks exceptionally good. They're running at 20% of original workforce (!). Just think about it (and I really mean it - taking aside personal dislikes, political views etc) – you have a company, you cut 80% of workforce and it still seems to work very well. This is insane. It's also not one off example - he is well known for speedrun stunts (ie. e2e completion of colossus supercomputer in memphis in 4 months <<!>>). The argument is – can you do something similar with government as well? As a body that is notorious for inefficiency it seems plausible the answer is yes.

abeppu 2y ago
> One off, politically driven reductions in advertisers and user groups is not caused by unhandled load from reduced workforce or implications of work from office policy. I think this is basically backwards; aggressive cuts and short-term revenue attempts alienated advertisers, casual users and influencers with large audiences. In particular: - they abandoned content moderation, including flagging misinformation, hate-speech, and targeted harassment. This obviously saves money, b/c it eliminates systems and ML models that needed to examine tweets/messages and accounts in real time. These are adversarial problems, so you can't just create the model once and leave it alone; you need to pay a team to keep finding the current abusive patterns. But abandoning this means that you have a network where (a) any post you see is more likely to be manipulative misinformation (b) you will see slurs and hatespeech and perhaps receive them and (c) if you're determined to be in some way objectionable to an army of trolls, you may be endlessly harassed. So it's a kinda awful place to engage. - they tried to sell blue checkmarks. This had multiple bad effects. It let any rando with a few dollars impersonate large companies and brands. This alienated those large companies who felt understandably burned, and it made casual users less trustful of content even that appears to be marked as legitimate by the platform. Further, b/c they were trying to force previously verified accounts from notable people to start paying them, they alienated celebs and influencers with large audiences. It's not just that people who disagree with Musk politically were moving away from twitter in some slow-rolling boycott -- the choices Musk made have transformed twitter to a place where it's harder to get real information, it's hard to have a conversation with your community without being attacked, it's hard to curate your feed (Musk posts may be injected whether or not you follow him), and far from being a "free speech" paradise, it's one where a bunch of people don't feel safe engaging at all.

abeppu 2y ago

> One off, politically driven reductions in advertisers and user groups is not caused by unhandled load from reduced workforce or implications of work from office policy. I think this is basically backwards; aggressive cuts and short-term revenue attempts alienated advertisers, casual users and influencers with large audiences. In particular: - they abandoned content moderation, including flagging misinformation, hate-speech, and targeted harassment. This obviously saves money, b/c it eliminates systems and ML models that needed to examine tweets/messages and accounts in real time. These are adversarial problems, so you can't just create the model once and leave it alone; you need to pay a team to keep finding the current abusive patterns. But abandoning this means that you have a network where (a) any post you see is more likely to be manipulative misinformation (b) you will see slurs and hatespeech and perhaps receive them and (c) if you're determined to be in some way objectionable to an army of trolls, you may be endlessly harassed. So it's a kinda awful place to engage. - they tried to sell blue checkmarks. This had multiple bad effects. It let any rando with a few dollars impersonate large companies and brands. This alienated those large companies who felt understandably burned, and it made casual users less trustful of content even that appears to be marked as legitimate by the platform. Further, b/c they were trying to force previously verified accounts from notable people to start paying them, they alienated celebs and influencers with large audiences. It's not just that people who disagree with Musk politically were moving away from twitter in some slow-rolling boycott -- the choices Musk made have transformed twitter to a place where it's harder to get real information, it's hard to have a conversation with your community without being attacked, it's hard to curate your feed (Musk posts may be injected whether or not you follow him), and far from being a "free speech" paradise, it's one where a bunch of people don't feel safe engaging at all.