Free speech isn’t that hard. Generating a profit with a platform with money from advertisers who are naturally cautious about what their brand is associated with while being a free speech absolutist might be impossible.
Welcome to the Left, Octo.
It’s a traditional tactic of traditional management, yes.
Will it work in an atmosphere in which:
- The labor marker for tech is already so tight that it squeaks, and
- The new owner has already bought out these people at the absolute highest possible valuation, and
- The employees were part of a unique culture that they valued, which is now being disparaged and toxified by the new owner and his minions, and
- The company has become a laughingstock, and working for Musk-Twitter will be a stain on one’s resume
I guess it’s possible that wealthy, sought-after talent will take a scarlet-letter job in a toxic environment working for an erratic egomaniac who shits all over them in public and demonstrably has no clue what he’s doing. A few people are probably driven enough by money that a price could be struck. Visa-holders will certainly be attracted, many H-1B’s will do most anything to stay in the country. But I think it’s fair to say that this is not a situation that Musk would have chosen, and nor will most former Twitter employees.
Ran across this update in Questionable Content (web comic by Jeph Jaques)
I stopped posting all the time on twitter a couple months back, but over this weekend I did a bunch of satirical tweets impersonating Elon Musk and they went fairly viral and he got so mad he (personally, I like to think) deleted my account. Nothing of value was lost, a good time was had by all, etc etc. If you google around I’m sure you can find screenshots.
I find myself in the privileged position of being able to walk away from a social media account with 80,000+ followers (it had ballooned to over 100k before it was suspended, lol) with no significant penalties to my life or income (as far as I can tell)
Brian
This is a good step for you. Congratulations!
Or maybe they see an opportunity to take down and discredit Tesla, a leading manufacturer of electric cars.
Far more money to be made selling the data of the gullible followers. Dissenters tend to be more critical of snake oil pitches.
Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m on Twitter and am watching the cracks form in real time, I’d give very little headspace to Musk. Teslas aren’t even the best electric car out there anymore (right now, had I the cash and inclination for an electric car I’d probably go for a Hyundai Ioniq of some sort), he keeps promising technology that never materializes and never will, his space race is an ego-boosting hobby to allow him to compete with the likes of Branson and Bezos on building giant phalluses, and I really have avoided learning anything about his personal life as much as possible.
Kathy Griffin has been suspended for “impersonating” Elon Musk. Hooray for Free Speech!
I foresee a lot more of this – she wasn’t the only comedian ragging on Elon:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/tech/kathy-griffin-twitter/index.html
And yet…
Do Trump impersonators and people making fun of Trump get banned on Truth Social? Which of the two stalwarts of “free speech” is allowing this type of content on their personal platform?
I have, in a past life, survived just that kind of lay off (albeit at a much smaller company). Senior management was dysfunctional, CEO was a sales guy, and got it in his head that that the software development teams were the problem, but didn’t have any knowledge of what went on on “that side of the house”, nor the curiosity to find out and just fired everyone with whom he had butted heads in the last six months.
Of course the people who are going to butt heads with management are the more talented and more invested types, and the people left over (including me, at the time) were closer to the “just there for the paycheque” types. It took about a month for the management team to realize that a whole slew of things that used to “just happen” were no longer being done, and by then all the people who had left had found new jobs that paid more.
I wouldn’t say I know enough about what’s going on at Twitter to say that’s what’s happening here, but there’s certainly nothing I’ve seen that makes me think any different.
It’s just a tiny drop in the bucket, but I deleted my Twitter account yesterday. I’d been debating it since Musk took over, and the Kathy Griffin – and others – being banned for parodying Musk was the impetus to do it.
I didn’t use it as social media at all. I just used it as a way to get up to the minute news of various kinds, so no big loss for me.
I feel for people who depend on it as part of their work, who have large followings there, and who are unhappy about where it’s going.
Not any more. Big tech massively overhired in the past couple years and is now either having hiring freezes or doing layoffs.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
The hits keep on coming:
Yeah, I’m not sure the layed-off at Twitter are going to easily find jobs in this environment, For one thing, I’m betting that most of them were not techies, but marketing types, content curators, moderation staff, ‘managers’, etc. Musk said that Twitter had a huge non-coder to coder ratio,
Second, everyone is laying off people right now. Meta is scheduled to lay off ‘thousands’ this week. Some of the big tech firms have recently lost a third or more of their entire valuation, and revenue is not what it once was. The big cloud players like Microsoft are losing revenue as work-from-home and other IT adjustments are reverting. And once election season is over, engagement online will likely drop even more.
Moderator Note
I’m not sure how this was intended, but it can be interpreted as being rather snarky. If it was intended as snark, then the proper forum for that is the Pit. Outside of the Pit, keep in mind the old rule of “attack the post, not the poster”.
My apologies for any confusion. I was being 100% serious. Perhaps I should have put a smiley at the end to denote that.
Like I said, I wasn’t sure how it was intended, so no biggie. Thanks for the clarification.
If he thinks this was a problem, that’s more evidence that he fundamentally did not understand the company he acquired.
Twitter was not and is not a technology company. The tech involved in collecting and redistributing small blocks of text and media is utterly trivial, compared to the Microsofts and Amazons of the world. There was and is nothing cutting-edge about Twitter, beyond perhaps the scale and performance requirements needed to keep a huge pipeline of data constantly flowing. Even the language processing and interest matching involved in predictively serving content via algorithm is pretty mainstream stuff these days.
What Twitter built was a hub-and-spoke content-delivery network whose users almost entirely self-organized their connections according to their interests and whims. Its value is not in systemic imposition of programmatically curated material but in a simple and smooth user experience that allows people to quickly and efficiently consume the content they have chosen to follow. That last bit is key — Twitter loses its attractive “stickiness” if people feel like they’re being fed content outside their choices. That could mean anything from simple irrelevancy to personally targeted harassment and abuse.
With this context, of course the coders are outnumbered by people dedicated to managing and maintaining content with the aim of ensuring user experiences stay positive. Of course. Obviously.
If Musk preferentially torched that side of the business in order to emphasize the tech, then he’s a goddamn fool.
People impersonate Elon Musk.
Musk: “All parody impersonation accounts must be labeled as such, or they will be suspended.”
Clearly-labeled parody account impersonates Elon Musk:
https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1589650245331587072?s=61&t=mMhKxa0SN5xKcc456HuRfw
I brought it up to argue the notion that the Twitter employees will be easily re-hired elsewhere because of a shortage of tech workers. Most of them aren’t tech workers. But I think Musk’s idea was to expand the tech and minimize the curation and moderation and management. I make no claims as to whether this is feasible.
Musk’s biggest problem is that he likely has a hostile workforce, and that his trollish tendencies are very destructive when you own the company. ‘Punching down’ is not a good look. He says impersonations are fine, so people impersonate him. So he bans impersonation, and hundreds of blue-checks join in the fun, putting him in a quandary. This kind of stuff will continue to happen.
Musk says he wants Twitter to ge the most accurate source of information around. I don’t see that ever happening. Twitter is more of an information battle ground, populated by numerous bad actors, trolls, state disinformation, idiots, etc. If he thinks he can turn that into an objective information space, well… good luck to him.